YouSaid · the spoken record

Mark Mullen

lines on the record: 44
first: 2021-06-24
most recent: 2021-06-24
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Well, I think you saw recently it's a company called Copia, Jen and Brett led that. Jen was very passionate about the business. We ended up using them. I don't know if you've seen it kind of entering in in the metaverse here for business. We used it for an event that we did with a bunch of bonfire founders. And it's really cool and different in terms of how you interact with the team instead of just using a Zoom. This is it, your own world that you can make. We can make a bonfire world. So it's very different than you'd ever think that we would do maybe as a bonfire firm, but it is software. It is cloud. And we were there early. We started to get to know the founding team. And as you see, Alexis O'Hanian from 776 did the deal with us. And he was there early too. We both saw and believed that being a partner in that deal would be great for each other and the firm. I mean, the fun. I mean, excuse me, the company.”
2021-06-24 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Optimising Investment Decision-Making in Compressed Fundraising Timelines & A Deep Dive on Portfolio Construction, Price Sensitivity and The Importance of Ownership with Mark Mullen, Co-Founder @ Bonfire Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Competition. Let's see what everybody's seeing the hands people are playing. This business is very opaque, right? You can be a VC and never have a return for like 10 years somehow figure it out.”
2021-06-24 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Optimising Investment Decision-Making in Compressed Fundraising Timelines & A Deep Dive on Portfolio Construction, Price Sensitivity and The Importance of Ownership with Mark Mullen, Co-Founder @ Bonfire Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I use this with both my kids and myself. I always say be bigger than you are, you know, whether that's physically or mentally. Put yourself out there as being bigger, whether it's what you're talking about. Maybe it's physicality, just have that confidence in yourself to be bigger than you are.”
2021-06-24 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Optimising Investment Decision-Making in Compressed Fundraising Timelines & A Deep Dive on Portfolio Construction, Price Sensitivity and The Importance of Ownership with Mark Mullen, Co-Founder @ Bonfire Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So long ago now, look, you've heard this before. Like you absolutely have this unique individual that is now your responsibility. And it just has to change your mentality, whether you know it or not. So, you know, it changed my life for sure. And very, very proud to say that.”
2021-06-24 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Optimising Investment Decision-Making in Compressed Fundraising Timelines & A Deep Dive on Portfolio Construction, Price Sensitivity and The Importance of Ownership with Mark Mullen, Co-Founder @ Bonfire Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I'm going to give you a couple of old books. One is called Undaunted Courage, which is the Lewis and Clark Expedition. And then you might enjoy anything about James Cook about the Endeavor. And the reason I kind of love those books today is that we're all maybe complaining a little bit. Hey, I've got five Zoom meetings, et cetera. Like, go read those books and stop complaining. Like what they were able to accomplish and the hardships they overcame were unbelievable and inspiring.”
2021-06-24 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Optimising Investment Decision-Making in Compressed Fundraising Timelines & A Deep Dive on Portfolio Construction, Price Sensitivity and The Importance of Ownership with Mark Mullen, Co-Founder @ Bonfire Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And then I started to invest in other companies that were our clients. And then we as a firm were investing in other funds. And it just gave me a real good feeling for how to manage and become a professional investor, which is where we are now.”
2021-06-24 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Optimising Investment Decision-Making in Compressed Fundraising Timelines & A Deep Dive on Portfolio Construction, Price Sensitivity and The Importance of Ownership with Mark Mullen, Co-Founder @ Bonfire Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, I've been lucky to invest in a couple funds that do things very differently than what I've ever done or they do. For example, they might focus on consumer or bam ventures or maven ventures or halogen and mac capital, for example, having access to different types of deals than I would ever see and getting expertise and information flow from them is helpful for what we do. I'm not taking their information and using it. I'm just saying it keeps me abreast of what's happening in the market. But I've had my first investment as an angel, which was never called that, as you know, until later on in life, was in 1997 I invested a friend of mine's company and they needed $10,000 for a server to start their ISP, right? The web hosting company. And I gave them the $10,000 and then they paid me 15% interest plus warrants. So I got the $10,000 back. And then the warrants, and then they went public and I made 40x on the warrants. By the way, $2,500 investment. So I had the bug. Now, of course, I lost money going forward, but I had the bug.”
2021-06-24 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Optimising Investment Decision-Making in Compressed Fundraising Timelines & A Deep Dive on Portfolio Construction, Price Sensitivity and The Importance of Ownership with Mark Mullen, Co-Founder @ Bonfire Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think you go more risk averse, which is not what you want to do in that environment. The thing is, determining how much risk to take for a portfolio is a really hard question, because even the greatest investors, I think Sequoia says 50 to 60% of their investments go to zero. Are you going to argue with their numbers? No.”
2021-06-24 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Optimising Investment Decision-Making in Compressed Fundraising Timelines & A Deep Dive on Portfolio Construction, Price Sensitivity and The Importance of Ownership with Mark Mullen, Co-Founder @ Bonfire Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One thing early on the companies you think are going to be super winners sometimes don't become ones. And ones you think are dogs become great winners. And so that's just life, right? And you have to be careful not to overemphasize the winners in the early couple years and underemphasize the ones who are not performing. And so we need to keep kind of a clear head about that. I've had a conversation with another VC who said, well, the rest of our portfolio is just killing it. So we think we're just going to throw in, you know, we're going to just leave this deal and throw in three and a half million bucks. I think that's what you're referring to, Harry. It's like you kind of, well, we're going to make so much money on the rest of the portfolio. Let's just throw in money here. I don't think many people do that. We can't do that. We have I said a team that kind of keeps each other true. But I get it. If your portfolio is doing really well, what if your portfolio is doing really poorly early on? What does that make you feel like? Are you going to be riskier on the next investment or less risky? Are you more worried about your portfolio? I'm not going to do it. We're not going to do any more deals because the rest of this portfolio is in trouble.”
2021-06-24 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Optimising Investment Decision-Making in Compressed Fundraising Timelines & A Deep Dive on Portfolio Construction, Price Sensitivity and The Importance of Ownership with Mark Mullen, Co-Founder @ Bonfire Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Got to do this deal. That founder is unbelievable. This opportunity is so cool. We got to do it. Those tend to be the winners. So the more analysis paralysis you go through, sometimes it backfires.”
2021-06-24 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Optimising Investment Decision-Making in Compressed Fundraising Timelines & A Deep Dive on Portfolio Construction, Price Sensitivity and The Importance of Ownership with Mark Mullen, Co-Founder @ Bonfire Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Look, I have two teenagers, right? So I get the iPhone, I've benefited from the iPhone, but in the last two years, I've gotten off of Snap, I'm off of Insta, I've never been on Facebook, I spend maybe 10 minutes a month on Twitter. But, I mean, I'm still inundated with what I call my slop. I call the slop, right? So this is text, email, Slack, Telegram, WhatsApp, LinkedIn, Signal, the phone, my family, my in-laws. It's a bunch of slop and it never ends. And so in order to manage all that information flow, I try to continue to get a handle around it so that I can pull out the information that's important. Otherwise, I'm just kind of inundated. And, you know, the more information we have in some ways, the harder it is to make a decision. I have found at double M and Bonfire, when we spend a lot of time overtime making, you know, trying to almost in reverse justify the decision we're about to make, those companies ended up not being the big winners. The ones where you come in, like, we”
2021-06-24 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Optimising Investment Decision-Making in Compressed Fundraising Timelines & A Deep Dive on Portfolio Construction, Price Sensitivity and The Importance of Ownership with Mark Mullen, Co-Founder @ Bonfire Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And seeing something like that, but it is more important and useful to say, well, I've had experience, I've seen this game played out before with these four other situations. Here's what happened in all those four situations. Here's why they didn't work out. And here's why I think that company is fitting into that same situation and why we shouldn't do that deal. So it's important to go through maybe a little bit more explanation as to how we get a decision.”
2021-06-24 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Optimising Investment Decision-Making in Compressed Fundraising Timelines & A Deep Dive on Portfolio Construction, Price Sensitivity and The Importance of Ownership with Mark Mullen, Co-Founder @ Bonfire Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, it's human nature to be biased by anything in the past, but yes, you have to be aware of this issue that you've just brought up, area, is like, I can't be the guy that's in the meeting with the team. And Tyler says, this technology is so cool. Like all my friends are using it. I'm like, well, this is dumb or something. I wouldn't never use that. Back to my point that I used earlier. You have to expand and understand that user experience for all of us is much different. And especially with all sorts of things that come into someone's life, where they went to school, where they're from, what their family life was like, how they use technology, and then understand that that's where we have to be open-minded, right? We have to be open-minded in terms of what things are out there that even though I may have an opinion on, I need to learn more about it as opposed to just give my opinion. Oftentimes I hear this from my team sometimes, which is like, sometimes you just make a decision and there's really no, you don't really explain how you made the decision. And that's fair. We all do that. I do it maybe because I've had experience.”
2021-06-24 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Optimising Investment Decision-Making in Compressed Fundraising Timelines & A Deep Dive on Portfolio Construction, Price Sensitivity and The Importance of Ownership with Mark Mullen, Co-Founder @ Bonfire Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Really doing a core investment check, and that company turns it was way worth it, way worth it. Plus, we're expanding and extending the bonfire brand by working with all these people. And we don't just give the money to scouts and say calls later. We have monthly calls. We have monthly, we call them mastery series. So we might talk, Jim might give a presentation on cap table management. I might give a presentation on M&A. You know, Brett might give a presentation on how to build your funnel, sales team metrics. So we're providing as much experience and education out to these scouts as they are giving back to us. So we're making a very, you know, we're actually making it a program instead of just letting them go out on their own. You mentioned that, you know, about team members seeing things that you maybe don't. You've seen a lot, you've seen a lot go right, you've seen things go wrong. I think it's so easy to be biased in your perspective of like, oh, anything related to advertising engines paved with”
2021-06-24 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Optimising Investment Decision-Making in Compressed Fundraising Timelines & A Deep Dive on Portfolio Construction, Price Sensitivity and The Importance of Ownership with Mark Mullen, Co-Founder @ Bonfire Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Scout program. So, in general, we want to continue to expand our network. And that's what I said earlier in this conversation that accesses everything from VCs. And so we want to continue to spread out our network. We are, again, only five people, so how many people can we actually get to meet? Spread out the network both in diversity and geographic location. And in order to do that, we need to invest in people who are themselves unique in the market. And so we have six scouts. We have four in LA, one in Boston, and one in San Francisco, three women, three men, diverse as well, and we've given each one of them 250,000 dollars. They are to spend it in unique opportunities, which are B2B only. It has to be where we focus. These are investments we think we're actually going to make money on. Like we hope that all six of those firestarters make an investment. That's 30 investments over the next three years. If we can get three out of those 30 or two out of those companies where we end up leading the seed round,”
2021-06-24 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Optimising Investment Decision-Making in Compressed Fundraising Timelines & A Deep Dive on Portfolio Construction, Price Sensitivity and The Importance of Ownership with Mark Mullen, Co-Founder @ Bonfire Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A lot of almost, I wouldn't call it this way, but there is peer pressure to make sure that these two small checks you make over a three-year period are ones that are going to be really good companies that you just feel like you know a little bit more or get a situation where there's new, look, we have two young members of the team who have a lot of different relationships, a lot of different experiences with technology that's different than mine. So when they come to me and say, this is a really cool technology that a lot of people are using and I don't understand it, I have to be careful and say, well, I would never use that. So why are we investing? I can't. I don't do that. We can't do that. If Jen wants to do an investment, she'd really think she's impassionate about. She should have the chance to do that. But there is a bar, right? You definitely don't want to come back at the end of three years and you made three small check investments and they all turned to zero. That's a tough meeting to come back to. I do want to also on the scout program as well, too interested here. How much do you give the scouts? How do you think about carry allocations for the scouts? And we see it more and more, even in Europe now. How do you think about how you structure?”
2021-06-24 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Optimising Investment Decision-Making in Compressed Fundraising Timelines & A Deep Dive on Portfolio Construction, Price Sensitivity and The Importance of Ownership with Mark Mullen, Co-Founder @ Bonfire Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Absolutely believe in whether it's the founder or the business, just absolutely believe in. And it may be not even a seed round. It's maybe an angel round, maybe a million bucks, and we're going to take $500,000. We have given each of ourselves that capability to do those checks. And I think that's helpful. We've also, real quickly, we've added, we have five, our six scouts. We call them fire starters, and they are doing interesting investments, obviously precede to give us a fresh look and a new look at lots of different types of opportunities. Too interested on these two elements there. When you say about the 500K Jack program, love that. Concern I always have for these programs is when you kind of minimize that barrier to investing. It kind of allows someone to go, ah, great, founder, big market. Let's see. How do you ensure you still retain that high, high bar without losing that quality? Do you see what I mean and without kind of ending up with that? Well, you can only do one or two, right? And they are being watched. So in fairness, you have”
2021-06-24 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Optimising Investment Decision-Making in Compressed Fundraising Timelines & A Deep Dive on Portfolio Construction, Price Sensitivity and The Importance of Ownership with Mark Mullen, Co-Founder @ Bonfire Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Tyler joined us in 2019. Jen joined us last year. So we keep expanding this team that's a decision making process, but in a very short period of time, like almost every year we're adding to that team. And so you're trying to welcome their thoughts, bring in their opinions, their expertise, and then apply that to a decision. When it was me, I just made a decision, right? And then it was Jim was on his own making decisions. Then it was the two of us. And so you can have the math works here. And so we do have a consensus process because we're trying to make sure that everybody does the right amount of work, asks the right amount of questions or the right questions, for example, and then presents it such that we all can make a decision. Now, when one of us says no, the deal can happen. When two of us says no, especially two of the partners, I mean, it's not going to happen, right? But what we've done in a couple different ways to manage some of that opportunity is we have implemented a small chat program. So any one of the five of us can invest up to $500 grand in a company that we just”
2021-06-24 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Optimising Investment Decision-Making in Compressed Fundraising Timelines & A Deep Dive on Portfolio Construction, Price Sensitivity and The Importance of Ownership with Mark Mullen, Co-Founder @ Bonfire Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Always helpful. In fairness, you got to be careful with the founders. Like, sometimes they use it as their way to manage the company, and that's fine. They may have a 50-page board deck, but it helps them clarify what they want to say about the company or clarify the numbers that they want to show. So you don't want to just, hey, this 50-page deck should be 10. That's not the point. Try to figure out what that founder needs in this deck, what that founder needs in the board meeting, what type of information do they appreciate getting or need, all those types of things play into the whole psychology of being a board member? Can I ask, if you take it pre-board member status and actually pre-investment, I think another really interesting thing about the move from solo to partnership is that investment decision-making process. And I'm always fascinated by the consensus versus non-consensus. How do you think about, as Josh Koppelman said, finding the truth together, what does that process look like for you, Annie? Are you consensus or non-consensus driven? Well, we're consensus driven just as a reminder, Jim and I joined forces at the end of 2016. Brett joined us in 2018.”
2021-06-24 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Optimising Investment Decision-Making in Compressed Fundraising Timelines & A Deep Dive on Portfolio Construction, Price Sensitivity and The Importance of Ownership with Mark Mullen, Co-Founder @ Bonfire Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“With the founder for the first time. And I like to make sure, and I go through the details with that founder so that we're not, I'm actually not the one doing it on the board meeting. I do try to push because I can do that in my position now. I do try to push other board members to be that same way. I'm like, please talk to the founder about any detailed questions you have in terms of numbers or the funnel or the hiring process we're doing. Please try to get that over with so that we can really help the founders or the team or meet more of the team in the board meeting instead of just waiting for the CEO to tell us what to do. Let's do that before the meeting. And then we get to the meeting let's really focus. I'm maniacal about trying to get board decks shortened, right? We have a template here at Bonfire, which we give to all our founders. They've done a great job of taking that template and adjusting it and editing it and making it into what they want to be. But we really try to focus on some of the metrics they want to show and get that part of the board meeting out of the way so that we can get back to focusing on how to help build the company. It's music to my ears here about the shortening of board decks. It's also not the night before.”
2021-06-24 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Optimising Investment Decision-Making in Compressed Fundraising Timelines & A Deep Dive on Portfolio Construction, Price Sensitivity and The Importance of Ownership with Mark Mullen, Co-Founder @ Bonfire Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of course, I talk about funnels, I talk about all the stuff, but I want to talk about really strategy and how to make you a better person, or not a better person, but how I can help you drive you as a founder. And whereas when I was younger coming into boards, it was more like going through the board deck, figuring out numbers, being very detailed oriented. I think that's where I've come away with more learnings over time. Can I ask, how do you think about preventing board meetings being a reporting function? How do I stop that and go, let's talk about strategic decisions and the core problems that we're facing? Well, you hear this from the really great investors, for example, Fred Wilson, for example. You know, the board meeting is for some reporting, but it really is to talk about strategy and making decisions. And so all that perfunctory reporting should have been discussed and evaluated and reviewed prior to the meeting. Every board meeting I have, when I get the deck or get the information, by the way, we're talking to these founders all the time. So it's not like we wake up the week before each quarter and start having a conversation.”
2021-06-24 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Optimising Investment Decision-Making in Compressed Fundraising Timelines & A Deep Dive on Portfolio Construction, Price Sensitivity and The Importance of Ownership with Mark Mullen, Co-Founder @ Bonfire Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, my style has changed. I mean, I'm on the board of one big public company. It's a 10 billion revenue company with 5 billion of EBITDA. And I'm about to join another public company. And then I have my seed investments. So one day I'll be having a conversation with a founder about helping her win a $50,000 ACV contract or hiring her head of marketing, right? And the next day I'm talking about a two and a half billion dollar financing with my company. And I'm the chairman of the audit committee on these public companies. So I have these serious conversations. They're all serious, but they're just serious in different levels. And as a board member, I have luckily lived in several countries, I've worked on deals in 30 countries, many, many different entrepreneurs. I've learned how to work with and advise lots of different types of entrepreneurs. And so I tend to be, you know, we refer this.”
2021-06-24 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Optimising Investment Decision-Making in Compressed Fundraising Timelines & A Deep Dive on Portfolio Construction, Price Sensitivity and The Importance of Ownership with Mark Mullen, Co-Founder @ Bonfire Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm obsessed with time management myself. The reality is, and you've heard this before, sometimes the winners need you the least, and it just goes that way. Like, you would love to say, look, I'm on the board of these three companies. They are going to the moon and I'm just hanging out and getting the accolades because I happen to be on the board of this company that's going to the moon. No, what you end up having is that the companies that are struggling need us the most because that's how we put ourselves out there. We have a lot of experience. We've seen a lot of things. We actually are telling you when we're investing, we will be there when you need us. And that is the hard part because we promise it and then it takes away from the time that we need to maybe focus on winners or new investments. But it's okay. It's the life we made first off is when we really enjoy it.”
2021-06-24 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Optimising Investment Decision-Making in Compressed Fundraising Timelines & A Deep Dive on Portfolio Construction, Price Sensitivity and The Importance of Ownership with Mark Mullen, Co-Founder @ Bonfire Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is going to be an outlier a little bit quicker than most because we're so involved with the company. We tried to make that investment decision. There are situations, of course, area where we are extending capital. We'll call it an extension or a bridge or whatever you want to do to get that company to that inflection point where they can go out and have that around. And there are certainly situations where we've given stretch capital and they didn't get there. And so back to portfolio construction, as you were saying, that's sometimes the mental games you have to play with. If I give this company half a million to extend that company to the next round, the reason they need this money is maybe they're actually not getting their fast enough for a third party to do it. So maybe I should be thinking about saving that money for my next core investment as opposed to doing the extension. Those are questions we ask ourselves all the time and we will continue to ask ourselves all the time. It just will happen that way.”
2021-06-24 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Optimising Investment Decision-Making in Compressed Fundraising Timelines & A Deep Dive on Portfolio Construction, Price Sensitivity and The Importance of Ownership with Mark Mullen, Co-Founder @ Bonfire Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, well, we, of course, take a fresh look at the company, but we also have the most information on that company. We do about seven to ten deals a year. We will take seven board seats of those 10, right? We're involved with these companies. We're seeing the information flow. So we should have the best feel and look at real information for how to make that investment. And if we're seeing poor traction, they're not going to get these types of rounds that are getting done. Right now, we are sticking to our process of investing in few deals. We have high conviction on these deals, but the rounds are coming faster and they're coming bigger. And so we're seeing an investment period compressed, right? It's not necessarily we're going to go out and raise a fund sooner, but we're seeing the investment dollars go out in a quicker way because they're bigger rounds and because we're doubling down. We're seeing fantastic growth in some of our portfolio companies. So we're making the decisions on how to invest based on really what they have been able to achieve in comparison to many other metrics and seed companies that we've already invested. And so we can see.”
2021-06-24 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Optimising Investment Decision-Making in Compressed Fundraising Timelines & A Deep Dive on Portfolio Construction, Price Sensitivity and The Importance of Ownership with Mark Mullen, Co-Founder @ Bonfire Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Like, is there going to be signaling risk if this company doesn't invest with us? And what type of help am I going to get at this stage? How does a company like Sequoia invest a $600 million seed fund, how do they write out $2 million check, let's say, in a seed round, and then actually give you the full Sequoia team behind? Maybe they do that. I'm not saying they don't. I'm just saying it's hard to scale that if that's what you're selling. But if you're selling the brand or the access to capital, and maybe we don't get involved, we leave you totally alone, founder. Here's the money, go kill it. We believe in you. That's another type of founder and another type of investment. Final one, and it's just like, as we said, going back to the pre-”
2021-06-24 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Optimising Investment Decision-Making in Compressed Fundraising Timelines & A Deep Dive on Portfolio Construction, Price Sensitivity and The Importance of Ownership with Mark Mullen, Co-Founder @ Bonfire Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Still is relevant today, but less relevant, so using my example the A investor comes in, they're putting in 19 of a 18 of a $20 million round. They want to take as much ownership. They don't care about signaling. It's not a signaling issue that we're not going to put as much pro rata in. They're actually like happy. We're not putting as much pro rata in. I think the companies that are struggling that you have to put in more money and there's a signaling risk, that may be a little bit of a canary in the coal mine saying that a company's really not on the right track. I totally agree with you in terms of the diminished signaling risk, even though I do like to use as an excuse for multi-stage players coming in at sea. You know, index have a new seed fund. Sequoia have a new seed fund. All multistage funds are playing at seed. Again, they have done many times. How do you think about this? And Samuel Shaw actually said on the show that founders are voting with their feet and taking multistage money. What have been some of your more recent experiences about how founders are thinking about multistage money versus boutique seed firms more like you and I? Well, there's two questions that found or asked themselves.”
2021-06-24 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Optimising Investment Decision-Making in Compressed Fundraising Timelines & A Deep Dive on Portfolio Construction, Price Sensitivity and The Importance of Ownership with Mark Mullen, Co-Founder @ Bonfire Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Maximize their own. They're trying to minimize dilution. They're trying to get the headline number for valuation. We get all those things and we're supportive of it. And we just need to make sure that the founder and the A firm are actually helpful going forward as well. There's plenty of A capital. There's plenty of seed capital trying to find the differentiating factor why these are good investors to follow on to us is important. We want people to be helpful. The hard thing also for me is like bluntly you have to proactively forecast your reserves deployment before you've even allocated those additional lines in the portfolio. Often the best companies come back faster. And so you've got to essentially project out on the complete unknown lines in the portfolio whether you'll double down on them. How do you think about that challenge? You just keep adjusting the model. You're watching the model and adjusting it. One thing I want to say as well is one of the reasons that it was important to commit to doing your pro rata was there was this thing called signaling risk, which people were worried about.”
2021-06-24 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Optimising Investment Decision-Making in Compressed Fundraising Timelines & A Deep Dive on Portfolio Construction, Price Sensitivity and The Importance of Ownership with Mark Mullen, Co-Founder @ Bonfire Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You ever play The Mental Excitement? It's a metal game that there's no ending, right? Because what you're saying is, do I want to put that extra $3 million at the AD pre or do I want to put another $3 million in a brand new company at 10 pre? I think the math will play out long term. We don't know where that's going to end, but I get your question. We have committed to follow on an ownership, so we're kind of stuck there. To be fair, those companies are getting those types of rounds are the ones who are growing and are progressing pretty well. Do you think you are stuck there, Le Bluntly? Because in prior markets when there wasn't such availability of capital, you know, you committed to do the follow-on. Mark, you're on the hook for the follow-on. Here, there's so much cash going that actually, if you say, hey, we're not going to take it, founders will most often say that's fantastic. Thank you so much for freeing up allocation. Yeah, and to be honest, like, we're not in those situations, we're talking about, we're not perhaps taking the entire pro rata we have. So we are managing that capital. And I think that the founders are trying to”
2021-06-24 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Optimising Investment Decision-Making in Compressed Fundraising Timelines & A Deep Dive on Portfolio Construction, Price Sensitivity and The Importance of Ownership with Mark Mullen, Co-Founder @ Bonfire Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And it skews the valuation that I got in on the seed basis, right? And so we are dealing with this ourselves. We're not complaining, but this is happening quite a bit. The other thing we're seeing with the A investors is that they are themselves trying to put as much capital work as possible. So they are not leaving a lot of room for the prior investors. And we keep track of that, of course. But what is important for us to do is develop that relationship with the founder because the founder is going to most likely protect us in that conversation. Also, we of course foster our relationships with the A investors and we tend to start working and only work with A investors who we know are going to come in and say, hey, we want to put in 20 million. We're going to do 19, figure out the one that you have for the rest of your investors. Do you ever play the mental game though of like, actually, the valuations are so high and the opportunity cost of those dollars, as you said, you need to put more and more into maintain your pro rata. The opportunity costs of those dollars.”
2021-06-24 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Optimising Investment Decision-Making in Compressed Fundraising Timelines & A Deep Dive on Portfolio Construction, Price Sensitivity and The Importance of Ownership with Mark Mullen, Co-Founder @ Bonfire Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“got Ax Series A fund or multi-stage fund putting $20 million down on 80 million pre like we both had. How do you advise them when it's much much earlier than it would have been in previous years? We are seeing this every week and we are benefiting from it, right? As a markup in our portfolio, we are benefiting from these preemptive rounds, let's say and the A rounds or just running a process. We started a process for one of our firms on May 12th. We signed a term sheet on May 21st. We had five term sheets. And that's great. I think that's what the market is doing right now. We can't pull the reins on our founders. If this is what the market is doing, we want to lean in and help them run that process. What's interesting what you're saying though is valuations have jumped as we all know and also the amount of capital the a firm is putting in so where the a round three years ago used to be six at 24 it's now 20 at 80 like you're saying and if i own 15 of a company coming out of seed and now they're doing a 20 million dollar round you know i've got a big check to write in that next round”
2021-06-24 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Optimising Investment Decision-Making in Compressed Fundraising Timelines & A Deep Dive on Portfolio Construction, Price Sensitivity and The Importance of Ownership with Mark Mullen, Co-Founder @ Bonfire Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Your fund is set up to do. We invest in the seed, as I keep saying, and we really like to take ownership in the seed because we understand and believe will be diluted over time. We like to take as much ownership in the seed. We almost double down because of the amount of capital we put in, not necessarily the ownership, but we'll maintain our pro rata in the A round. We might do a little bit in the B, and then we're done. And so we believe that if we are going to be the type investors we are, which is we get very involved with our companies, we spend time, we want to be the first call you make or bad news and good news. If we're going to be putting all that work into these companies, we want to have ownership and such that when this company takes off or has an exit that we've actually been rewarded for both the time we put in and the capital we put in. Can I ask, you mentioned there are the reserves element. Now when we think about preemptive rounds, the decision on whether to double down is coming faster and faster. First question, how do you advise founders who say, hey, I've”
2021-06-24 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Optimising Investment Decision-Making in Compressed Fundraising Timelines & A Deep Dive on Portfolio Construction, Price Sensitivity and The Importance of Ownership with Mark Mullen, Co-Founder @ Bonfire Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Want to stay focused there. And on the portfolio construction, we may dial up risk. Obviously, we're monitoring the portfolio at all times, and we may dial up risk. If the portfolio is kind of down the middle after, you know, maybe do three or four investments that are down the middle type of things that we like to do, we'll dial up risk for some opportunities that maybe is a unique founder or some situation where there's not as much traction for us to make a decision. Can I ask, you know, you mentioned there 24 to 28. When you think about ownership, I think this is one which is actually really changing over time, before five, 10 years ago, 20% ownership was pretty feasible and possible. Now I think it's a lot more challenging. How do you think about the centrality of ownership today when you're making a decision? And this is where I've made big mistakes, honestly, Mark. I've said no because it was 8% and I wanted 13 or 14 and it was huge mistakes. How do you think about the centrality of ownership? Right. So we focus on it. I heard you with David Tish the other day. I mean, everybody has their opinions and I think they're all valid. Depends on what you believe and what you believe.”
2021-06-24 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Optimising Investment Decision-Making in Compressed Fundraising Timelines & A Deep Dive on Portfolio Construction, Price Sensitivity and The Importance of Ownership with Mark Mullen, Co-Founder @ Bonfire Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This, you know, you're a story adventure investor. I'm sure you thought about this a lot with the $101 million that you have in your new fund. What's the right number of lines and how do you approach it? Right. Look, we have made our bed. We said we are seed investors in B2B software. And we're very good at it. We're getting better. We're always trying to get better. But we're not going to move out of that. So we have a very clear focus in what we do. And we do about seven to eight, seven to nine deals a year. We'll have a 24 to 28 company portfolio and we do about 40% of the investments are the primary check and 60% follow-on. We have very methodical ways that we think about the follow-on and how much capital we're going to put into additional companies. But we stick to our knitting and we're trying to get deeper in what we know in our knitting and not wider, if that makes sense. Look, we lucked out. We focused on, Jim and I've been focused on for many years, the B2B cloud software. And that has turned out to be a pretty big business.”
2021-06-24 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Optimising Investment Decision-Making in Compressed Fundraising Timelines & A Deep Dive on Portfolio Construction, Price Sensitivity and The Importance of Ownership with Mark Mullen, Co-Founder @ Bonfire Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A big move for somebody investing in a seed company. You know, we can talk about the Tigers and D1s and all those guys. They're doing great, fine. They're looking at companies that have quite a bit more traction and things happening. So they can make those decisions faster. We still need to go back. We're trying to understand how big the market is. There's very little traction with these companies. We're trying to understand that founding team. And in order to understand that founding team, you need to do those types of references. You need to have the conversation with people around them. And the other side of the coin, which is very hard, I think for all of us, is the expectations for these founders now. They can do 20 Zoom meetings in a week and they want a decision faster. And so we're all dealing with that and learning to move faster. And we'll see how it plays out. It will be totally interesting. And you're right. I think Zoom is a big part in terms of the compression of the fundraising timelines. When we go back to Bonfire, the brain trust, honestly, one of my biggest passions in life, one of the many reasons for my limited friendship group is portfolio construction. When we think about portfolio construction for you today, how do you think about...”
2021-06-24 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Optimising Investment Decision-Making in Compressed Fundraising Timelines & A Deep Dive on Portfolio Construction, Price Sensitivity and The Importance of Ownership with Mark Mullen, Co-Founder @ Bonfire Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And the team. And we need to be, I just need to continue to be to get conviction on those types of feelings when I have with a founder. I totally agree with you. Sorry, and then we will return to some form of structure. My question to you is also, when you said about their kind of the brain trust and you can't say yes in the first meeting, and then you also said about kind of that founder centricity and the relationship with them. My concern is today with the liquid markets that we have and the proliferation of capital that we have, you don't have the time on the fundraisers themselves. And bluntly, you just have to make decisions faster than ever before. How do you balance that centricity of founder relationship with the need to make decisions very, very fast in these markets? Well, we're all in the same boat. So we talk a lot about this, the need to move. It's been fun to find a situation where we all have this feeling around the founding team. We got to move fast. We have done a meeting to term sheet in nine days, which is now apparently a little bit long. I'm hearing things are happening over the weekend. But nine days...”
2021-06-24 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Optimising Investment Decision-Making in Compressed Fundraising Timelines & A Deep Dive on Portfolio Construction, Price Sensitivity and The Importance of Ownership with Mark Mullen, Co-Founder @ Bonfire Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Can I ask a hard one? And I asked David Tish this a box and I said, if you were to think about your biggest miss, what would your biggest miss be? And I guess what were the tangible takeaways that changed how you think about investing because of that miss? Yeah, I can give you two quick examples because they're related to what I just said about the individuals that I met in one meeting and invested. I met Sean Rad from Tinder and I met the guys from Honey. And I turned down honey twice. And actually I go back to the email exchanges I had with them. And I actually turned them down, as I said in the email because I didn't have the time. That's a terrible answer, right? The terrible answer. And I think it was more maybe I just didn't understand the business as well. And so there's going to be those types of situations. And I think that the learning is that as I get deeper into our investment career, both at Bonfire and MM as a professional BC, I guess maybe professional is not the right word, but you still end up investing and we invest in the C stage. We're really investing in the founder and the person.”
2021-06-24 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Optimising Investment Decision-Making in Compressed Fundraising Timelines & A Deep Dive on Portfolio Construction, Price Sensitivity and The Importance of Ownership with Mark Mullen, Co-Founder @ Bonfire Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Walter Driver from Scopley, or Jeff Green from the trade desk, I invested in the first meeting. I committed to them in that first meeting. We don't do that anymore. It's really hard, right? And especially since I have a team, I can't just walk in and go, yeah, we're going to invest in this company. We need to really talk about it.”
2021-06-24 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Optimising Investment Decision-Making in Compressed Fundraising Timelines & A Deep Dive on Portfolio Construction, Price Sensitivity and The Importance of Ownership with Mark Mullen, Co-Founder @ Bonfire Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's positive negatives outweigh the negatives. I mean, look, I came from a partnership mentality. I understand and understood what were the benefits from being in that partnership. Really, the hardest thing to do is scale yourself and scale an individual. And so me going from Sol GP, sitting in my office, perhaps being lonely, looking at deals, trying to get things done to now we have a five-person investment team and a broader team in general. I mean, that just has introduced me to such a larger brain trust, right? Such a larger amount of deal flow. Imagine how many good deals that I may have turned down as a sole GP because I had limited knowledge of the space or frankly limited time. And now I have exponentially grown our networks, our deal flow, our knowledge with the team. And you know, access is key and venture. So I think that for sure the positives have outweighed the negatives. One thing that we need to be careful of, and I try to push this a little bit, is still being nimble. I can give you examples when I first met”
2021-06-24 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Optimising Investment Decision-Making in Compressed Fundraising Timelines & A Deep Dive on Portfolio Construction, Price Sensitivity and The Importance of Ownership with Mark Mullen, Co-Founder @ Bonfire Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A barbell mentality where you have a lot of illiquid investments and then maybe some real liquid stuff, for example, in the stock market or just cash. And I think that's what's helped me actually going through those busts is now helping me be a little bit more risky, frankly.”
2021-06-24 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Optimising Investment Decision-Making in Compressed Fundraising Timelines & A Deep Dive on Portfolio Construction, Price Sensitivity and The Importance of Ownership with Mark Mullen, Co-Founder @ Bonfire Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, my first job out of college was 1986, and then I caught the first 87 crash, which people don't remember that one. And that's when I had like $1,000 in the stock market of my savings and lost half of that and immediately sold it. Learn not to do that again. But the crashes that I've been through, the 93, the 01, the 08, et cetera, yes, definitely put a little bit of a damper on the riskiness I take with my portfolio. However, I think I've turned the corner and learned a lot about what I didn't do, which was take advantage of the dips, right, and take advantage of that situation. And for the first time ever last March, I went negative cash and I went big into the market and big into crypto. And I think, so I'm still learning and I'm still adjusting and being able to take risk when I think there's going to be an opportunity. As a VC and as an investor in many funds myself as well as, of course, Bonfire, you know, we have this big piece of ill-liquid investments, ventures illiquid. You kind of end up having”
2021-06-24 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Optimising Investment Decision-Making in Compressed Fundraising Timelines & A Deep Dive on Portfolio Construction, Price Sensitivity and The Importance of Ownership with Mark Mullen, Co-Founder @ Bonfire Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, and his right hand person is a man by the name of Brian Devi, who was much younger than Bill and an LP in all my funds and has been one of my mentors forever. Just the way they dealt with people was straight up. You told people what you thought. You helped people do what they wanted to do. You lived by a handshake. And those were things that sound very trite, but are super important today still. I think that everybody knows when I'm having a conversation with them. I'm telling you the straight up story. And that's really one of the things I learned. Of course, I learned that from my father as well, but seeing that in a business setting and how you worked with and dealt with people was very impactful for me.”
2021-06-24 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Optimising Investment Decision-Making in Compressed Fundraising Timelines & A Deep Dive on Portfolio Construction, Price Sensitivity and The Importance of Ownership with Mark Mullen, Co-Founder @ Bonfire Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“International. So I got a chance to live in both Paris and London. And so for many years, that's what I did. We also invested in companies ourselves as well as other funds. And so when we sold the firm, we sold all the assets upon his death in 2000, 2001, then we had still the investment bank and we sold the investment bank in January 2007 to RBC Capital Markets. Fantastic transactions before the crash happened. I was a senior partner then, and I had to stay three more years. But that's really the taste of investing and where I got the taste of investing from.”
2021-06-24 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Optimising Investment Decision-Making in Compressed Fundraising Timelines & A Deep Dive on Portfolio Construction, Price Sensitivity and The Importance of Ownership with Mark Mullen, Co-Founder @ Bonfire Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Really, when I came out of college, I was already getting into finance. I worked for a bank and then I became an investment banker, more like a merchant banker because we also made investments. For a very famous entrepreneur, his name was Bill Daniels and is currently still known as the father of cable TV in the US. I got a chance to work for him and ended up working for the firm for 20 years. He was one of those stories you don't hear about anymore. Didn't finish high school, lied to get into the Navy. Golden Glove boxing champion for two years. Flew 250 missions as a fighter pilot. Came back to the US, started selling insurance, wanted to see a boxing match on Closed Circuit TV and started cable television in 1953. This is the kind of person I got to work under and all the people that worked for him. And so we had an investment bank, about 75 people that did M&A in the cable world and ISPs and towers and broadband, wireless, et cetera, across the world, as well as we owned a bunch of different companies.”
2021-06-24 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Optimising Investment Decision-Making in Compressed Fundraising Timelines & A Deep Dive on Portfolio Construction, Price Sensitivity and The Importance of Ownership with Mark Mullen, Co-Founder @ Bonfire Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source