YouSaid · the spoken record

Michael Skok

lines on the record: 34
first: 2016-09-21
most recent: 2016-09-21
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Well, I have to say, you're doing a great job of it, and thank you for highlighting the things that help us all learn. And may we all find ways to share it with you.”
2016-09-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Valuation Is A Stupid Concept, VC Is Ripe For Disruption & Not All LPs Are Made Equal with Michael Skok, Founding Partner @ Underscore VC · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Great. It's been a pleasure sharing it with you. Look forward to doing so in the future. And I also wanted to end by asking you a question, if I may. You do a great service here for all of us bringing these kinds of things to light for entrepreneurs. Can you tell us a little bit about why do you do this and what is it that you hope to achieve and that we could support you with?”
2016-09-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Valuation Is A Stupid Concept, VC Is Ripe For Disruption & Not All LPs Are Made Equal with Michael Skok, Founding Partner @ Underscore VC · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's not a good starting point for me. But I then was lucky enough to have our open source core engaged and our marketing core engaged, about 20 of them or so got involved here because we kept keep an open mind always. And as they engaged around David and Mortic, it became very obvious they and we thought, wow, this is going to be huge. This could be game changing. And 11 of them wrote personal checks alongside us, which made it very easy for us to write our check and commit to the thing. And we're very excited to see David's progress and have seen him recruit a fantastic team already get his first, as I said, thousands of customers now. And I see his product translated into now over 40 languages amazingly. And to be really off to the races in building the business. So we're very excited about that. And you'll see our funding announcement probably a little after the podcast comes out about next level commitment too.”
2016-09-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Valuation Is A Stupid Concept, VC Is Ripe For Disruption & Not All LPs Are Made Equal with Michael Skok, Founding Partner @ Underscore VC · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, I've given a little sort of hint to it. It was Mortek. This is the open source marketing automation company. And I didn't say yes, actually, which was really fun. The entrepreneur had been, I was lucky enough to back a project called Drupal. I went and worked with the entrepreneur Dries, who's a genius. He's built now the largest open source project in the world. And as part of that, I was investigating all of the open source content management products. This is nearly a decade ago. And one of them was Joomla. And so this particular entrepreneur, David Hurley, who approached me, had been involved in that. And I didn't invest in Joomla and did invest in Drupal, which now become Acquia, because I love the community that Derese was building and I didn't like what I saw, which was a broke community in Joomla. So when David came to me and said, oh, yeah, I was the guy behind Joomla. I said, hmm.”
2016-09-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Valuation Is A Stupid Concept, VC Is Ripe For Disruption & Not All LPs Are Made Equal with Michael Skok, Founding Partner @ Underscore VC · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't listen to many podcasts, admittedly. Funnily enough, I have very little time for them, but the same thing. One of the things I enjoy, for example, your podcast, there are a bunch of the sort of, if you like, hyper-local ones that I try to sort of plug into. Help me find the path to the entrepreneurs who need help. So that's usually what I use them for.”
2016-09-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Valuation Is A Stupid Concept, VC Is Ripe For Disruption & Not All LPs Are Made Equal with Michael Skok, Founding Partner @ Underscore VC · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So funny you ask that. I'm a big believer, as you've heard, in listening rather than reading. And so I try to get into a much more interactive dialogue, a much bigger believer in things like workshops. But I do try to follow things that are, you know, obviously great things like Mattermark that I know you like as well. Love Mastermark. Yeah, it's great. I mean, I think things that point me to resources where I can go and engage with entrepreneurs, but most of the time, we try to have a much more interactive way of engaging entrepreneurs than just sort of reading the blogs and so forth. But by the way, I do encourage entrepreneurs to blog because I think rather than reading other people's blogging for yourself is actually, first of all, great therapy. And secondly, it brings people to understand how they might help you.”
2016-09-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Valuation Is A Stupid Concept, VC Is Ripe For Disruption & Not All LPs Are Made Equal with Michael Skok, Founding Partner @ Underscore VC · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, by far the biggest challenge was to unlearn because what I didn't want to do was bring any of the legacy of VC or even of my success to date and the success has all been thanks to working with the great entrepreneurs to sort of like a point of saying this is the reason we should do A, B, and C. But instead to go out there and listen and rethink this from the ground up and figure out how we can do better in the future.”
2016-09-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Valuation Is A Stupid Concept, VC Is Ripe For Disruption & Not All LPs Are Made Equal with Michael Skok, Founding Partner @ Underscore VC · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I've been very lucky I've had mentors all the way through my life, but I think every day I have mentors. My peers are my mentors, my entrepreneurs are my mentors. In a way, everybody is a potential mentor. And the single biggest thing I'd say here is that for other entrepreneurs out there, don't forget this, that we're all learning together because as we create the future, it's an unknown future if we're making breakthroughs. And so we actually all stand to gain from figuring out how to support each other in that process.”
2016-09-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Valuation Is A Stupid Concept, VC Is Ripe For Disruption & Not All LPs Are Made Equal with Michael Skok, Founding Partner @ Underscore VC · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Everything's a learning process. For me, one of the most important things here is that there are no answers and there is also no failure. There's only learning. And that's a great opportunity for every entrepreneur who approaches it that way”
2016-09-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Valuation Is A Stupid Concept, VC Is Ripe For Disruption & Not All LPs Are Made Equal with Michael Skok, Founding Partner @ Underscore VC · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right now, I'm reading a fun book called Demon, which is all about the future and how, for example, VR and AR might merge into our world. And it takes a very dark but fun look at how could this change the world, everything from security to society. So I like looking at things that are visionary and out there and get people thinking about what's possible.”
2016-09-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Valuation Is A Stupid Concept, VC Is Ripe For Disruption & Not All LPs Are Made Equal with Michael Skok, Founding Partner @ Underscore VC · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Arrives in our cause to look at and do the review of. It's in the cloud, everybody gets to see it, we share all our diligence, we share the entire process, we share the best practice. And the reason we're doing that is that we don't want there to be any black box anymore. We want entrepreneurs to understand very openly how we approach investing with not only the goal that they have a good experience with us, but more importantly that in the future some of our core members are turning out to be great investors and may choose to get into VC. And if they choose because they love it and they find they're good at it, well, guess what? I think they'll make great partners to entrepreneurs in the future. So I hope we end up creating not only great partnerships with entrepreneurs along the way, but the next generation of great VCs who have come to understand what the opportunity for them personally is to contribute to the next generation of great entrepreneurs. What's going to take a decade or so? But if I have my choice before I die, I will at least tried to share that openly and hope that other VCs and entrepreneurs benefit from it.”
2016-09-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Valuation Is A Stupid Concept, VC Is Ripe For Disruption & Not All LPs Are Made Equal with Michael Skok, Founding Partner @ Underscore VC · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If I have anything to do with it, we'll absolutely shoot the transactional relationship. We intend to blow up the VC black box. And here's why. In the end, what I've observed is that the best VCs are actually entrepreneurs. Not always. I mean, there's some great exceptions to that. You know, obviously you've got people like Fred Wilson or many of the sort of founding fathers of industry didn't have that chance. But the point is that if you've had the experience and you can help entrepreneurs and you can be their partner along the way and you're respectful of the fact because you've seen it yourself, how hard it is to build a business, why wouldn't you partner with them? And so our whole goal here is even a bigger thing than I've shared so far, which is we really want to blow up the black box. In fact, our core members, when they're investing with us, get to watch us and participate in a whole cloud-based investing program because the way in which we do our investments is we eat our own cooking here. So everything is in the cloud because that's part of our thesis. And so from the minute the”
2016-09-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Valuation Is A Stupid Concept, VC Is Ripe For Disruption & Not All LPs Are Made Equal with Michael Skok, Founding Partner @ Underscore VC · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Really, got to think about what's the right amount of capital that's going to get them on this vector funding from where they are now to where they're going to hit the right milestones to get a nice uptick. And between those two things, valuation falls out. And we never try to get clever.”
2016-09-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Valuation Is A Stupid Concept, VC Is Ripe For Disruption & Not All LPs Are Made Equal with Michael Skok, Founding Partner @ Underscore VC · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So interesting, you asked that. Well, first of all, valuation is just as stunningly stupid concept. Who on earth can value a person? I can't. And at the stage that we're working at, we're valuing people. So what we try to do is just look out and say, and you really look back at all the successful companies, all this notion of ownership and valuation just washes out. What you've got to do is as an entrepreneur form a partnership with your funding partner on our side, we think of it very much as we want to work with people that we're really excited about, helping them build their careers and their lives on. As I said, we invest money, but they invest their lives. And think about how you're going to support them. Well, the two fundamental things you need to have is you need to have enough ownership for the founders and you need to have enough ownership for the recruitment of A plus towns, as I call it. And A plus towns are whole subject into itself. But that's the beginning of the discussion. The second thing you've then got to do is what we talked about earlier.”
2016-09-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Valuation Is A Stupid Concept, VC Is Ripe For Disruption & Not All LPs Are Made Equal with Michael Skok, Founding Partner @ Underscore VC · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To do to connect, to get free messaging across different countries and to share photos and so forth. So that's how we think about it.”
2016-09-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Valuation Is A Stupid Concept, VC Is Ripe For Disruption & Not All LPs Are Made Equal with Michael Skok, Founding Partner @ Underscore VC · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“How can we do that? Could we create a social networker? It wasn't called that, of course, but that was a latent aspirational need that has evolved to becoming now a latent critical need because people have figured out that actually that's how they like to communicate and how they like to stay in touch and so forth. So I think the trick is to be honest with yourself about where you are in the marketplace. And in many instances, if you're creating something, you're going to start at a latent aspirational level. You really won't have customers begging for what you're doing because you're creating it. They don't know they have that need. If you are really convicted in the belief that once you build it, they will come and indeed it will fulfill something that is fundamental in their lives, like, for example, the need to communicate and to meet and so forth, then you'll build the next great messaging platform and you'll have the next WhatsApp. But nobody sat there and said, oh, I've got to have WhatsApp. What they did was probably iterate through the latent aspirational to latent critical by answering more and more aspects of what people want.”
2016-09-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Valuation Is A Stupid Concept, VC Is Ripe For Disruption & Not All LPs Are Made Equal with Michael Skok, Founding Partner @ Underscore VC · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, that's really interesting. So it depends on your market. So, I have, again, a framework called the Black and White Framework. The acronym black stands for latent and latent aspiration and critical. So if you think of a 2x2, where at the bottom left is latent and aspirational needs, this is things we don't know we need and they're aspirational things. So anything in the fashion area is a latent aspirational need. At the top right is blatant and critical. And blatant critical things are like, hey, a new regulation just got introduced that says, for example, we've now got to valuable derivatives so we don't have another financial meltdown. Okay, that's a blatant critical need. It gives rise to companies like Rebalt, for example, have created products for that. But if you're Steve Jobs, you don't sit there about blatant critical needs or you're Mark Zuckerberg. What you think is, hey, people have this basic need, for example, in the consumer world to meet people, to get to know them, to date them, and hey.”
2016-09-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Valuation Is A Stupid Concept, VC Is Ripe For Disruption & Not All LPs Are Made Equal with Michael Skok, Founding Partner @ Underscore VC · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This is things like, for example, data warehousing as a service, companies like Casina that are doing that. That could take three years because you're knocking down really big accounts where the sales cycle alone is 12 months. So you have to look at it business by business, stage by stage, and as a vector and figure out how you're going to be there as a funding partner of the entrepreneur each way, each step of the way, and get in sync with them about the milestones and be sure to be supportive for them as they're looking at how they are going to be funded at each of those milestones. And our view is that's the only way to do this.”
2016-09-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Valuation Is A Stupid Concept, VC Is Ripe For Disruption & Not All LPs Are Made Equal with Michael Skok, Founding Partner @ Underscore VC · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Okay, great. That funning strategy is to go the distance, breaks down each of the steps, some of which I've been mentioning, like ideation and creation and validation and creating repeatability and so forth. What we're trying to do is make sure there's always funding in advance of the next major milestone. So let's take an example. We almost all think about things like creating a minimum viable product. MVP is great, but I'll tell you the next big milestone that most people miss is in product market fit, they say, oh, well, you're going to go prove that that product's being accepted by the market. Yes. But the market's huge if we're going after something significant. So you can't just say we're going to prove the whole market. You actually need to break it down another step into what I call a minimum viable segment. And you have to pick off your first segment that you can really dominate uniquely well where customers have the same set of needs. Now that can take anywhere from six to nine in very simple products to 12 to 18 months in more complex products. In some cases I've seen it, for example, when you go into infrastructure products, you know,”
2016-09-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Valuation Is A Stupid Concept, VC Is Ripe For Disruption & Not All LPs Are Made Equal with Michael Skok, Founding Partner @ Underscore VC · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, Jeff's a very good guy. I like Jeff a lot. And I think if you listen to all the good BCs, they'll say something like 18 months. Some of them like Jeff think longer. What I love about Jeff's thinking is it's really a 10-year game. So actually how I think about it is even longer than that. I actually think, and we do this literally, as I called it, vector funding, which is a term we created for a reason. We think about the entire vector of building a business. Now, it's folly to think that we're going to know how much capital each company is going to take, but you can at least create the vector and start to look at all the milestones it's going to take to fund them, you know, at seed, at series A, and beyond. And you can think about what do you need to prove. And when I teach this at Harvard, there's a whole piece on this, by the way, on the startup secrets.com site. It's called Funding Strategies to Go the Distance.”
2016-09-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Valuation Is A Stupid Concept, VC Is Ripe For Disruption & Not All LPs Are Made Equal with Michael Skok, Founding Partner @ Underscore VC · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Before and is willing to take the risk with them, and that's why we're in at the earliest stages, and we're willing to, as we've done in the first few investments, help an entrepreneur, good example would be David Hurley with this company Mortek. His idea was to disrupt the entire marketing automation world.”
2016-09-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Valuation Is A Stupid Concept, VC Is Ripe For Disruption & Not All LPs Are Made Equal with Michael Skok, Founding Partner @ Underscore VC · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, when I listen to entrepreneurs on this listening tour, we talk to well over 300 of them. I heard the same thing consistently, which is, look, people really don't listen to us in the early stages when we've got just an idea and we've got conviction around it. They keep saying things like, we'll come back to the metrics or come and prove it to us. Well, that's really a tough thing for an entrepreneur. I mean, in many instances, that may work and you may be in a position to put friends and family capital together to pull an MVP together and figure out what your minimum viable segment is and go after it and get some traction. That might be great. But what if you don't? What if you've got to build something that is really going after a very difficult problem to solve and requires significant capital and actually is going to take some number of years to really prove out? Then where do you start? And that's where we come in. We want to be there when the entrepreneur is first thinking through those challenging problem sets and need somebody who understands how to do this, who's done it.”
2016-09-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Valuation Is A Stupid Concept, VC Is Ripe For Disruption & Not All LPs Are Made Equal with Michael Skok, Founding Partner @ Underscore VC · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So that's interesting. So, that's an entrepreneur led thing. As is always the case, you want to hear where is the greatest pain, just like if you're starting a company, you don't go to the customer and say, well, tell me the third most painful thing. You say, what's the most painful thing?”
2016-09-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Valuation Is A Stupid Concept, VC Is Ripe For Disruption & Not All LPs Are Made Equal with Michael Skok, Founding Partner @ Underscore VC · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“For some number of years. So you need to get investors who are very patient and you have the support behind them to be with you for multiple funds. So we could have easily raised the first fund very quickly just from individuals. But we said, you know what? That's not a good thing. First of all, we don't want individuals to be held up for 10 years from their sort of individual agendas. And most individuals are not thinking in 10-year sort of life cycles. That's why foundations and endowments are much more important. And secondly, we want to make sure that the fund has at least two or three funds worth of investors behind it from the get-go. So I think that's one caveat for anybody looking to raise a fund is be careful to think long term. Don't just raise the money.”
2016-09-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Valuation Is A Stupid Concept, VC Is Ripe For Disruption & Not All LPs Are Made Equal with Michael Skok, Founding Partner @ Underscore VC · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Some for that reason. You might select others to be the exact opposite, to be passive supporters who really just will get behind your agenda, as it were. And you might select others still, as we did, as I was mentioning for the causes for what they represent in the world and what you want to be able to give back this sort of double impact, if you will. But in the end, we said, you know, why don't we have all three of those? Why wouldn't we just make those sort of reflect the intersection of what we look for on NLPs? And that's why we were so selective. So actually all of our LPs have all of those three aspects. They all are capable of playing alongside us, supporting us, and they all are making a difference in the world in terms of their own outlook. The only thing, by the way, I should add, because I do think it's interesting, is for anybody who's going out to raise a fund, if you were to do that, or somebody was to give you an opportunity to look at it, is very important to look at this as a business that is at least a decade-long fund at a time, and you never really know the results of your funds.”
2016-09-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Valuation Is A Stupid Concept, VC Is Ripe For Disruption & Not All LPs Are Made Equal with Michael Skok, Founding Partner @ Underscore VC · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't think many of them think that way because most of them obviously look at us as the professional portfolio managers and say, look, the reason we're giving you money is because we don't have time to do that. But I think there are a couple of things I could offer, though. One is that, like everything, not all Ps are made equal. And there are one or two that have very distinct mandates to actually co-invest, for example. We have a couple of funds and funds, very carefully chosen. And those are partners who will definitely do follow-ons for us. So I mentioned that there's well over $40 billion worth of capital behind our LPs that are investing in us. That was important to us because I've invested in a company like Demandware, for example, which probably took about $70 million worth of capital before we got it public. I mean, obviously, you know, nothing when you compare it to $3 billion outcome, but still, you know, not a trivial amount of money for a seed to aid fund. So if we don't need to go long and we need sort of significant capital behind us, we do want some of our LPs to co-invest with us. So you might select.”
2016-09-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Valuation Is A Stupid Concept, VC Is Ripe For Disruption & Not All LPs Are Made Equal with Michael Skok, Founding Partner @ Underscore VC · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Or the children's hospitals that we're working with. Really, we feel like when we make a lot of money, they'll do great things in the world. But also because they looked at this model and said, wow, of course, why wouldn't you do that? That's going to bring the best entrepreneurs to the fore. And it's going to make them more successful. And in the end, everybody will win. They didn't look at the downside and go, well, of course, if you lose all your money, then we're going to lose our money because they also saw us personally as GPs write very big checks. I mean, we put five times as much capital in individually as the founders here than would traditionally be the case. So that's how we did it.”
2016-09-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Valuation Is A Stupid Concept, VC Is Ripe For Disruption & Not All LPs Are Made Equal with Michael Skok, Founding Partner @ Underscore VC · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of course, they do. That's the old model, right? So it took a lot of work. I mean, first of all, it took a year of legal work to sort of actually establish the platform and to get the rules in a way, the modeling and everything else. But here's the fun thing, just like any breakthrough, it's not understood by many initially, and that's the whole point. You're going into unknown territory. But the kinds of people you want with you, of course, are the innovators. You don't want the laggards. And so that's exactly what's happened. And we're thrilled. I mean, Fund has been oversubscribed very quickly. We were able to select the VC, sorry, the LPs who really understood the model and wanted to get behind it. And I'm happy to tell you that, you know, that's well over $40 billion worth of capital in the foundations and, for example, the kind of educational institutions and children's hospitals and the like that have got behind us. So we not only selected them for their innovation, we also selected them from their causes. So we really want to be working with people who are going to make a difference in the world. So things like World Fund.”
2016-09-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Valuation Is A Stupid Concept, VC Is Ripe For Disruption & Not All LPs Are Made Equal with Michael Skok, Founding Partner @ Underscore VC · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A great question, Harry. It's so funny. We have ended up with a very select group of LPs because a lot of LPs just said, no way, not going to do that. What do you mean they're going to get paid out first? But you know what? That was a filtering”
2016-09-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Valuation Is A Stupid Concept, VC Is Ripe For Disruption & Not All LPs Are Made Equal with Michael Skok, Founding Partner @ Underscore VC · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That at some level. But one of those community members might be involved, for example, on one deal, and they might contribute greatly to hiring some key people or getting some key customers, etc. But how do you reward them all throughout all of that period? Our answer to that was go back and change the whole platform. We said, look, first of all, we're going to take a chunk of our carry and we're going to make it accessible to what we call our community, which is the cause. And the cause are able to do two things. They can invest their time as they help the entrepreneurs build their business. And if they do, they get carry from us as though they're partners of the fund. And if they are, in many instances as they are successful entrepreneurs who've made billions of dollars building companies and we're lucky enough to have participated with them doing that then they may write checks and if they write those checks we treat them as partners again we give them exactly the same terms as us whether they put in 50 000 or 500 000 they're very rarely putting in 5 million alongside us we still get them exactly the same terms so they appear”
2016-09-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Valuation Is A Stupid Concept, VC Is Ripe For Disruption & Not All LPs Are Made Equal with Michael Skok, Founding Partner @ Underscore VC · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Skills at every step. For example, when you're ideating or creating or validating, that's very different than when you're looking for, for example, validation to go to actual information and then creating, for example, repeatability and scalability and predictability and profitability. Those are all incredibly different stages over the course of building a business. And so the idea that, for example, you're going to just give one or two people from your network to an entrepreneur to help them build their businesses is nonsense. You've got to actually over the period of a decade as you're building a big multi-billion dollar companies be willing to keep coming back with the talent at each stage with the right skill set and indeed in many instances the right domain expertise for example very different if you're in e-commerce and b2c than you know if you're an infrastructure and b2b that can help people build their business and that community is typically not rewarded at all uh in the traditional vc model i mean you might for example have a side fund and that's great you know side funds nothing wrong with”
2016-09-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Valuation Is A Stupid Concept, VC Is Ripe For Disruption & Not All LPs Are Made Equal with Michael Skok, Founding Partner @ Underscore VC · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, first of all, I think everybody has a different contribution to bring to this. So we don't have all the answers. And in fact, part of what we're still doing and will continue to do is to listen to figure this out. But we actually went back to basics and said VC was founded as a model over 40 years ago. And we think it's ripe for disruption. It's just like any other business as change happens. And there's been a lot of change. You think about AngelListing, crowdsourcing, kick-starting, co-funding, and accelerating and incubating. Those are a lot of changes, many of which happen in the last decade or so. If you see that much change in a business, you don't just stick your head in the sand and carry on, which is basically what the traditional VC model has done for 40 years. So we stepped back and said, look, let's fix this at the core. It required a couple of things. First of all, when we mentioned that it takes a community to build a great company, we should actually make a community accessible to entrepreneurs at every stage of their business. And this is a key insight that comes from having built businesses for many decades. And that is that you aren't actually looking at the same set of”
2016-09-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Valuation Is A Stupid Concept, VC Is Ripe For Disruption & Not All LPs Are Made Equal with Michael Skok, Founding Partner @ Underscore VC · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Capital theme. It's a necessary commodity, but entrepreneurs are investing their life, and that is genuinely priceless. They can't get that back. And as part of that, you know, time is their scarcest resource. So when you look at what contributes to their ability to make the most of their business, it's always talent. Talent is the most valuable asset. And finally, when we look at that over the long period of time that you see when you've built many companies, as I've seen them from zero to IPO and beyond, it takes a community to build a great company over that many number of years. And we step back and said, look, if that's really what people want, why aren't we providing it for them? And what do we need to do? And it turns out there was one other very big theme that needed to be addressed, and that's alignment. That isn't good alignment, whether people like it or not, between the entrepreneur, their VC, and the VC and their GPs, sorry, and their LPs in many instances. And so we decided we needed to do something about that. And that just was a compelling reason to start underscore. So that's how we got going.”
2016-09-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Valuation Is A Stupid Concept, VC Is Ripe For Disruption & Not All LPs Are Made Equal with Michael Skok, Founding Partner @ Underscore VC · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I'm very lucky I've been an entrepreneur for a couple of decades and then was a VC for another decade plus, and got to a place having seen a lot of success from working with great entrepreneurs and building great teams, to say, what should I do next? And could have gone the obvious route, which was to carry on the teaching at Harvard and the building of the startup secrets course where everything else. But in the process, I started a listening tourum, a big believer that we all need to develop better listening skills. And so this notion of a listening tool for me was about trying to understand what entrepreneurs really were looking for from both their journey in developing and building their businesses and also along the way from funders and VCs who contribute to that. And I heard a few very basic things, you know, the headline of which is that capital is clearly a commodity and entrepreneurs' lives clearly aren't. And sort of if you double click on that, there were five bullets that we stepped back and said, wow, these are really a very big theme that we need to do something about. Trust of all, you know, on the”
2016-09-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Valuation Is A Stupid Concept, VC Is Ripe For Disruption & Not All LPs Are Made Equal with Michael Skok, Founding Partner @ Underscore VC · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source