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

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“And back then, you know, we were a smaller fund. And I'm not saying we would have wanted if we would have competed, but benchmark had the success across their portfolio to take a bet like that. And again, this is. Many years ago, these days, a lot bigger checks are being written I just think even if I wanted to compete, I don't think I would have won it by then. So it's a rare exception of one that went from super early stage, Jeremy Liu giving him 500K because he was spreading around a lot of bets on talented teams and he got a few of them very right. And then just immediately stratospheric success.”
2018-04-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Mark Suster, managing partner, Upfront Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And by the time it just really had taken off, I don't think I could have competed in one because benchmark came in and they offered them, I think, I don't know the exact numbers, but I think order of magnitude like 12 million at a 63.”
2018-04-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Mark Suster, managing partner, Upfront Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And you can't control everything, right? But I just had so much nervousness over investing in something. And at the time, Snapchat was inappropriate pictures. Shared. And I just felt like that was they hadn't built stories, it hadn't been a mess, you know, the same kind of app that it's become. So that was that. And then all of a sudden it took off and it became massive. And Mark famously tried to create an app to complete and then create an app called, was it Poke or something to compete with it? And that actually just gave it more oxygen”
2018-04-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Mark Suster, managing partner, Upfront Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Listen, here's what I tell people about Snapchat, and I authentically believe this, even though it sounds like post hoc rationalization. When they went out to raise. There were a million photo sharing companies. There were. I didn't think that it would be exceptional relative to all the other ones I was seeing. I was looking at a company called Scout. And Scout was like location based networking. And a lot of young kids. And I was really nervous, honestly, as a parent about protecting children and what would happen if children were groomed on a website like that. I was super close to investing, and the founder is a wonderful guy. He's out of, I think he's Finnish, if I remember correctly.”
2018-04-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Mark Suster, managing partner, Upfront Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“People have been trying ever since I've been there. I wish I had a good answer. They set up tech transfer offices. We went and spent a bunch of time on universities. I think there's a lot that could happen. I don't know what the winning formula is.”
2018-04-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Mark Suster, managing partner, Upfront Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Know why it is. I can tell you at Caltech my perception, even though we have incredibly successful alumni from there, is that it's more theoretical school, it's less practical application. So MIT, I think, has done a better job in the startup world at creating startups and breeding that culture. Like the places I love, I love Carnegie Mellon. I love for startups. I like actually Wharton is doing a fantastic job of creating startups. They have these combined programs that are management and computer science together. I don't think we've done a tremendous job in”
2018-04-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Mark Suster, managing partner, Upfront Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Stanford is really unique. I think even the UC system overall hasn't done a great job at trying to figure out how to support entrepreneurs or how to spin out companies because they had a royalty system and they didn't think about the equity culture. I think Stanford's really led the country in that.”
2018-04-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Mark Suster, managing partner, Upfront Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, Apple's certainly an exception. I will tell you this, there are categories I don't think LA will be good at. And one of them is SAS. Software as a Because to be a product manager, to be a sales rep, to be pre-sales or post sales support, there's just such a concentration of those people because of historically Oracle, people soft. CBOL, Salesforce Now, Workday, and all those people are aggregated here. It's really hard to find experienced people in LA have done that. I think we'll create some of those, but I don't think we do as well on that. But we do really well on trade, transportation, logistics. We do really well, I think, on hard sciences. There's a great robotics program at USC. So we're starting to see a lot more robotics come from LA.”
2018-04-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Mark Suster, managing partner, Upfront Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right, right. And what's the negatives? Is it just the hard computing or the geekishness? Because I find most, I think of it in a similar way. I find LA companies more emotional. I don't mean that in the negative terms. And the ones in Silicon Valley very cold. Like, it's a very different. There's not a lot of storytelling. There's nothing, except for Apple, obviously.”
2018-04-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Mark Suster, managing partner, Upfront Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Marketing media. So we have the ability to brand, market, have endorsements, have consumers be able to figure out how to buy products. So I think we do well in the three C's. And then you look at the hard sciences. I mean, there's a reason SpaceX is there. It's, you know, because we have JPL and Northrop Grumman and we, you know, we're the place where there was the birth of the aerospace industry. Howard Hughes. And so all of that talent is still in LA. It's just never been in the startup community.”
2018-04-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Mark Suster, managing partner, Upfront Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, if you go into a best buy and you look at 12 products and they're all announcing their different video specs and this has this much storage and this much RAM and this Wi-Fi consumers don't want to buy products like that and having”
2018-04-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Mark Suster, managing partner, Upfront Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But we also are like the northern capital of South America. I mean, there's 5 million Mexican people in Los Angeles. And unlike what Trump would try to get you to believe, The vast majority of them are hardworking. They're not first generation immigrants. They're professional. They're not all educated. A lot of them are educated. And they're productive, but we have a large population of South Koreans, the largest population outside of South Korea with the largest population of Persians outside of Iran. And so it's this great melange of people that are building those three C's. And we also have the celebrities that can endorse products. So back to Ring, you may know that Shaquille O'Neill was our spokesperson.”
2018-04-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Mark Suster, managing partner, Upfront Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And we also understand consumer brands, and we understand how to create products, and we understand international trade. I mean, 43% of all products that come into America come through LA. It comes through either Long Beach or the LA port. So we're great import export. I think we're really the entry point for Asia into the United States.”
2018-04-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Mark Suster, managing partner, Upfront Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, when you think of it, you are spending time because you want to buy those are done for e commerce companies. You want to communicate with other people. You're lonely or bored, and you want to consume media and information. And I think not just LA, but LA and New York are really well positioned for the three seats.”
2018-04-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Mark Suster, managing partner, Upfront Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Company So I'm going to give you a metaphor for how I think about consumer businesses. We'll talk about B2B in a minute. But consumer businesses, you have infrastructure. So in order to build, let's say in the era of shipping, in the era of airplanes, you needed airports. You needed deep water ports for shipping And then once you did valuable stuff happened on top of that infrastructure, the infrastructure of the internet had to be built first. So it was routers and switches and databases and browsers and caching software and all of that happened in Silicon Valley or most of that happened in Silicon Valley. But once that was built, I would argue that everything you do as a consumer on the internet falls into three categories. I call them the 3C. Content, commerce, and communications.”
2018-04-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Mark Suster, managing partner, Upfront Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Was in Beverly. It was started And then the types of companies, you're saying there's a lot of creative stuff because I consider Snapchat a creative company more than an emotional company. I don't know how else to put it. It has more.”
2018-04-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Mark Suster, managing partner, Upfront Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So Tinder, yeah, but that's because IAC. It was started at IAC. But you have West Hollywood. That's a lot of stuff. So you have West Hollywood. You have North Hollywood. You have downtown LA. You have the West Side.”
2018-04-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Mark Suster, managing partner, Upfront Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It was. And what I think you'll see over time is actually the growth of downtown Los Angeles because there's tons of industrial space. It's much cheaper. And you can actually get there from North LA, from over in the valley, but you can also get there from east. And it's a lot more affordable, and it draws for many more parts of Los Angeles. And you probably know this. We actually have public transportation now. You can take a train, a light rail from Santa Monica to downtown. You can go from North Hollywood to downtown. So as the rail system has been built up, I think it becomes a lot more commutable.”
2018-04-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Mark Suster, managing partner, Upfront Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So that's down just north of the airport. So it's about 20 minutes south of Santa Monica. But the important thing is it draws from Redondo Beach, Manhattan Beach, and Hermosa Beach south of the airport. And the reason that's important is you can draw all the young people, because the young people want to live down there and it's more affordable. But it's also by freeways. So you can take the 405, which we talked about earlier. You can easily get in there. And so it was undeveloped land, and you'll see a lot of development down there. It was”
2018-04-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Mark Suster, managing partner, Upfront Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I know you'll think that I'm spinning this, but I'm trying not to. I think that's mythology. I really do. Because if you look at the Bay Area, you've got the crowd who lives north of the bridge and they'll never go to San Jose. They'll never go to Palo Alto. They only will take the boat over to San Francisco. So you have the San Francisco community, you have the East Bay community, you have the Palo Alto Menlo Park community. You have the San Jose community. Like people don't do that in the Bay Area. You'd sooner get on a plane and fly to LA than you would be to go to San Jose. The same is true in LA. You have pockets. So our main pockets now are Santa Monica, Venice, which is the west side.”
2018-04-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Mark Suster, managing partner, Upfront Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Architected better, and that's a story I'm happy to take on if you'd like to. But I will tell you the example is Ahmit Kapoor, who is the COO, Stanford graduate, COO of MySpace, then went and created gravity, another LA-based company, which we backed and we sold that to AOL.”
2018-04-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Mark Suster, managing partner, Upfront Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They had opened up and they opened up the platform community at exactly the time MySpace shut it down. So I think that's really what happened and Rupert just thought he could innovate internally. Facebook eventually, as you know, kind of shut down their platform as well, but they were open at the right time.”
2018-04-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Mark Suster, managing partner, Upfront Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so video became popular in the era of social media. Photos became popular. So what he didn't have was he didn't have the currency the way that Google did because it had this stratospheric public market valuation that it could pay $1.65 billion to buy YouTube. And he was really pissed off. He went out and bought the trophy prize, which was a photobucket. He thought, oh, I'll buy the photo one. And then he shut down the API. So he didn't allow developers to build on MySpace”
2018-04-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Mark Suster, managing partner, Upfront Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Merged with them So my space in particular, I think, didn't architect its technology right for scale. So I think that was one of the problems. Number two is I think they made a mistake, which is Rupert Murdoch when it was YouTube was bought by Google.”
2018-04-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Mark Suster, managing partner, Upfront Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“PayPal. Well, no, he merged with them. Merged with them. Yeah, yeah. But when you have one, it does create, if there's problems like Snapchat right now, for example. Let's actually go back. What happened from your perspective to the MySpace and demand? And those are all individual problems that the each had.”
2018-04-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Mark Suster, managing partner, Upfront Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“He is. He's not. I don't think he mixes a whole lot. I think he's not even on the planet. He's stratospheric. I think he's the greatest entrepreneur of our times. But I have seen him out at dinner. I've sat next to him at a dinner party and it does happen because he lives in LA.”
2018-04-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Mark Suster, managing partner, Upfront Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But now people have seen Scale at Tinder, they seen scale at Write Games, they've seen scale at Snapchat, and actually you're seeing people break out of SpaceX. People forget that SpaceX is an LA-based company. They forget that Elon lives in Bel Air. He lives in LA.”
2018-04-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Mark Suster, managing partner, Upfront Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We sold to Disney, and the first thing I did is I recruited a former colleague of mine from Salesforce to move down to LA to be the CTO. He had seen scale at Salesforce. He stayed for five years after we were acquired. And I really wanted to build a company that could scale. So he hired 55 engineers. So we built a real engineering team at Maker Studios. And so we ended up selling. He stayed for his lockup period. And he's got another startup now. And so that repeat rinse and repeat process is happening more in LA than it ever has in the”
2018-04-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Mark Suster, managing partner, Upfront Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Because you could have a great engineer from Indiana or St. Louis or Florida. And that engineer is no less qualified than someone who's from Silicon Valley. But if they worked at LinkedIn and Sawscale or Salesforce or Facebook, they have an advantage. They understand both not only how to scale, but they understand consumer behavior in a way you don't if you haven't seen scale. So an example When I moved to LA, I funded a company, I know you're aware of called Maker Studios. And the first thing I did.”
2018-04-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Mark Suster, managing partner, Upfront Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I'll say a couple of things. When a company succeeds, you end up with a lot of important things. One is what we call recycled capital. So people make a lot of money and reinvest it in younger entrepreneurs. You end up with mentors. But you end up, so what Silicon Valley has an advantage of is people who have seen scale.”
2018-04-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Mark Suster, managing partner, Upfront Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We're back with Mark Suster from Upfront Ventures in Los Angeles. We've been talking about sort of the LA tech scene, which Mark refuses to call it Silicon Beach. I agree with him, actually. But he wants to call it LA Tech. Let's talk a little bit about LA Tech. Again, you have investments all over the world, but you have 40% of them in Los Angeles. Talk to me a little bit about the LA scene, because what seems to have happened, there's been one of the things that helps Silicon Valley is there's so many successes in one place. There's more than one, essentially. The experience has been one at a time, and then many of them have flamed out MySpace, big and hot, then not. Demand media was the next one. And now Snapchat is struggling, even though I think the world of Snapchat, I think it's a really cool company. But it's never had that, do you need to have that big group of companies?”
2018-04-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Mark Suster, managing partner, Upfront Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There you go. It smells there. And so what I don't want to do is emphasize the beach. And I don't want to be derivative to Silicon Valley because I don't think we need to. I think we can be proud of what we have. So I like to call it LA Te”
2018-04-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Mark Suster, managing partner, Upfront Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And those are all beach communities, and they're beautiful. That's where I live. And there's a lot of startups. There's a lot of startups. So you tend to see a lot of people starting there, and then you migrate elsewhere because it's just too expensive. Like you wouldn't build a startup on fishermen's wharf in San Francisco, right? It's not the right environment for it.”
2018-04-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Mark Suster, managing partner, Upfront Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They raised $5 million from Coastla Ventures. This is right when I arrived. And then Coastla Ventures moved them up north, which I don't blame Costa Ventures, and I don't blame this company, but that company's called Lookout, and it's now north of a billion dollar valuation. It's a very prominent mobile security, but they were Angelinos like they should have stayed. And so I think there's a million invisible deaths that we died of people who relocated. And I think those The reason I'm so passionate about more capital being in LA is I think those people didn't want to leave LA and I think we can retain them now.”
2018-04-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Mark Suster, managing partner, Upfront Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, listen, let me say this we're not going to replace Silicon Valley, and that's not even the objective. I think we can build a dynamic, valuable ecosystem without, it's like, you know, would Chicago really replace New York as the financial capital? Would Seattle replace LA as the creative video capital of the world? It's just not going to happen. There's just 40 years of developing those communities in the Bay Area. So we're not trying to do that. But I would tell you that What I used to complain about was what I call the invisible startup. And the invisible startup is someone really talented. There was a team out of USC that were security experts and they created a company.”
2018-04-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Mark Suster, managing partner, Upfront Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, there's better weather, better lifestyle, more diversity, lower cost of living, a lot more going on, and especially when you think about so many of these people being like 23 to 35, they prefer to be in LA, but the jobs weren't there. And that's something that changed. And because that's changed, it's not just that those people, if you go to UCLA or USC or Caltech or Harvey Mudd or Cal Poly Pomona or any of these colleges, they're there. You want to stay, but now we're getting people moving down from the Bay Area. And it's not just entrepreneurs. A lot of VCs are moving down. You have David Lee, you have Chris Saka, Fred Wilson spends every winter there now. So you have a lot more people who are coming to LA.”
2018-04-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Mark Suster, managing partner, Upfront Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Way that I look at Los Angeles is this. First of all, we have incredible tech talent. So we have more top 25 engineering universities in greater Los Angeles than anywhere else in the country. And again, that shouldn't be a surprise because we're the second largest city behind New York. There's 19 million people in Greater LA. There's seven to seven and a half million people in Greater Bay Area. So we have this incredible pool of talent. And you mentioned it before, like if you're a talented engineer, you either went into aerospace and defense, you went into Hollywood, or you moved up north to join a startup. But they didn't want to move up here.”
2018-04-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Mark Suster, managing partner, Upfront Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“40% is a lot, but think of it this way a city of 19 million people, it is obviously the second largest city in the United States, and it is the third largest venture market. It's the fastest growing. Why wouldn't we use our advantage to look at the top end of the funnel of every deal created locally and then just be more selective? But what I don't want to do is have concentration risk where every deal we have is in Southern California. So we do 25% Bay Area, about 15% New York City. But we have deals internationally, so two of us are dual citizens. I'm a dual citizen of the U.S.”
2018-04-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Mark Suster, managing partner, Upfront Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“What's now up front ventures Yeah, there's a small number of us, but Dana was new to LA back then. Right, right. So there were a number of these newer funds that have been created in the last 10 years”
2018-04-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Mark Suster, managing partner, Upfront Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And after nine months, no jokes, she said, I'm not leaving. Oh, wow. LA's a wonderful place. It's 19 million people. It's very diverse. It's not monocultural. So anyway, so I was there. And what I said to her, aside from the fact that she fell in love with it. What I said to her is there's very few VCs here that have any amount of software skills, technology background, operating experience. And I think, okay, it's a smaller pond, but I could be a much bigger fit.”
2018-04-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Mark Suster, managing partner, Upfront Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right. Well, we'll get to that, like, why that is, what's different. So, when you went down there, you went there to did you consider yourself an LA venture capitalist or was that what you're going to be your focus? Because you are. You are kind of the center of. LA Tech”
2018-04-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Mark Suster, managing partner, Upfront Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“LA based And I don't think that's by accident. And you look at other companies, people tend not to associate with LA, but write games, League of Legends, bought for $10 billion, ultimately created in LA. Right.”
2018-04-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Mark Suster, managing partner, Upfront Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There were some good people. There were some less good people, as is always the case I know some of the good people So, in any event, if you look at, we had a failed start with overture, we didn't become Google, we had a failed start with MySpace. It didn't become Facebook. But it was inevitable that it would start to happen. And what I think is unique about LA, at least in consumer web, we can talk about hard tech in a minute, but in consumer web, we really understand the sensibility of brands, of consumers, of marketing, of how they make decisions, but also of design. So look at Gen Z. Two of the leading products created in the last five years in the consumer space, Snapchat, LA based. And”
2018-04-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Mark Suster, managing partner, Upfront Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And it wasn't working, and the internet had crashed, and they realized that they could go buy a bunch of email lists from all these VC-backed companies that didn't succeed. So they bought all the email lists. And they started emailing everybody and driving them to a social network called MySpace. That's how MySpace was born. A lot of people don't know that either. But it was born.”
2018-04-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Mark Suster, managing partner, Upfront Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Again, I think LA is the place where people have to make money, right? So look at MySpace, okay? So MySpace actually came out of a direct marketing initiative. They started by direct marketing face creams and stuff like that. Right.”
2018-04-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Mark Suster, managing partner, Upfront Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And you look at price grabber and shopzilla and a whole bunch of these lower my bills, they were all finding ways to arbitrage money and to drive eyeballs to websites. And they were all monetization techniques.”
2018-04-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Mark Suster, managing partner, Upfront Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But you know, especially back then, Silicon Valley VCs, most of the funds were like $150 million. They weren't like $10 billion that they are today. They were $150 million, and they literally didn't want to travel more than 25 miles because the idea was.”
2018-04-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Mark Suster, managing partner, Upfront Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“When you think about Silicon Valley, where people will hand you $30 million and tell you to go generate the next amazing internet service and try not to monetize, because let's try to build really big and capture the market. You have the luxury of not monetizing. When someone says, I'll give you $3 million and that's all you're getting, you got to make money. So let's look at who came out of.”
2018-04-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Mark Suster, managing partner, Upfront Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And what applied semantics did is they didn't do search the way that overture was doing. They would read what was on your webpage. They would look at semantic analysis and they would serve ads based on what keyword density. And also based on Clickstream of what clicks you took before you got to the page. Well, that became Google AdSense. So, both Google AdWords and Google AdSense, the two most profitable businesses ever created, were initiated in Los Angeles. Right, absolutely. We didn't win.”
2018-04-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Mark Suster, managing partner, Upfront Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, what Google bought is another LA company. So, I want to point this out. So, first of all, we created the category. Google won, and they won for reasons where I could tell you if you're interested, but Google won. And we still built a company that sold for $1.6 billion. Then another gross graduated from Caltech, another Caltech alumni was named.”
2018-04-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Mark Suster, managing partner, Upfront Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT