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Magnus Grimeland

lines on the record: 78
first: 2024-02-15
most recent: 2024-02-15
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Partnering with really great individuals and really putting force behind it. The opportunity to do things is way above ever imagined when you're young, particularly building a very strong teams and they're insanely lucky and privileged to work with so many great people in Antler and also so many people supporting us through our network, you could really make great things happen and it's not only done to you”
2024-02-15 · Capital Allocators · Magnus Grimeland – Day Zero Investing at Antler (EP.369) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Thinking about becoming a doctor, and that's very meaningful because you have direct impact on things. So if you're a doctor or a surgeon, you go in and do a heart transplant, you can save a patient or two every day and you directly know that you save that person's life. In the military, you go in and you do a hostage rescue operation or whatever it might be and you have a direct impact on these people's life and safety. If you choose to go the way, I've gone now and you have indirect positive impact on a lot of people. If feedback a founder who invents a new cancer drug medicine and helps self millions of lives, that's always very impactful for the year, for the world, but it's very indirect that we've found them, we backed him, and then we backed him with capital. That for me was a very interesting way of framing the world. Do you want to have that direct impact, which is tremendously important? And people doing this work are insanely important for the world, or do you want to have that indirect impact? And I think both of them are...”
2024-02-15 · Capital Allocators · Magnus Grimeland – Day Zero Investing at Antler (EP.369) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My grandmother probably gave me more great advice than anyone that I ever had. She grew up in Bolivia and Argentina. Her father was building railways in South America. She was growing up in the bush. So it was a big difference between growing up in the farm in Norway. And she always had this tremendous perspectives on the world and would send me books to read fiction on fiction philosophers. And she would always tell me, as long as you know that there are so many things out there, you don't know and you're eager to learn them. That would be very good for you. I want to mention one other one is Pelm Linfield Roberts, who was my house father in high school. He was a former SAS agency. He worked for special air services in the UK for many years. Then he went into teaching in politics. And he was quite relevant for me because I went into the Special Force myself after. And it's a hard choice to make to leave the Special Forces. And I was thinking a lot about what to do. He put it quite simply for me. You can stay in the Special Forces.”
2024-02-15 · Capital Allocators · Magnus Grimeland – Day Zero Investing at Antler (EP.369) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“About when you came in from high school, there's this view on economics being math and theory and this starting to learn about behavioral economics and the psychology of business and already in the freshman years starting to think about how human decision making and human biases drives a lot of decision making when it comes to investments. I think it was very helpful very early on in my career and how you take human relationships in the strengths of people and now obviously our core business is assessing great founders. getting exposed to that so early very quickly after I came back to the military was very meaningful. These people have been very impactful in my career.”
2024-02-15 · Capital Allocators · Magnus Grimeland – Day Zero Investing at Antler (EP.369) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is around Europe just in terms of set one clear focus for the organization from McKinsey, that was clients first. For us it's founders first. We always think about having a founder in the room. If we make a decision, will it make it better for the founders worse for the founder? If we have great founders coming in to Antler, what we do matters, if we don't have great founders coming in, if we don't have access to the best founders in the world, it doesn't really matter how good of a decision maker we are, how good our tech is, what access to AM we have and so on. Claire focus on one thing and driving excellence and distinctiveness within that one thing. You learn a lot about through that school and I had great mentors there in Tor and Dominic. And I also want to mention at my time going to Harvard, I had this tremendous classes with Andres Lifer, who's a behavioral economist there and political economist, and also met his wife, Nancy Zimmerman, who's also now in our advisory board.”
2024-02-15 · Capital Allocators · Magnus Grimeland – Day Zero Investing at Antler (EP.369) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's money lately Larry Summers who's now bored, has been very impactful, particularly since obviously we've built this thing through a very interesting time, right? We launched in 2018, then we had COVID. Then we had 2021 peak, then we had hyperinflation. There's been wars. He's consistently been there very meaningful advice, particularly also when it comes to the macroeconomic environment. And as him this other day, what do you think should be the main focus of the platform going forward? And he said, hey, sometimes you should just think about what is required for you to be there in 20 years. If you're there 20 years from now compounding, adding to your platform, adding the learnings that you're doing today, it's going to be incredible business. And it's great to think that long-term view. So it's been very impactful lately. My time in McKinsey was very impactful working with Dominic Barton, who was also now board in the early days, used around McKinsey for eight years and our chairman, Tor Mural, Justby, the leader of the senior partner election committee.”
2024-02-15 · Capital Allocators · Magnus Grimeland – Day Zero Investing at Antler (EP.369) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When people say they're going to do something and they don't do it, we meet all these incredible founders who walk the talk every day. And then I have a number of friends and they're still very good friends of mine, but I find it so irritating when somebody talks about doing something for 20 years and they never end up doing it. So walk to talk.”
2024-02-15 · Capital Allocators · Magnus Grimeland – Day Zero Investing at Antler (EP.369) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In the military and special force in Navy SEALs, one of the insertion methods is sometimes you can jump out of a small plane with a parachute and you have a diving equipment and you will dive into a submarine or dive into a target. It's a way to get unseen into targets. And we did that one time and up north in Norway where we were jumping out of the plane and we had a bunch of diving equipment and we landed in a hole. Group of orcas or killer whales. And I just watched the laser was its frozen planet too or so where they showed the hunting technique of the killer whales. We had a safety boat there at the time, but instead of coming to help us out, they actually pulled up video cameras and started filming them and you can hear them laughing like crazy. It's a fun story.”
2024-02-15 · Capital Allocators · Magnus Grimeland – Day Zero Investing at Antler (EP.369) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I love sports, any type of long distance, the longer it gets really, the more excited I get, whereas very long hikes, mountaineering. I took a week off in between my last business and building antler and I just went hiking alone for a week. Once a year I tried to do an Iron Man. I'm doing 100k race now in April. Football, hit workouts, cycling, swimming, water sports. That's where you'll find me.”
2024-02-15 · Capital Allocators · Magnus Grimeland – Day Zero Investing at Antler (EP.369) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One tremendous learning from Warren Buffett, which I always enjoyed was invest in yourself. So I think that if you're imagining your own money and if you're managing other people's money, you have an obligation to be your best self. So I always thought about how can I become more and more effective every day, every month, every year. So I like to set myself pretty ambitious 10-year goals and then break that down into a one-year goal and break that down into a one-month goal across personal sphere, across work, and across health. And the monthly goal changes every month. But it's related to where I want to be a year from now, which only changes once a year or so, who's related to where I want to be 10 years from now. So I think investing in yourself is incredibly important. And then that will lead to also be able to invest in your team.”
2024-02-15 · Capital Allocators · Magnus Grimeland – Day Zero Investing at Antler (EP.369) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Those networks globally, which is why we also see a very diverse set of founders back all across the globe. And I think those things in parallel creating more opportunities for the world's most talented individuals combined with the importance of innovation to drive the world forward and the importance of putting some capital to work into driving that innovation is, I think, what drives most of Antler and is why our mission statement is make progress inevitable.”
2024-02-15 · Capital Allocators · Magnus Grimeland – Day Zero Investing at Antler (EP.369) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That anyone can succeed. And obviously, it's not always the case yet, but very much there's a mantra hero, creating an opportunity for everyone to move through the stratospheres of society. And there are so many self-made, incredibly successful entrepreneurs here. And we want to do the same at a global level, right? Ensure that the very best founders in the world who want to innovate have access to a platform and a network where we can support them to use that skill set in solving really important problems. And that's quite exciting because I think traditionally to build a business, you've been quite dependent on networks. You need people to support you in the early days. You need access to co-founders, you need access to capital. Obviously in Silicon Valley now we have the best networks in place for this in the world. But if you go to some other cities in the world, those networks doesn't exist unless you happen to be the more privileged part of the society. Now we actually level the playing field because we provide access to”
2024-02-15 · Capital Allocators · Magnus Grimeland – Day Zero Investing at Antler (EP.369) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We have this tremendous opportunity to support the next generation great founders all across the globe to solve important problems. And if there's one thing that I believe is that the future will not have less problems than the past. And if you just look at some of the problems we're always facing today from climate change to health tech to access to finance to the uninsured, whatever it might be, these problems are not going to be solved by governments. They're going to be solved by great people innovating. We want to create a platform where we enable as many of the world's best people to do that. I think the more people who choose to spend their time innovating and driving the economy forward, the better the world will be, not only by solving these problems, but also leading to economic growth and productivity increases. So that's one big thing. The other thing that we're quite passionate about is creating a quality opportunity. One of the reasons why I loved studying in the US, I always love coming here is I think the US is built on this dream.”
2024-02-15 · Capital Allocators · Magnus Grimeland – Day Zero Investing at Antler (EP.369) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That point of time, we obviously also have more data and insights on that company than anyone else, right? Because we've selected the founder, we worked with them in person for three to six months, we backed them typically in the seed round as well. We have all their data and KPIs from day zero. So we can combine the market interest with our own data view and put more capital to work in the very best way on underlying portfolio companies. And if there's one thing early stage investing shows, it's if you can concentrate capital in the winners, the absolute returns that you can deliver back to LPs, and the DPI you can deliver increases quite considerably. So that's the second part we're focusing on. So A is continuing to build a better and better platform to be the best partner to the best founders and B for them. And then two, continuing to improve and build out our multi-stage strategy so that we can deliver great returns back to our LPs.”
2024-02-15 · Capital Allocators · Magnus Grimeland – Day Zero Investing at Antler (EP.369) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We now invest up to series C. And the way we structure that up is also very much to create system value. So one is for the founders. So if I come to as a founder and I say, hey, I can put up a million dollars into a business over two rounds. That's obviously attractive. But if I come to you and say I can put up to 30, 40 million into your business over five rounds, you become a longer partner. So you get access even better founders. At the same time, when you look at us doing a series A deal, into our own portfolio, we decided to put a few principles in praise to avoid any conflict of interest. So first of all, we don't lead rounds into our own portfolio. So there are many multistage funds that could lead a series A and they can also lead a series B. We don't do that because we don't want to mark our own homework. So the valuation of the subsequent round is set by another Tervon. We see our investors. We only co-invest with other Terwan investors and they set the price.”
2024-02-15 · Capital Allocators · Magnus Grimeland – Day Zero Investing at Antler (EP.369) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We want to be singularly focused on one thing, which is being the best partner to create founders all across the globe as they're just getting started. And that means finding the best people and have access to the best people through being their best partner, which is then what we do in terms of supporting our portfolio. So we're constantly working on optimizing on that, learning that. And we'll scale that a little bit, right? We can make a few more investments per year in New York. We can make a few more investments per year in Bangalore. There's a few more cities we might launch, like Tel Aviv. west coast of Africa, a few more cities in the US and so on, but it's not that many more locations, right? So very much now it's focused on the core, making that better and better. Increasing selectivity. I ultimately believe that if you're very focused on doing one thing really great, that's how you can deliver systematically better returns. And the other thing we're doing from a capital perspective is becoming more of a full stack investor. So I mentioned earlier we have a separate strategy where”
2024-02-15 · Capital Allocators · Magnus Grimeland – Day Zero Investing at Antler (EP.369) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Quite interesting to follow this more regulatory governmental infrastructure setup that will really affect innovation. Those are the three takeaways. One is, hey, the kids of innovation is moving much more rapidly on a global pace. Two, there are still differences in terms of opportunities based on where the ecosystem is. And then three, there are these very specific regional opportunities that are very exciting for founders that unless you're there on the ground and you have teams on the ground, you won't be able to capture. And the earlier you go, the more important that is. Later stage, you actually can make investments from other. Locations because you're much more looking at the business as a business as you would a public market business.”
2024-02-15 · Capital Allocators · Magnus Grimeland – Day Zero Investing at Antler (EP.369) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Security companies, hardware companies, gaming companies. If you go to the US, you can build anything here. You can do proven models. You can do really deep tech stuff. If you go to Nairobi Ryanov is a lot of proven models still, right? So it's actually local innovations. You'll take a model, which is very successful, let's say, in Asia, in the US, and then innovate locally on those models. There's tremendous amount of more traditional business models where you can still build billion dollar businesses. The other thing in some markets is major infrastructure change. So in India, there's this tremendous opportunity that has arisen over the last few years where first they introduced digital ID. So you can identify now 1.4 billion people. Then they built a payment system, which is linked to that ID. So now you can pay for almost anything online.”
2024-02-15 · Capital Allocators · Magnus Grimeland – Day Zero Investing at Antler (EP.369) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's always a set of global themes that you see everywhere, that cadence is increasing. So there used to be a time where you'd see something happening in China, let's say, and then a few years later you'd see it in Southeast Asia, or you'd see something happening in the US. And then a couple of years later, you'd see it in Europe. The cadence behind that has gone down drastically. If there are exciting ideas being built one place in the world, very quickly is being built everywhere in the world. And being global in that sense is quite fascinating because we have founders who came in in Asia who want to build a specific thing. And we could already show them hairs. 124 other teams across the globe looking at doing the exact same thing that you are doing. And that can be quite informative in terms of setting out what I need to build. Now obviously there are very different opportunities in Africa, for example, than you see in London. In London, there's a lot of very successful fintech companies. If you go to Helsinki, where we just set up an office, there's been a tremendous amount of really successful cyber.”
2024-02-15 · Capital Allocators · Magnus Grimeland – Day Zero Investing at Antler (EP.369) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Them being your customer. You gotta believe in your product so much. You gotta hustle. You can't take no as an answer. If you get a no, you got to meet 10 more people and get 10 more no's. And for a lot of founders, that is actually a hard thing to learn. Some people are born that way. I was not born that way. I had to learn that. And Mrs. Ayala important to succeed. And lastly, the one thing we spoke about earlier, this grit, right? That you can't go into building a business with a mindset that failure is potentially an option. You can't go in and say, hey, let me try this. I might learn a lot. And if I don't succeed, I can just go back to my day job. You gotta go in there and put everything in there. Very often it's actually not necessarily the best team that wins, but it's a team that never gave up. And then they become the best on the way.”
2024-02-15 · Capital Allocators · Magnus Grimeland – Day Zero Investing at Antler (EP.369) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Lova, which is basically says that you shouldn't think that you're better than anyone else. more than your neighbor. If somebody says no, you should never ask them again. And it's similar for a lot of founders also, it's hard to go out there and leaving your pride behind and hustling, right? Asking people for help, asking people to be a customer, asking people to work with you when you can't really pay them. You can only sell a vision. asking people to be your first investor. And there are so many examples of people getting snows and then giving up on the way. And there are other examples where people never gave up. Spotify, I think, is a great example. I think for years they tried to raise capital, spoke to all the VCs in Europe at the time. I think they got 23 no's before they get the first yes. If you're a great founder, you must believe in your product and your team. So the investors you're trying to convince, you're doing them a favor by investing into you. The customers you're trying to bring on board, you're doing them a favor.”
2024-02-15 · Capital Allocators · Magnus Grimeland – Day Zero Investing at Antler (EP.369) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That gets easier. And the only one we can create it in the early lays is Founder. So therefore, you need to exchange time in the future for time right now and double down the first two to three, four years, you have no choice. You gotta put in as much affected time as you can. When I speak to founders, I would like to say that call your family, call your friends, and tell them you're incredibly busy over the next few years if they want to spend time with you, they should come and help you build your business. I think if you ask me any very successful founders build something truly incredible, they will talk about the first three, four years being like this. Then after that, you actually have some choice because you put together a great team, you have customers, you have momentum, you can choose to work a little bit less, or you can choose to work more. Unfortunately, most founders tend to be quite obsessed, so they end up working incredibly hard until they exit, and then they might start another business. But at least you have the choice. So number one, front-loading. Second is learning how to hustle. So I come from Norway, where they have”
2024-02-15 · Capital Allocators · Magnus Grimeland – Day Zero Investing at Antler (EP.369) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Assumption that you're trying to find co founder, you ask the questions first and then you fall in love later. But if you meet someone organically, you fall in love first and then you ask the questions. So we ask our co-founders to spend real time meeting a tremendous amount of really interesting smart people before they make the choice on who they want to build with. And then once you've done that, there are a few learnings I made on the way. One of them is as a founder, you need to front load. When you're building a business, let's say kind of antler in the really early days, when it was only me, If I binge watch Netflix or chose to take a week vacation to go surfing, nothing happened with Angeler. It was a standstill. And it's really like that for a while when you build a business. You might have a co-founder, but the effective hours you can put into every week is insanely important to create momentum. And momentum creates momentum in the startup world. If you raise a bit of capital and you can't make anything happen, it's very hard when they raise next rounds, very hard to hire people. It's very hard to get customers. If you create early momentum all”
2024-02-15 · Capital Allocators · Magnus Grimeland – Day Zero Investing at Antler (EP.369) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The characteristics of a successful final we went through quickly earlier having a spike, having drive, and having a tremendous amount of grit. Now, once you have that, you need to ensure that you bring aboard one or two or three other people who is similarly as strong and share a common set of values. And we have a pretty detailed questionnaire and view on what makes an exceptional founder team. There's this myth that you're better off building a company with someone you've known for a long period of time. Yes, sometimes that's the case. But sometimes also building something with your brother or sister or your colleague or somebody went to college with is very different from being in that scenario with them. So there's actually very many founder teams who've selected someone who they happen to know for a long time, which actually would be way better off meeting 50 to 100 exceptional people and picking the best of those. If you go into that through having met each other under the perspective.”
2024-02-15 · Capital Allocators · Magnus Grimeland – Day Zero Investing at Antler (EP.369) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Stripe and the type of platform or API analysis startup needs to use. We can offer for most of them it's like almost a million dollars worth of free services. So all this is technology enabled. It's also what makes the data and the learning and the network effects work. So that's one part of the global support team. Then we have legal compliance and finance. So that's fully centralized. It's also incredibly important that the people we bring on board take responsibility for this, but we also need checks and balances of all regulation, investment reporting, all this stuff. So that's centralized function. Then we have marketing and brand. A lot of founders won't know anyone in Sequoia.”
2024-02-15 · Capital Allocators · Magnus Grimeland – Day Zero Investing at Antler (EP.369) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We have a global support team, which I lead, which is fully focused on creating leverage for the partnership. The most important thing they do is building technology. So we have a tech team of about 15 people who build out AndroFusion, which includes all the productivity tools I spoke about earlier, the data platform, but also crude tools for the founders, right? So we have their access to our investor database with all of the VC relationships and the angel relationships. So let's say I'm a healthy company in Africa that needs to raise my Series A, you can go in there and put in that criteria and out pops. Okay, here are 40 relationships that Antler have. Who would make the introduction? Or do we have a portfolio company that have backed them? Can we make an introduction through them so we can create a competitive advantage in terms of funding rounds for our portfolio? This is a talent network I spoke about. It's the advisory network. There's a founder community. There's the perks platforms we negotiated. Free credits with Microsoft Azore, AWS.”
2024-02-15 · Capital Allocators · Magnus Grimeland – Day Zero Investing at Antler (EP.369) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That and then we put 25% of the carry into global pool versus shared with everyone. If you deliver on our target return of 6x, let's carry upside where you get 75% of it. So the big upside. And then we tried to keep salaries at the level where it covers basic living costs. You see the same actually with most early stage funds. The same with Y combinator partners don't take a very big salary, but they have significant carry upside in the funds. That's very much how we're structured. This works incredibly well.”
2024-02-15 · Capital Allocators · Magnus Grimeland – Day Zero Investing at Antler (EP.369) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We're 256 full time people across Antler. We also have about 10 venture partners by location. So these are part-time people. For example, Andreas AN, who was the CTO of Spotify, will dedicate a few hours to support founders out of Singapore. And we have people like that who dedicated some of their time to support the founders. And then we have a thousand advisors. When you look at the full-time employees, the vast majority of the partners in Joint Antler are very carry incentivized. So there are people who've been founders before. So when you build a company, you typically don't come into that journey for an immediate payday. You come there for equity upside. And in our sense, that's carry upside. We've created a partnership where carry is very fairly distributed across organizations. If you run, for example, India or if you run the Nordics, if you run the US now, 75% of the carry goes to departments around.”
2024-02-15 · Capital Allocators · Magnus Grimeland – Day Zero Investing at Antler (EP.369) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The decision making to each individual partner. So people have a very clear idea in terms of how well they are doing. Now, on occasion, there will be a good court and a bad court. There will be some chance to this. Sometimes there are also macroeconomic things that leads to a specific type of situation in a specific market, right? If you look at Israeli founders right now, we have several Israeli founders who temporarily had to go back to Israel given the current crisis. So you need to obviously look at these type of black swan events and random things that happen, but in general you can form a pretty good view on quality. And you can also benchmark things up against each other. And there we have a major advantage. We can benchmark 60 to 100 cords per year. And we can tie every single of them on a decision making basis back to individuals and thereby consistently improve our organization and create systematic advantages.”
2024-02-15 · Capital Allocators · Magnus Grimeland – Day Zero Investing at Antler (EP.369) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The follow-up gets. So that's the leading indicators. Then the lagging indicators are more straightforward. It's 12 months NYC growth, 24 months MYC growth, fund through rate, what percentage of our portfolio raised subsequent capital, how many rent subsequent capital over a certain amount of dollars. So they give you fairly good idea, 12 to 18 to 24 month on the momentum of the card. And we see quite interesting linear trajectory on MIC growth in our portfolio. After four years, about 5.3x and it's increasing quite linear towards that. But there's differences between chords in each location. And then there are operational KPIs, which is Foundron BScore, how happy are the founders about us and us as supporters. And then we do a team NPS score, which is how happy is our team. And we can literally stack rank every single court, every single location. We also link.”
2024-02-15 · Capital Allocators · Magnus Grimeland – Day Zero Investing at Antler (EP.369) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The next chord, you get 4,000 applicants. That's an indicator of the whole system possibly being less popular. So you want to see a growth in the number of applicants, at least up to a certain peak. You want to see a share of experienced founders being high for us. Experienced founders are founders made to series A or Series B or made to a certain amount of revenue. They don't necessarily have a massive IPO or solar company for a billion dollars, but they accomplish something, big milestone. Or they are serious funders who did exit the large business and now they're building the next one. The third thing on Colto Scouting funnel is funder acceptance rates. So if we give an offer to a founder, what percentage of them accepted is a very negative signal if they don't accept it or if they take money from someone else than you? And then lastly is selectivity. applicants instead of 10%.”
2024-02-15 · Capital Allocators · Magnus Grimeland – Day Zero Investing at Antler (EP.369) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Looked at around 36,000 startups and then leading indicators for how they ended up succeeding. This is all public data. And then we looked at our own data where we had around 400,000 applicants. So far, more than 1,000 portfolio companies. And we looked at what are leading indicators that leads to specific outcomes. And obviously something we get smarter on every day and we'll get smarter and smarter as our data set increases. I think we add now millions and millions of data points every year. A current hypothesis, the 10 most important things broadly split in three categories are one, the quality of the scouting funnel. Two, the quality of the portfolio, which is more laggy indicators, and then three, operational indicators. If you look at the quality of the scouting platform, there are four things that really matters. Application volume, which is more actually to do with the momentum. So if in New York you get 5,000 applicants for”
2024-02-15 · Capital Allocators · Magnus Grimeland – Day Zero Investing at Antler (EP.369) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One big thing that we introduced is the pre IC. So let's say 100 people come in to the program here in New York. Then three months later you're doing an investment committee. You might actually want to, after a month, do a pre-IC to just without a few of the people who came on board who are not serious enough. One bad apple in a great team. It can create a much more trouble. So we actually seen that the quality of the work we do and the quality of the rest of the program becomes much higher when we create a one-month gateway. If you brought them people who don't know the right level of ambition, we ask them to go and build their business elsewhere. It's always hard to push people out, but it creates so much more quality after. So that's something we tried out in the bunch locations. It led to really good outcomes and we replicated it. So that's a big thing. But there's also small things. In Norway, they started testing this specific way to use LinkedIn.”
2024-02-15 · Capital Allocators · Magnus Grimeland – Day Zero Investing at Antler (EP.369) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“People amongst that group of people, there are going to be some really exceptional people, but at least we've been in the position to potentially make an investment. I think it was Mark Andreessen who said, LeBron James scored more points than anyone else in the NBA, but he also missed more shots than most other players. But he was in a position still to win. And I think you got to learn from missed opportunists, but you can't fret too much about it.”
2024-02-15 · Capital Allocators · Magnus Grimeland – Day Zero Investing at Antler (EP.369) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, the way we do it now is 20% we do direct investments. So if it's really exceptional people, you need a very high level of conviction because when we look at a deal where they haven't been in our office for three months, we need to feel the same level of confidence as we would having worked with someone for three months, right? So the bar is incredibly high, but we can invest in them just directly without doing the program. And then we remain in contact. It's two to three weeks after the program started. could drop into the current one otherwise we just try to stay close to them and very often they will actually end up joining anyways the next one unless they're really far ahead so the loss is not that high but at the same time i think if you think about the space of what we're doing it's a tremendous amount of really exceptional founders out there we need it to be in a position where we could come in and invest into them but we know as a fact that just last year we said no to more than 130”
2024-02-15 · Capital Allocators · Magnus Grimeland – Day Zero Investing at Antler (EP.369) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When you have a hundred people coming in together creates a certain type of pressure, it creates opportunity for people to meet more co founders, creates opportunity for people to push forward amongst the same agenda, creates a little bit of competition, it creates deadlines. So there's all these human psychology into how a cohort works, which you can't replicate through a rolling program. So even if it logically makes sense, the outcomes ended up being worse. We tried it think six times in total. says equivalent to three years worth of learning we're never gonna do it again because it just doesn't work that's a good example of what we tried and didn't work”
2024-02-15 · Capital Allocators · Magnus Grimeland – Day Zero Investing at Antler (EP.369) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Great example of something we're not going to do again. Our most operanda is we do two chords per year in this location. So let's say you want to join as a founder in New York. If the court starts today, the next time for you to join is six months from now. Now, most founders is in a bit of a hurry and they don't want to wait six months until the next course starts. So they're just going to start building a business. So that's a lost opportunity for us. So we thought, okay, let's not do courts, but let's try out this thing called the rolling program where we bring on board ten new founders every month and then every month we'll do an investment committee and either ten founders would leave or we'll invest into them. So you'd always have 100 founders in the office, but 10 of them will get replaced every month, which logically makes sense because that means we're always open for business. We try that out in Australia and Africa, a few other places. While it logically makes sense, it led to worse outcomes. And I think the reason why it led to worse outcomes is”
2024-02-15 · Capital Allocators · Magnus Grimeland – Day Zero Investing at Antler (EP.369) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Becomes an advantage instead of creating additional complexities, and we give leverage to really great people. So instead of being just a collection of great individuals, some of the parts is much bigger and much stronger than the parts themselves.”
2024-02-15 · Capital Allocators · Magnus Grimeland – Day Zero Investing at Antler (EP.369) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Works than the US, and we still work with all of those parts currently across the globe. We work with Andres and Horway across the globe. We work with Y Combinator everywhere, and we can make great introductions. And it's the same with advisors, it's the same with access to customers, with talent. We have a talent platform now of the very best founders we didn't end up backing with more than 6,000 people on the platform so people can hire people. And that means that we provide not only kind of value to the founders, but also to the ecosystem so they want to be part of the network. So I think, for example, Andresen Horwitz's first investments in Norway was an Antler company. And why Combinator's first investment in Vietnam was an Antler company? Because we build trust with these larger allocators across very many different nodes. And that network effect is incredibly important. We created a technology platform where data, learning, and network effects means that scale.”
2024-02-15 · Capital Allocators · Magnus Grimeland – Day Zero Investing at Antler (EP.369) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If I do an IC, it's inland antlusion. So, in that way, things are done in the same way everywhere. And then scale becomes an opportunity for you to learn. So when we run 27 locations in parallel, that's 27 years worth of learning in one year compared to those running one location. If you capture that learning and if you use it to improve your processes, we can test out things in that way quite rapidly so we could test something in three locations, see if it leads to better outcomes and worse outcomes. If it's better outcomes, it goes into the new best practice bucket. If it's worse outcomes, it goes into, okay, we're not going to do this again anywhere. If it doesn't lead to anything, it's still in the unknown bucket. That's the second thing is learning. And then the third is it creates tremendous network effects. We work with VCs. Sakoi is a good example always announced Sakoa split in 3. We work with them in China. We work with them in Southeast Asia. We worked with them in India. I worked with them in Europe.”
2024-02-15 · Capital Allocators · Magnus Grimeland – Day Zero Investing at Antler (EP.369) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Technology is critical. We built the technology platform, which means that we get stronger the more nodes we have. We build a partnership structure where we get stronger, the more great people we have in the organization. So scale for us becomes a strength instead of creating complexity. Now, how do we do that? A is data, right? So we're very data-driven, so we track founders even before they applied. They visit our website. They do this. They were the newsletter, wherever it is. Then we track them through the application funnel, then we work with them in person, then they're part of the portfolio. We gathered it an entire way when we used that data to optimize decision-making, optimize the funnel. The other is, in lack of a better word, you call them kind of productivity tools, which is ensuring that the scouting process, the programs, the ICs, everything is run on the technology platform. So if I go into a coaching meeting where I take my coaching notes, I was online refusion.”
2024-02-15 · Capital Allocators · Magnus Grimeland – Day Zero Investing at Antler (EP.369) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Once we made the first investment, they can actually still stay in our office for another two to three months. But they typically end up growing quite quickly. So they outgrow and get their own offices. They're still a sign of coach. So we check in with them more or less weekly. Typically what they need support with is in the early days it's getting the product to the market, getting the first customer, sometimes hiring. We have a strong network of customers. We have strong network of advisors who can support on the product. And then within a few months, they typically will raise in their next round if they have a lot of momentum. Then we have this network of more than 3,000 VCs and 2600 range investors where we can make very relevant introductions. We also have many LPs who are interested in co-investing and we can make those introductions. So a lot of full companies look at us as almost like a third or fourth co-founder. Because we can support with a system and a community on a local level.”
2024-02-15 · Capital Allocators · Magnus Grimeland – Day Zero Investing at Antler (EP.369) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The capitalist predetermined, so that's quite important. So once we select founders to join the program, we already sign an option agreement with them so we can invest a certain amount of capital at a certain valuation. Now that is important because very often after a while they've been in the program, they're moving forward very fast. There's a lot of other VCs coming and knocking on the door. So we have already secured our investment rights. So for example, in the US, we invest then 250K in cash for about 9% equity. And then we put in another 250k commitment for their follow-on round in total of 500K commitment, but 250k coming in up front. And it's only us doing that round. This is the one thing that we're focusing on being the best at is finding really exceptional founders and being a great partners to them in the early days. And we obviously follow on as well, but the core drive returns is that process.”
2024-02-15 · Capital Allocators · Magnus Grimeland – Day Zero Investing at Antler (EP.369) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And literally, the product market fit. So is product and market. Still, the team is much more important. If we have an exceptional team where the ID still needs work and the product still needs work, you can still back them. If you have an exceptional ID, but we figure out the team is not AAA, top notch, you tend not to back them. Because so early on, IDs still really iterate a lot. So those are the things that we look at. And then based on that, we make a decision on whether we want to invest or not.”
2024-02-15 · Capital Allocators · Magnus Grimeland – Day Zero Investing at Antler (EP.369) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So after three months, you have a very good understanding of the teams, their momentum, and what they're working on. Just imagine working with one of your investment prospects for three months or sitting in the leadership team meeting of a company you're considering investing into for three months in a row, the level of depth and the insight you have into the quality of the team and the business model they're working on is pretty exceptional. And then we codify all of that. So we built an internal client diffusion, we brought on board an amazing person who joins in the early days from BlackRock. Everything we do all across the world is done in one technology system. And there people are being assessed really amongst three dimensions. One is the quality of the team, which is spoken a lot about already. But on top of being an individual is the quality of the team and the team working together. The second thing is we look at the culture of the product. They're trying to build.”
2024-02-15 · Capital Allocators · Magnus Grimeland – Day Zero Investing at Antler (EP.369) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“People come in. What their focus are at that point in time is iterating their business model. Some people have multiple IDs, some people have one ID they thought about for a long time. Some people just started thinking about what to build. Some people are looking for co-founders. First, really very much on the team. Then after a while, then moving and iterating business models forward.”
2024-02-15 · Capital Allocators · Magnus Grimeland – Day Zero Investing at Antler (EP.369) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so at that point in time, it's just about the person. People write about their ID and what they're thinking about doing and their ambition and so on, but we don't really value it that so much.”
2024-02-15 · Capital Allocators · Magnus Grimeland – Day Zero Investing at Antler (EP.369) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So spike is something about an individual that they're better at than most other people. If you look at most very successful founders in the world, they're quite spike individuals. They're really good at something, better than most other people on something. They might have other areas where they're not that strong. So we just want to identify an area where they're much stronger than other people, cube that are very deep in a specific algorithm, specific computer language, a very good product developers. It could be that they are a friend of yours who walks into an elevator with 12 strangers and when an elevator hits the bottom floor, they're friend with everyone. So it is good with people. But we want to see something that is truly exceptional at. Most founders tend to be really great at one or two things. And they leverage that strength and they know that strength and they build a team of people around them who have different strengths that ultimately creates much higher performing team that it teams that people are just averaging and everything.”
2024-02-15 · Capital Allocators · Magnus Grimeland – Day Zero Investing at Antler (EP.369) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And after that, we select the top 2%. Throughout that entire funnel, we're looking for a spike, so we want to see something in the founders that are better than most other people. We're looking for drive, which is a combination of ambition and having shown the ability to execute. And we're looking for grit, meaning there are people for whom failure is not an option. A little bit like I was speaking about in special forces selection earlier that just will power through to make their ambition work.”
2024-02-15 · Capital Allocators · Magnus Grimeland – Day Zero Investing at Antler (EP.369) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We use data to do this. It's a similar tool to Haystack, which automatically gives people a score. Now, this program is pretty good at identifying really good people, but it's also giving a lot of false negatives. So you need to go through the reject pile because some of the very best people might be there. Unfortunately, most AI models looking at assessing people these days, they're pretty good at finding specific types of people, but there's also there's certain things it can then stand yet. So we use data for the rest, people will fill in a self-assessment, the personality test for about 10% of the applicants will do a 15-minute revient to you, which is basically testing for a few very specific things. Is it the right time? Are they really serious about this? Do they have a spike? Do they have some of those criteria that we're looking for in the great founder? And subsequent to that, a few of those get selected for partner induce. Then we do two one-hour part.”
2024-02-15 · Capital Allocators · Magnus Grimeland – Day Zero Investing at Antler (EP.369) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source