YouSaid · the spoken record

Mark Suster

lines on the record: 111
first: 2018-04-18
most recent: 2018-04-18
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Embracing it as a technolog It's real true. So the concept is on a second. So it's the idea that it's not this latest. We're building rules, the latest Matt Damon startup, essentially. Although does he have one? No kidding. No, but like the Kard”
2018-04-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Mark Suster, managing partner, Upfront Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And they have used it to start to enhance their recruiting process. So they had, I don't know, a thousand people go through it and compared it against their own recruiting process. And they like it so much that they're now embracing it as a technology. But that's being built in Los Angeles. It's real true.”
2018-04-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Mark Suster, managing partner, Upfront Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And Meredith's, in fact, you're right. I remember that. And Meredith's just fantastic, and she's really, truly an entrepreneur and innovator. And I think she's going to build something very successful. You never know. These are always risks. Another is Rebecca Cantar, who has created a way to do cognitive assessment using computer games. So you run simulations where you have, I'll give you an example, a virtual world of fish, of coral and plant types, and you have to assemble the right fish, coral, and plant types in an ocean environment with the right level of salinity and sunlight and depth to create a self-sustaining ecosystem. How you make the decisions tell something about how your brain processes information. And she built that because she wants the SAT to go away because she wants to teach children differently.”
2018-04-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Mark Suster, managing partner, Upfront Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The number one narrative that people have about LA Tech is they perceive it as just the place where you're building video and advertising and kind of lightweight tech. Right. And I think they misunderstand that we have phenomenal engineering talent that we're really building some big ambitious projects. Some of them are going to be very successful, maybe not at SpaceX level, but that's a phenomenal success. But I'll just give you a couple examples. And I will mention that they are upfront companies. So I'm not sounding like I'm talking my playbook without disclosing that. But UBIam, which is a wireless energy company that there's, you know, they've had some positive press and some skeptical press, but they really are innovative and they've really pushed the boundaries. We have gotten direct feedback from the market that nobody has done the kind of wireless energy transfer.”
2018-04-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Mark Suster, managing partner, Upfront Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think we Because I believe that China. For us. So, lastly, tell me one thing that people don't, again, I don't want to regionalize you, but you are the most prominent venture capitalist in Los Angeles now. What is something that you think people should is wrong that people get up here and elsewhere about LIE tech?”
2018-04-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Mark Suster, managing partner, Upfront Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'm a big believer that international trade is a net positive for everybody. I don't think our ailment as a country is the fact that we're trading with Asia. I think we get a lot more benefit from cheap products provided to everyone that give them more disposable income. But I believe that we need to take the gains that we have from being in a world economy and invest them in education and infrastructure for people affected. And so I'm a Democrat and I believe in taking those gains and reinvesting them. I'm not to the far left. So I don't believe in like Elizabeth Warren's view that we should not be part of TPP because I believe that China will just dominate trade in Asia. And that's a lost opportunity for us.”
2018-04-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Mark Suster, managing partner, Upfront Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think he's done a great job at protecting immigrants. He's done a great job at running the second largest city in the country. I think he's right on a lot of positions, but he's very pro-tech. He's pro innovation.”
2018-04-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Mark Suster, managing partner, Upfront Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The other thing that businesses don't know a lot about is something called tailgating. So when you go into a building and someone swipes their cart, people follow them in, even though they're not supposed to, right? And so with density, we can track tailgating and we can help you know when there's a problem. But we do it with lasers, not cameras. So the important thing about that is we're building an anonymous service.”
2018-04-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Mark Suster, managing partner, Upfront Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“A demo from I love that. I spent an hour with the Disney person in charge. Like, that person's a genius because they know how to move people around. It's important things they say and signage and how you signal crowds.”
2018-04-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Mark Suster, managing partner, Upfront Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I Industrial scale sensors. And I've invested in six companies in the category across all different applications. But other examples, insurance policies, like if you can't have too many people in a room, we're doing line busting. So you can actually see how many people are on the line at certain places that you want to go. We're helping businesses with things that sound mundane like HVAC, like when do you turn on your heating and electricity based on when employees come in?”
2018-04-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Mark Suster, managing partner, Upfront Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oh, did he? Yeah. And so part of what we're doing, we're not in shopping malls. We're used a lot in space planning. So working with large people who have real estate, like you take a meeting room like this, is it used 80% of the time or 20% of the time? And of the 80% of the time it's used, does it have six people in it or two people in it? And it doesn't matter if you're a small building, but if you're in a...”
2018-04-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Mark Suster, managing partner, Upfront Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, our goal is to give you stats every day to help you be a better parent and not feel like you need to rush in all the time, but a byproduct of that is we believe we can predict autism younger than anyone else can because we believe from about six months on we can start to see signs that doctors yet can't diagnose. And I won't bore the podcast with why, but we have a bunch of data out of Israel to suggest that. But I believe cameras can also be used to predict Parkinson's because you develop a twitch in your finger and a shuffle in your walk. Alzheimer's, you develop both a change in your voice pattern and a shuffle in your feet. And these things that observationally a doctor can't pick up because they see you once or twice a year. A computer can pick up”
2018-04-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Mark Suster, managing partner, Upfront Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But I'll tell you what I spend my time on is computer vision. And I'm a really big believer in computing, being able to interpret the physical world in better ways than we as humans can. I'll just give you some examples. So I invested in a baby monitor. It's called Nanit. And what we do is we help monitor the well-being of your child when they're sleeping. So the idea is monitor less, sleep more or sleep more, monitor less. It's most of the people who had baby monitor.”
2018-04-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Mark Suster, managing partner, Upfront Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So I'll tell you cryptocurrency, I'm not as big a believer in cryptocurrency, but the underlying technology, which you hear a lot, this blockchain, I think is transformative. And so I'm spending a lot of time trying to understand that. I just released a primer video on YouTube. If you search on YouTube for upfront ventures, you can find my primer video and I release slides. And I'm trying to educate myself. And a lot of times by educating other people, it forces you to learn. Yeah, I think you have discussions.”
2018-04-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Mark Suster, managing partner, Upfront Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I will. I was trying to learn more about the company in the space. I'm just interested in it. And I see this tweet from this gentleman, and he's using their product in a remote village in India to teach homeless people how to be better designers to improve their lives. And there's a lot of that in the world, and we can focus on. Where's the Happy Shiny Truth? On our own little dramas.”
2018-04-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Mark Suster, managing partner, Upfront Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“All the trends were heading in positive directions. And, you know, you could very easily talk yourself into dystopian future. But in general, I think technologies have been more good than bad. I just share this on Twitter yesterday. Like in all the dystopia that we see every day, I saw a tweet from a guy, I think he was in India who was teaching poor inner city people, homeless people how to do design work using a product called Canva, I guess you pronounce it. Yeah, CANVA. And I don't know the company all that well. Led by a woman, they just raised earlier this year from Sequoia.”
2018-04-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Mark Suster, managing partner, Upfront Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right, absolutely. $10 million valuation. Yeah, he had a lot of ambition. So I'll finish up talking about where we are. Right now we're in sort of a crisis around Facebook. Tech is disliked. There's all these massive technologies coming, automation, robotics that could be problematic for society. It's not a good time for tech. Tell me where you think things are going from a venture perspective.”
2018-04-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Mark Suster, managing partner, Upfront Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We had the head of Nordstrom at our code commerce thing yesterday. And I told a story of going to, I did a story. I worked for the Washington Post. Nordstrom was invading all the cities with their innovative stores. And I was out there in Seattle to meet the Nordstroms. And I had extra time, so I went to see this little startup Amazon. You know, he wasn't little little, but he was little and had five people. And it was an afterthought”
2018-04-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Mark Suster, managing partner, Upfront Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think it creates the wrong environment for it. And then are the rare unique breed of people who are just built to take the risk on, to Know, create next generation products to go out there every day against all the odds like Jamie Siminoff with Ring when everyone said he could Amazon too.”
2018-04-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Mark Suster, managing partner, Upfront Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Of their innovation now is coming through acquisition. Salesforce just bought Mule Software's $6 billion plus dollars, and they had bought two or three companies before that. They bought Quip. They bought a number of companies. If you look at Facebook buying WhatsApp, buying Instagram, buying Oculus. I think they're buying innovation, and I think Google has done it too. And I don't think anything's wrong with that. I think that's going to continue to happen. It's just so hard to create the environment when you're at Google and you're paid, I'm going to make it up $300,000 a year plus half a million dollar a year in stock grants and you can turn up when you want and it doesn't really matter if you don't win in your market.”
2018-04-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Mark Suster, managing partner, Upfront Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I love it's the guy from LA that's prudent. Then what about the big companies that are doing? One of the things a lot of startups here is saying like it's not the er of the startup, it's the er of the big companies now.”
2018-04-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Mark Suster, managing partner, Upfront Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so it does distort markets in the short term. I think when the markets eventually crash, I don't know when that's going to come. I've thought it was going to be three years ago, so don't listen to me, but eventually markets go through cycles and that capital, some of it will be pulled back out into put into other uses.”
2018-04-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Mark Suster, managing partner, Upfront Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Look at the dot com era. We overcapitalize all the companies. It distorts markets because If you can create a company that doesn't have to monetize and you have eight companies that don't have to monetize, the three that try to build successful business models can't because why would you pay for product if I can get everything for free?”
2018-04-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Mark Suster, managing partner, Upfront Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“11 materials, and you got to sit around and come up with some way to get this spaceship back. Like, that's the mentality I have is I think the creative pressure of not being overcapitalized actually helps. But here they are.”
2018-04-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Mark Suster, managing partner, Upfront Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Desperate they are. You know, I always said necessity is the mother of all invention. Like if you give someone $2 million and they have to launch on $2 million and they have to wake up a little bit earlier and not have as big a team and not waste money on parties and all this other stuff. Sometimes it produces more innovation. Like the scene I have in my head is Apollo 13, you know, when they're trying to get the spaceship back and they have these.”
2018-04-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Mark Suster, managing partner, Upfront Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And you think that's like that's such common behavior. And I had that in my two startups. I had people saying, I can buy you, I can buy your competitor. And the first time I didn't listen to him and I just kept building. And the second time I thought, I'll have what's behind door number two. Those are very personal decisions. But of course, people feel that pressure. But then you look at companies like, I'm not so sure. Again, I hate saying negative things because I don't really know the company. But let's just take as an example magic leap. The enormous amount of money going into a company pre product launch. I think it just distorts so many distorted.”
2018-04-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Mark Suster, managing partner, Upfront Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You remember the famous story, which is Steve Case running this little tiny company called AOL. He goes to see. I probably read it. He went to C. Bill Gates and, you know, we can buy you or bury you, which is it going to be.”
2018-04-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Mark Suster, managing partner, Upfront Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I think there's an appeal also for entrepreneurs. So I would also say with this large pool of capital, not just SoftBank, but Tamasic, and there's a lot more sovereign wealth funds out of Middle East doing direct investing. LPs are investing, hedge funds are investing, mutual funds are investing. Two things are happening. One is founders are able to sell stock into secondaries so they can get some monetization and so they don't feel the pressure to go public. And some of the seed and early funds are actually selling their stock in those transactions. And actually, some VCs are. So it's actually being seen as a potential exit. For some people. But when large pools of capital come into companies at early stages, it distorts markets. And so there's going to be some positive stories and there's going to be a lot of negative stories too.”
2018-04-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Mark Suster, managing partner, Upfront Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, let me say it this way. One thing I'm sure you're aware of is the trend that companies are staying private longer. Yes. And there's in a certain attractiveness to entrepreneurs, to saying private and not being conditioned to the public markets. And because of that capital is actually chasing the opportunity to still get investments because they can't wait until it goes public.”
2018-04-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Mark Suster, managing partner, Upfront Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, talk about, I mean, he also has created sort of a juggernaut in Seattle in that regard. Well, they have Microsoft and they had a bunch of companies. Talk about where you think trends are going. Softbank has all this enormous amounts of money. I just interviewed the DoorDash CEO last night in Las Vegas at Chop Talk at our Code Commerce event. And I think it was $535 million in half of that was from SoftBank. They're handing out checks of hundreds of millions of dollars. How are you all being impacted by them and what's happened? Because at first it was Mark Andreessen doing that, handing out giant sums of money, but now he's been Mark Andreessen, essentially.”
2018-04-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Mark Suster, managing partner, Upfront Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Eventually didn't succeed, also those stories just don't get told. Amazon ever made. I know Investing in LA? Smart to do that. I was sort of like, oh, the one thing that Amazon doesn't own or Google does. Now they do. Now they do. What can I do? I can't resist Jeff Bezos apparently.”
2018-04-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Mark Suster, managing partner, Upfront Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But the road is lined with people who didn't sell and eventually didn't succeed. Also, those stories just don't get told. We have collective amnesia in memory. And honestly, I just, I'm super proud of Jamie for getting to the finish line. I think it's the largest tech acquisition Amazon ever made. I know they paid more for Whole Foods, but the largest tech acquisition, and I'm super proud of him. And he's staying in LA. The team's staying in LA, Amazon's investing in LA.”
2018-04-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Mark Suster, managing partner, Upfront Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And he's tough. The nest was coming at you. Our job is to support founders, and when they decide they want to sell, we never fight against them. If I had my choice, I would have rather taken more risk. And tried to go along, but I'm a VC, and that's what my job is to do. Yeah, exactly.”
2018-04-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Mark Suster, managing partner, Upfront Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, listen, I think I think it's not just nest coming, it's also Amazon wanted to be serious in the category. And I think Jamie took a view that here's a chance for me to not only get a great financial return for investors and employees and himself as founder, but to join arguably the best-run company maybe in the world now and to be a large important part of that. And I think Jamie found that attractive”
2018-04-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Mark Suster, managing partner, Upfront Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so he started with the doorbell and then he did a flood lamp, which you can just literally unscrew your flood lamp and screw it in. And then he had a stick up cam and then he sold like a solar charging unit. And then he sold a sign that went outside your house. And because he delighted customers, they kept coming back and buying more profits.”
2018-04-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Mark Suster, managing partner, Upfront Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“With ring, if you buy a security doorbell, you use it every month and you get utility out of it every single day. With Fitbit, a certain number of people get huge value out of it forever and a certain number of people, it goes on the desk, right?”
2018-04-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Mark Suster, managing partner, Upfront Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right, right. But the idea was that you couldn't do it. And also hardware was hard. They had struggled here with a bunch of them like that. There was sort of an anti-hardware thing after they poured lots of money into it. Who's they? Venture capitalists here had the narrative that hardware was too hard, essentially.”
2018-04-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Mark Suster, managing partner, Upfront Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Years, though, they really struggled to innovate where Ring has outpaced them at every step. And so actually it was a venture fund set up by a home builder who understood the market, which was Shea Ventures. Now, I think they're called Calibrate now that stepped in and led that round and then Kleiner Perkins came in and Richard Branson came in.”
2018-04-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Mark Suster, managing partner, Upfront Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think in total the round was like a million and a half dollars, something like that. And he sold $3.1 million of product like that. It was amazing. And they sent him out. And this is the thing about hardware. If you have problems in hardware, you can't just do an update. So, yeah, we struggled somewhat with product quality early days, but for a company that was so new, so innovative, so ahead of its market, I think they did a fantastic job. And Jamie's the consummate service professional. So we raised the next round with True Ventures. We participated also in the A round. And then he had enough capital where he replaced a lot of the malfunctioning products and he built a better version and then a better version and then a better version.”
2018-04-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Mark Suster, managing partner, Upfront Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“As an alarm system, but it's kind of a crappy system. They kind of provide crappy service. There's no video. And I believe in computer vision. And I think there's a huge trend towards not just video, but video and laser and infrared and other ways to interpret the physical world with computing devices. And that's what Jamie was building. And I didn't know would people care or not, but I knew he was a great entrepreneur. So we brought him in. My partner, Greg Bettinelli, was new to the fund. It was, I think his first deal. The first deal he took over became Goat, which is another company we haven't talked about doing hundreds of millions in sales LA based. And Greg really was a large part of the reason why goat was created. But this was his first de novo deal was ring. And we knew Jamie and we just wanted to.”
2018-04-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Mark Suster, managing partner, Upfront Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In the early days of voicemail, where most of us didn't want to sit and listen to voicemail all day, it created transcriptions for you. I think the company name was SimilScribe. The product was phone tag. So I knew Jamie through that. He then created a second company. It was called Unsubscribe. It wasn't for me, but he was creating products, innovating. Then he created something called Edison Labs. And Edison Labs was going to start spinning out a lot of companies. And they came up with this idea they called doorbot. And I was hanging out with Jamie at a local conference, and he was telling me about Dorobot, and he said it was security doorbells. And I thought, that's a clever idea. You know, I've got ADT”
2018-04-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Mark Suster, managing partner, Upfront Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Jamie Siminoff is a longtime entrepreneur in LA. I try to explain this to people who invest in venture funds because they all say, well, can't the Silicon Valley funds just fly down and do all the best deals? The reality is a lot of the people we're backing, we've known for 10 years, Jamie created a company called Phone Tag. I don't know if you ever used that, but it was a great product.”
2018-04-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Mark Suster, managing partner, Upfront Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They have Instagram has reached a point where some of the product is better than Snapchat. Some of the product is better. And I think Snapchat's paying attention. But I think Snapchat also has an innovation engine of things that are in the pipeline that are coming.”
2018-04-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Mark Suster, managing partner, Upfront Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's interesting. You know, actually, I did an interview, a podcast with Kevin Sister. He just flat out said, Yeah, we're stole it. That's what we did. He said they built a radio. Well, he just said it. Like, he didn't even bother. And I appreciated that. Actually, he said, you know, they built a radio and we built a better radio. So what? Did they have the things on radios? And I was like, okay. All right. You're going to defend your behavior. That's fine.”
2018-04-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Mark Suster, managing partner, Upfront Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Are you worried about their leave? It's the funniest thing to me because if the situations were reversed and Snapchat was a Northern California company and Instagram was an LA based company, everybody up here would be screaming bloody murder about how we're stealing IP Nobody seems to care. I asked someone about this recently. He said, I asked a VC. He said, well, honestly, people do care, but no one wants to complain about Facebook because they still buy all our companies.”
2018-04-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Mark Suster, managing partner, Upfront Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right, and they need to do that. What do you imagine they need? So those two things. And I agree with you on the communications part. I think they're much more robust. They're also much more innovative. Facebook just borrows and borrows and doesn't come up with any.”
2018-04-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Mark Suster, managing partner, Upfront Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And they chose not to lean into that. And a lot of those people ended up at Instagram. And I think you could have sucked the oxygen out of the room and enabled them to stay on Snapchat and would have been harder to get Instagram to bring them over. Number two is I believe that you had to build a management infrastructure that over time learns how to decentralize power and to hand off power and build a hierarchy and a campus and a company culture that can withstand the trauma and the changes. And I don't think they've done that. And that'll be their big challenge going forward.”
2018-04-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Mark Suster, managing partner, Upfront Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And that's more sustainable because it's direct bidding and they have a bidding platform. And they've shifted all that revenue without falling off a cliff with, I think, I think as a monumental achievement that people don't talk about. The things that I think they didn't get right were twofold. Number one is I don't think they understood the world of influencers well enough. And I think Evan really was reluctant to serve them. Yeah.”
2018-04-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Mark Suster, managing partner, Upfront Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And it has a network effect Where once people are communicating with all their friends on it, it's very hard to disrupt that. I'm not saying it can't happen, but it's very hard to disrupt. So I think it's a lot more sustainable than people think. Number two is they went from brand advertising, which helped them grow very fast because you didn't have to prove it to go sell a $2 million campaign. You didn't have to prove efficacy. And they shifted it towards a direct marketing or a CPA model where people now are doing a lot more DR.”
2018-04-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Mark Suster, managing partner, Upfront Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There's a few things that I think Silicon Valley reporting gets wrong about Snapchat, and there's a few things that maybe I could elaborate on. So, I think the narrative in Silicon Valley, because so many of the people that comment on Snapchat are not avid young users of the product and they compare it to Instagram, I think Snapchat really is more like WhatsApp than Instagram.”
2018-04-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Mark Suster, managing partner, Upfront Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT