YouSaid · the spoken record

Mike Speiser

lines on the record: 82
first: 2025-08-07
most recent: 2025-08-07
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

“Or 10,000. I was like, whoa, ten thousand times better. And he said, Well, for some things it should be, but we'll see. And in fact, there are some things we could do in two minutes that took 30 days on a $20 million system. So it was quite a bit better than $10,000.”
2025-08-07 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · Finding the Right Problems: How Sutter Hill Ventures’ Mike Speiser Creates Great Companies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And the storage piece is important for OLTP, but the compute pieces, the key piece for analytics. And the opportunity in analytics was to parallelize. And to do that, we went to the cloud. And we actually built, while we were studying this, we built something where we were testing the real issue is if you want to scale compute, the problem is the networking speed fast enough to use disparate computers. So that was the study, this first study we did is was there enough networking bandwidth to use pieces within Amazon, web services, together as one giant computer. And it turns out there was. And so we went out, we built Snowflake. But just such a good illustration of how we do these things, right? We went out and studied, and you pull the thread and you pull the thread. And opportunity, I remember I asked Benoit, is this going to at least be 10 times better? I'm sure you've been in the valley long enough. There's the good old 10x. If it's not 10x better, you don't have a business. He said, I don't know whether it's 10, 100, 1,000.”
2025-08-07 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · Finding the Right Problems: How Sutter Hill Ventures’ Mike Speiser Creates Great Companies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Emphasis, and he said the problem is in analytics. So it turns out this isn't known by many, but we did build Snowflake 100% on Flash, but that was a secondary thing. It was nice to do, made sense to do, but it wasn't the key thing. The key thing was a database's half storage and half compute.”
2025-08-07 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · Finding the Right Problems: How Sutter Hill Ventures’ Mike Speiser Creates Great Companies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Transaction processing, and there's OLAP, which is analytic And he said, you know, the OLTP, your idea is good for OLTP, but that's not really where the problem is. I think the problem is in analytics. So back to your question. You know, I'd studied this for a long time, but Benoit really changed kind of my mindset.”
2025-08-07 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · Finding the Right Problems: How Sutter Hill Ventures’ Mike Speiser Creates Great Companies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And he said to me, Your idea for Flash database is cute, and Benoit's French, and I spent a little time in France, and I knew Qt was a French person's way of saying not very good idea, but in a very nice way. And I said, well, what's not good about it? He said, well, right now the problem, there are really two types of databases. There's no LTP database, which is performance. About reading and writing quickly.”
2025-08-07 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · Finding the Right Problems: How Sutter Hill Ventures’ Mike Speiser Creates Great Companies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, the idea was that flash is such a major change relative to disk that there'd be opportunities to create a bunch of new companies. And one of those companies was a storage company, and I thought one of the companies would be a database company. But we couldn't figure out the database opportunity. We figured out the storage opportunity pretty quickly. So we started. Sure. And so we started pure in 2009. While I was doing that CO job, I kept on studying databases and I met a bunch of PhDs and databases, whether they were professors, whether they were researchers, whether they were practitioners. And as I met them, Benoit Dajaville kind of stood out.”
2025-08-07 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · Finding the Right Problems: How Sutter Hill Ventures’ Mike Speiser Creates Great Companies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“2007, and NAND Flash was starting to take off. And so I started studying NANFL both for what would become pure, but also actually it was the beginning of studying what would become Snowflake.”
2025-08-07 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · Finding the Right Problems: How Sutter Hill Ventures’ Mike Speiser Creates Great Companies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Sure. So I joined Sedder Hill in May of 2008. And in May of 2008, I had already become interested in Nan Flash. So the iPhone was a brand new thing in Nan Flash.”
2025-08-07 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · Finding the Right Problems: How Sutter Hill Ventures’ Mike Speiser Creates Great Companies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, you know, I try to when we get things started, this is one of the back to the question you asked about the firm. The firm always said if you do the right thing for the team, the founders and the team, it's the right thing for us. If there's a difference between the right thing for them and us, then we're probably going to lose. And so if you generally make the right decisions for the founders, and the founders are generally making the right decisions for customers and for employees and so forth, it all works out. When it works for everyone and when it doesn't work, it works for no one. So I don't see it as a big conflict. There are moments where there are conflicts, but whenever there are conflicts like that, we resolve it by doing the right thing for the team and it works out for us pretty well in the end.”
2025-08-07 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · Finding the Right Problems: How Sutter Hill Ventures’ Mike Speiser Creates Great Companies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“When you're a founding CEO, your management, but you're also the investor, and so you're the board. Not uncommon. Any founder led company has some of these dynamics, but is there an inherent conflict and how do you manage it? Or do you not even really look at it that way?”
2025-08-07 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · Finding the Right Problems: How Sutter Hill Ventures’ Mike Speiser Creates Great Companies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Each startup is not a cookie cutter. Each one has its unique problems. And if you're doing something that's never been done, you don't know what it is. So you have to figure it out. That process is risky. But I do think that if I look back, the number of things that the things that have worked really well, we actually picked the problem and the people really well and we employed a process that led to getting the truth.”
2025-08-07 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · Finding the Right Problems: How Sutter Hill Ventures’ Mike Speiser Creates Great Companies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Maybe, or maybe we have something's wrong. Like maybe we have the wrong problem, maybe we have the wrong people, maybe we have the wrong people, maybe we have the wrong process. Right.”
2025-08-07 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · Finding the Right Problems: How Sutter Hill Ventures’ Mike Speiser Creates Great Companies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You get better and better at solving it, but it's not when I've had really great success in things I've worked on, it turns out we haven't really pivoted that much. That's just my experience. And that's because we had incredible clarity on the nature of the problem.”
2025-08-07 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · Finding the Right Problems: How Sutter Hill Ventures’ Mike Speiser Creates Great Companies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Was right, so I'd say it's pretty interesting how the problem that we start with is usually something we figure out. The team we help put together, and we come up with an answer together, but really more from the technical team than us. But what's fascinating is if I look at the first deck that we did at Pure, that we did together with the founders. And I look at the first deck we did together with the Founders of Snowflake, what we do today, over a decade later in both cases is pretty similar. So we didn't do a lot of pivoting, but what we did is we found the problem and then we found the answer.”
2025-08-07 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · Finding the Right Problems: How Sutter Hill Ventures’ Mike Speiser Creates Great Companies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, you know, I like to start with a, you talked about the problem that we solve. We talked about finding the right problem at the right time Finding the right people and then using the right process. Well, when you talk about the problem, that's kind of how I think about it, not the answer, not the product, not the company. But what's the problem we're going to go solve? And when you start with the problem and you find incredible people, I oftentimes at least find that the answer is not where I started, but the problem is where we started typically. And so when it came to Snowflake, we knew the general problem area we were interested in, but the particular way to solve that problem was better coming from Benoit Dajaville and Thierry Crohn's, the co-founders of Snowflake, than it was me, because they had spent their, they did PhDs in databases, both of them in Paris 6 in the 1980s. They'd spent decades in the database world. So the fact that I was more likely to come up with a particular way we're going to solve the problem than they were was not realistic. But the fact that it was time to use technology to change the way we build a database to solve problems in data.”
2025-08-07 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · Finding the Right Problems: How Sutter Hill Ventures’ Mike Speiser Creates Great Companies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Large meta grants that were given to these AI engineers. And people were talking about do people do things for money or not? And of course, money is part of it, but I think the best work people do is typically not primarily driven by money. Certainly, that's never been my primary motivator. I think that money is the byproduct of good work, but good work is something that's beyond economic motivation. I think particularly in scientific fields, no kid that I know kind of starts off saying, I'm just going to do this to make money. They start off because they're really inspired to go explore something. And I think if you keep that desire to explore something and you hit it down, hopefully you'll get through it, you know, because anything that's really great is hard. And anything that's hard, you need a motivation. And I think money alone is not sufficient.”
2025-08-07 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · Finding the Right Problems: How Sutter Hill Ventures’ Mike Speiser Creates Great Companies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, one of the things I've noticed from great investors is they have some kind of process where they make the really hard choices, right? It's not about investing in a lot of things. It's about picking the right things. I know no better way to focus your energy if you have 80% of your energy or 100% of your energy is going to go in one thing as a founder. You're going to make sure that one thing is worthwhile. And so I think it's really helpful for me at least to say, do I want to spend my time doing this for the next not year or two? Maybe as founding CEO for a couple years, but the next 20 years, 10 to 20 years, do I want to spend my time on this? And some of that is generate a return that's an acceptable return. Some of that is, do I want to work on this? When you're working day in, day out, you're going to fail and it's going to be really hard. And when you hit the downs, you want to make sure that what you're doing is worth doing. There was something that was going around recently on the internet about why people are working. I think it was spawned by”
2025-08-07 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · Finding the Right Problems: How Sutter Hill Ventures’ Mike Speiser Creates Great Companies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“A game. We don't feel pressure to invest. We only invest if we really think we're uniquely positioned to do something that will justify the kind of return that we're expected to earn. And so that's the good. Maybe the bad is we're a little more conservative, but I haven't seen the cost of the conservatism for us is do we think the problem we're solving is a technical problem? If it's not a technical problem, we don't like that kind of risk. There's demand risk, which is, will people show up? We don't like that. We love technical and scientific risk because we can almost always reduce that risk by finding the right people, the things you talked about, having the right people follow the right process. It takes money in it, which we have, and it takes time, which we have the luxury of thanks again to our LPs.”
2025-08-07 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · Finding the Right Problems: How Sutter Hill Ventures’ Mike Speiser Creates Great Companies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yet, we're really lucky to have a very small group of LPs that have been around for decades and were evergreen, so we don't ever have to raise money. Having a very small group of LPs allows us to have a really transparent set of discussions with them. And that transparency leads to trust. And that trust leads to us being able to make very long-term bets. We have a company called CELA, and CELA is doing something in fundamental battery science, Nobel Prize caliber chemistry to dramatically increase energy density in batteries. We're 13 years in, and we probably have another decade left. To make a bet that's a 20-year bet is something that's hard to do for most firms, and that's something that's not hard for us to do because we have incredible limited partners that support us. You'd said oftentimes, but it's not oftentimes, it's 100% of the time a minimum of 25 cents of every dollar comes from us. We write a check every investment. And I think there's a lot of good and maybe some bad that comes with that. The good is we're not investing other people's money. We're investing our own money.”
2025-08-07 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · Finding the Right Problems: How Sutter Hill Ventures’ Mike Speiser Creates Great Companies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But I didn't feel like it was going to replace Silicon Valley. India's success wasn't kind of win win, wasn't Silicon Valley's loss? And I think over time, you had China, and then you had kind of New York take off in various ways here in the United States. And I don't think the other place is doing well is bad for Silicon Valley. But I also don't think they're an alternative to Silicon Valley. Silicon Valley has something that's magical on it. I don't know how to describe it other than I guess a long way of answering your question is I can't imagine the things I'm going to start are going to be started anywhere but Silicon Valley.”
2025-08-07 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · Finding the Right Problems: How Sutter Hill Ventures’ Mike Speiser Creates Great Companies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I think most places in the world, when you come up with something ambitious, they try to tell you why it won't work. And I think some of that is just the culture here. And I think some of it is the collection of people here. And those two things conspiring together lead to real magic. You know, one of the things when I joined here in 2008, one of our endowment and limited partners, one of the endowment heads said to me that time in 2008 India was taking off is a place to do technology engineering. And he said, you know, isn't Silicon Valley going to lose to India? And I remember feeling like that's, you know, we had Veritas, we had 4,000 people in Pune. And I remember, you know, it's really powerful what's happening in India. And it's good for the world to have other places do really good things.”
2025-08-07 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · Finding the Right Problems: How Sutter Hill Ventures’ Mike Speiser Creates Great Companies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, I can definitively say there isn't, but I don't know where it is if it's not here. There's something magical about Silicon Valley where when you come up with something ambitious, people try to make it more ambitious.”
2025-08-07 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · Finding the Right Problems: How Sutter Hill Ventures’ Mike Speiser Creates Great Companies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Just this past week, we had a great designer join us, and he really wants to work on kind of studying the brand and evolving the brand at Soder Hill. And as he did, one of the number one things he put on the list of things that Sutter Hill is uniquely Californian. And I found that interesting and really right on. And so we're sitting in Palo Alto, which is really the core of the firm. It's still mostly here. We have had other offices that are support offices in the past in Boston and in London. But what I've learned is every time I've tried to start something outside of here, it's very difficult. And some of that might be unique to me, just that my network is here and so forth. I think there's something special. There's something magical about Silicon Valley. And so I think that going forward, the vast majority, if not everything I do, will be based here.”
2025-08-07 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · Finding the Right Problems: How Sutter Hill Ventures’ Mike Speiser Creates Great Companies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Who are operators, not people who are investors. I'd say about 100 people are walking around here, of which three or four are pure investors. I'd say the largest number of people are PhDs in physics who are focused on things like research, studying various technologies and opportunities to get into, to make some kind of change in technology. We have a whole range of people that we have designers, interaction designers, visual designers. We have researchers, we have engineers, we have salespeople. So very much feels more like a startup here than a traditional venture firm.”
2025-08-07 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · Finding the Right Problems: How Sutter Hill Ventures’ Mike Speiser Creates Great Companies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Know in some ways it's similar. I learned a lot about the business from the people that came before me, and I think a lot of it was leading with integrity. We talk about intellectual honesty. It's something I got from people here. It's the belief that you believe something and what you want to do is when you get information that says you're wrong, you change your mind, which seems fairly obvious, but few people do that. And that's something I had some really good role models here in, I think treating people well and doing business on a handshake. We still really do business the old-fashioned way with kind of, you know, do you want to be in business with the person or not? And those are things that I learned from the people that came before me. And I think the firm similar culturally to the way it's been long before I got here and hopefully long after I'm here. And other ways it's very different. If you walk around the building, which we'll do after together, this floor we're taking over downstairs here across the way over there. It's mostly people who are engineers, researchers.”
2025-08-07 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · Finding the Right Problems: How Sutter Hill Ventures’ Mike Speiser Creates Great Companies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Was very non traditional, and I knew at a high level I wanted to build, but it's back to, you know, when you're bottoms up, you just kind of start pulling the thread, you start kind of seeing where it goes. And so I didn't know exactly what it would look like, but I knew I wanted to build. As I went out and met people and invested in people, it just wasn't fun for me. What was fun was going out and building. People oftentimes will ask me or credit me for coming up with this great strategy to make money was not that. It wasn't fun to go talk to people and invest in them. It was fun to go get people that were smarter than me who are great builders and build things the world needs. That was fun. It just so happened it made a bunch of money too, which was really nice.”
2025-08-07 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · Finding the Right Problems: How Sutter Hill Ventures’ Mike Speiser Creates Great Companies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Go become a great investor. So I appreciate having me on great investors. I'm not so sure I'm a great investor, but I appreciate the sentiment. But hopefully we will be part of some really great companies we help build and back.”
2025-08-07 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · Finding the Right Problems: How Sutter Hill Ventures’ Mike Speiser Creates Great Companies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I look at some of the great investors and I don't think I'm a great investor, at least as I imagine investors. I think I'm a pretty good builder. And Venturers is really kind of unusual, I don't know, kind of asset class, if you want to call it that, where it's part builder and part investor. And, you know, I think historically people had gone back and forth and still go back and forth between the share with Inventure of Building versus investing. I think all the great venture capitalists at some level are partners to builders and builders or builders themselves. And so I went back recently and I looked at things where I had helped start them and run them versus where I had just been a pure investor. And 90 plus percent of the returns came from the things I helped create. And, you know, intellectual honesty is everything. We use the word around here all the time. And so I looked at that and said, well, I have two choices. I can try to get better at pure investing or I could just double down on the building. And I'm 54. I'm going to double down on the building. I'm not going to.”
2025-08-07 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · Finding the Right Problems: How Sutter Hill Ventures’ Mike Speiser Creates Great Companies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Jim White was on the board of my company, Bix. And Sutter Hill has a long history, very well known in the valley. One of the things they're known for is just really high integrity, good people. And that was my experience when they head back to my company. And so if I'm going to go out and build things with people I care about, I want to work with the best, highest integrity people out there. So it was a pretty easy answer when I was thinking about what to go do. And it was the firm in general, but Jim White in particular was someone who I just had deep trust for. And any entrepreneur knows that this is a very emotional endeavor going and starting companies. It's emotional and it's hard. And you just want to be on a team with people you can trust.”
2025-08-07 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · Finding the Right Problems: How Sutter Hill Ventures’ Mike Speiser Creates Great Companies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Product incubator on my own. I'd figure it out. But thankfully that didn't happen within a year and a half. I started pure storage and the firm we were able to start evolving the firm to do what I thought we should go do, which is build a product incubator.”
2025-08-07 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · Finding the Right Problems: How Sutter Hill Ventures’ Mike Speiser Creates Great Companies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Know, I really wanted to build great things my whole life since I was a teenager. And I'd done startups. I'd worked at large companies and venture capitalists were the ones I would always kind of work with to try to figure out how to finance my companies and also learn there's a lot of knowledge in venture capital. And so when I was trying to figure out what's next after I had sold a company to Yahoo, I had considered a starting companies and I'd considered joining in venture capital. And what I really wanted to do is what we do now. I wanted to go build a machine to build machines. I wanted to build kind of a product incubator. But no one thought that made sense. Incubators didn't work. And so I'm an entrepreneur and I really don't care when people say something's not going to work. That means that's an opportunity. And so I joined Sutter Hill hoping that they would allow me to kind of go do what I wanted to do. And a year and a half later, I started Pure and they did, in fact, let me go do what I wanted to do. But if they weren't going to let me do what I wanted to do, at least I could learn from one of the great firms a bunch of stuff I didn't know. And then I would just go start.”
2025-08-07 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · Finding the Right Problems: How Sutter Hill Ventures’ Mike Speiser Creates Great Companies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Thank you very much. Thank you for coming to California to do this. Goldman Sachs team, and thank you, Ken. Thanks for the partnership in general and the opportunity.”
2025-08-07 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · Finding the Right Problems: How Sutter Hill Ventures’ Mike Speiser Creates Great Companies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT