YouSaid · the spoken record

Nabeel Hyatt

lines on the record: 92
first: 2025-04-04
most recent: 2025-04-04
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Thank you so much for having me on. I love what you do. It's insane what you've done over the last 10 years. And it's really, really amazing.”
2025-04-04 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why To Win in AI, Investors Need to Change Their Approach | Why VC is Run by Principals and Associates and is a Broken System | The Bull Case for Anthropic & Whether Deepseek Changes Their Strategy with Nabeel Hyatt @ Spark Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Venture as an industry was a very weird thing when it was invented, right? This idea that you wouldn't take majority share in a business and you'll be a passive investor with just a board seat, a small voice instead of a loud voice. That was a unique thing when it happened. And so we've always been a world where we were in the lean back instead of lean forward control PE mechanism of it. Whether that means we're preferred or common or the term sheet changes and our lick prefs are different and all of these things have like altered over time like open to it. Like I just want to make sure founders can build good companies and that they treat the people that they're bringing into their orbit as people who should be committed to the same cause. And I think treating everything transactionally is kind of like the enemy of what I'm trying to work on. It's like it's probably as simple as that.”
2025-04-04 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why To Win in AI, Investors Need to Change Their Approach | Why VC is Run by Principals and Associates and is a Broken System | The Bull Case for Anthropic & Whether Deepseek Changes Their Strategy with Nabeel Hyatt @ Spark Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't know, the big broad thing that I think about right now is I can complain a lot about the way the VC market is structured today and think that it's not structured that well, frankly, for innovation and it's not really in service to founders in the right way. That doesn't really answer how should this whole market actually work? If you could wave your wand and it was 10 years from now, we might agree that especially in worlds of high levels of innovation, you can't look at a checklist and decide whether a company is amazing or not. And that's not how you make exceptions. And we're in the business of investing in exceptions and exceptional companies. But that doesn't really lay out like, what should this whole thing look like if we really believe that startups are the font of innovation and that they help the world move forward and also create great capital value for people and all the rest of it, what should it feel like and what should it look like? I don't know the full answer for that, but I think that's a more productive conversation because once you've talked about the way you think it should.”
2025-04-04 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why To Win in AI, Investors Need to Change Their Approach | Why VC is Run by Principals and Associates and is a Broken System | The Bull Case for Anthropic & Whether Deepseek Changes Their Strategy with Nabeel Hyatt @ Spark Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't think that making money changed my mindset very much. I don't actually think I execute that differently than when I was a term sheet pulled on me and I had to sell my car in order to make payroll for my team and those stages of early entrepreneurship. I don't know that I process the world that differently, mostly because I like playing the game for the joy of playing the game, whatever the game is. And the score takes care of itself. And I get that we all get measured on a leaderboard. Like we don't get to get, I don't get to keep doing this if we don't make a lot of money for our LPs and our founders aren't happy and all the rest of it. But I just enjoy the work. And I still enjoy the work. And I can go do other things if this doesn't work out.”
2025-04-04 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why To Win in AI, Investors Need to Change Their Approach | Why VC is Run by Principals and Associates and is a Broken System | The Bull Case for Anthropic & Whether Deepseek Changes Their Strategy with Nabeel Hyatt @ Spark Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think many of the decisions that are made wrong and how people build venture firms and how people hire people and how people invest is about not being fundamentally attuned to that fact and because it's so unnatural for humans to work in a kind of incredibly intrinsic way. Do you feel like you did a good job today?”
2025-04-04 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why To Win in AI, Investors Need to Change Their Approach | Why VC is Run by Principals and Associates and is a Broken System | The Bull Case for Anthropic & Whether Deepseek Changes Their Strategy with Nabeel Hyatt @ Spark Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, there's this thing where musicians struggle with their second album when it works, and that is completely untrue about athletes when they get to their second year of being a pro. If you're a tennis player and you go to your second year, you get better. You get smarter, you get better. Musicians, it actually gets harder. Why is that? Why do you have the sophomore album problem? And it's because one is a core creative exercise where you're not trying to A your tests. Like you don't know what the next answer is. With athletes, you know it's a fixed game. Venture is not a fixed game. It is more a creative exercise than it is a maths exercise. And that is because the markets are changing constantly. The venture market is changing constantly. The founders are changing constantly. The products are changing constantly. And so it's just not like putting a ball in a hoop. I don't know how to talk to somebody about navigating that, but I try to get them to a world where they understand how to navigate uncertainty with confidence and without terror.”
2025-04-04 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why To Win in AI, Investors Need to Change Their Approach | Why VC is Run by Principals and Associates and is a Broken System | The Bull Case for Anthropic & Whether Deepseek Changes Their Strategy with Nabeel Hyatt @ Spark Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If I had any superpower joining venture, it was that I had no long-term desire to be in venture. I was very happy to be in Venture if it worked out. And I'm still very happy to go start a company. I would be very happy as a founder as well. It's just not what I chose to do. And I really love this job deeply. But if it had not worked out, it was okay. And so I came in with a nothing to lose mentality, which allows you to sit on the front end of creative risk and being willing to take that extra risk, which of course, that's what this business is about versus this kind of protectionist, like, I just want to make sure I have my job. I just want to get to the next fund, which is where I think you make most of your mistakes.”
2025-04-04 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why To Win in AI, Investors Need to Change Their Approach | Why VC is Run by Principals and Associates and is a Broken System | The Bull Case for Anthropic & Whether Deepseek Changes Their Strategy with Nabeel Hyatt @ Spark Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. I mean, look, I had a moment where I came home after my sophomore year in college as a computer science major, which is you're like, oh, he probably maybe get a job. It wasn't even sure then. And I was like, I want to leave. And I'm not even sure if I'm going to go to university. I might just start another company. I don't know. I can't do this. I ended up going to art school. And my parents were completely supportive. Could not have been more supportive.”
2025-04-04 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why To Win in AI, Investors Need to Change Their Approach | Why VC is Run by Principals and Associates and is a Broken System | The Bull Case for Anthropic & Whether Deepseek Changes Their Strategy with Nabeel Hyatt @ Spark Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I like the role of Consigliary in the world. We can talk like crazy with a founder or my two sons about what they're going through. And then with earnest and deep heartfelt coming from a real place, be like, it's your decision at the end. It's okay. And I don't know what the truth is. So I'm not telling you what's right or wrong. You got to walk your own path, but it doesn't mean we can't like exhaustively talk about it all.”
2025-04-04 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why To Win in AI, Investors Need to Change Their Approach | Why VC is Run by Principals and Associates and is a Broken System | The Bull Case for Anthropic & Whether Deepseek Changes Their Strategy with Nabeel Hyatt @ Spark Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Can't I don't know that I did very much differently because I think my parents did not understand me at all and yet were incredibly open to me walking my path. My mother was a first generation immigrant. Like she just wanted me to be a doctor or a lawyer or whatever, except unlike a lot of first generation immigrant families, she never told me that and I never even felt it. She could tell that I was going to walk a weird path. She didn't even know what entrepreneurship was. She didn't know any of that stuff. And she just like just wanted me to find my place. So no, I'm more trying to mimic my parents than I am the opposite.”
2025-04-04 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why To Win in AI, Investors Need to Change Their Approach | Why VC is Run by Principals and Associates and is a Broken System | The Bull Case for Anthropic & Whether Deepseek Changes Their Strategy with Nabeel Hyatt @ Spark Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I can tell you that some of the founders that I have worked with that are stagnating and don't have that next chapter, they're doing the things that founders do.”
2025-04-04 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why To Win in AI, Investors Need to Change Their Approach | Why VC is Run by Principals and Associates and is a Broken System | The Bull Case for Anthropic & Whether Deepseek Changes Their Strategy with Nabeel Hyatt @ Spark Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Could be anything. It's storytelling. It's always storytelling. Let's get the story down. And I think people default back to numbers when they have no other story to tell. So let's start from the beginning. Tell the story about what you want to be able to tell the world in 18 months about this product that you're building, this company that you're building, and then we can figure out whether we think that that's actually viable enough or are you sandbagging?”
2025-04-04 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why To Win in AI, Investors Need to Change Their Approach | Why VC is Run by Principals and Associates and is a Broken System | The Bull Case for Anthropic & Whether Deepseek Changes Their Strategy with Nabeel Hyatt @ Spark Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Like, if that conversation has often led to situations like, well, everybody kind of expects us to do 8 to 10 million in AR. I was like, oh, well, everybody expects you to do 8 to 10 million ARR, then I got to tell you, they probably won't invest if you do it. Because what they want is for you to exceed expectations. What they're trying to invest in is the best. If they think you've already got 8 to 10 in the bag, then it's not going to work. So I'm so glad we had this conversation. Now, what do you think would really surprise yourself about this business? If you woke up a year from now, what would shock you? What would make you feel amazing? Do you think you can storytell that to VCs? Can we work on packaging that? Let's make, I about 20% of the time, 25% of the time founders are down for it after we invest, I immediately try and have a conversation and get a pitch deck together for the next round. Just a glossary, just a table of contents. What would you want your next pitch to be? Could be story, could be product, could be data.”
2025-04-04 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why To Win in AI, Investors Need to Change Their Approach | Why VC is Run by Principals and Associates and is a Broken System | The Bull Case for Anthropic & Whether Deepseek Changes Their Strategy with Nabeel Hyatt @ Spark Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, how do you get to the next round? I usually try and start from asking them a lot of questions about how they think about the future and trying to separate them from the way a VC thinks about the future. Because ultimately we're listeners more than we are really tellers. Like I get that part of this job is for us to be tweeting, for us to be on podcasts like this and so on and so forth. But the future is invented by founders. The question is, what can you surprise an investor with in the next year that they weren't asking versus the other way around?”
2025-04-04 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why To Win in AI, Investors Need to Change Their Approach | Why VC is Run by Principals and Associates and is a Broken System | The Bull Case for Anthropic & Whether Deepseek Changes Their Strategy with Nabeel Hyatt @ Spark Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If I was a founder starting a company, my default state is dead. Things are really hard. It's hard to recruit. It's hard to raise money. All of it's hard. You're pitching the worst of the world that you're dedicating your life to this thing and you're all in, quote. And so if that's true and you're trying to risk mitigate all the things that are going to kill you, and it's the age of AI, I don't know why you're not in San Francisco. Forget the opposite case. Can somebody succeed in London? Can somebody succeed in Berlin? Like, of course they can. The real question is if as a founder, why would you make that choice? So that's the problem. The problem is that more of the people who are actually all in, not just telling you they're all in, more of the people that are actually all in who are actually trying to do everything on the planet to put themselves in the best case to win and are willing to sacrifice for it, they're going to want to be at the dinner where they're learning about AI people. They're going to want to be able to recruit the best people. All those people are in San Francisco right now. And so why wouldn't you do it?”
2025-04-04 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why To Win in AI, Investors Need to Change Their Approach | Why VC is Run by Principals and Associates and is a Broken System | The Bull Case for Anthropic & Whether Deepseek Changes Their Strategy with Nabeel Hyatt @ Spark Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It does. It does. But what's your point? I'm optimistic. I would be optimistic about the US in either case, no matter who won this election, I'd be optimistic about the US.”
2025-04-04 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why To Win in AI, Investors Need to Change Their Approach | Why VC is Run by Principals and Associates and is a Broken System | The Bull Case for Anthropic & Whether Deepseek Changes Their Strategy with Nabeel Hyatt @ Spark Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But I'm not investing in the U.S. public markets today. So when you ask me, how do I feel about America? Am I optimistic about America and all the rest of that stuff, my pronation of thinking about the world is like, oh, well, why do I think about 10 years from now? That's my thinking. I'm a long, long, long, like I don't get to do anything today. I get to invest today for something to seven to 10 years from now.”
2025-04-04 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why To Win in AI, Investors Need to Change Their Approach | Why VC is Run by Principals and Associates and is a Broken System | The Bull Case for Anthropic & Whether Deepseek Changes Their Strategy with Nabeel Hyatt @ Spark Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't know that the president affects the economy in the US as much as you would think that any president affects the economy in the U.S.”
2025-04-04 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why To Win in AI, Investors Need to Change Their Approach | Why VC is Run by Principals and Associates and is a Broken System | The Bull Case for Anthropic & Whether Deepseek Changes Their Strategy with Nabeel Hyatt @ Spark Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“How did I find that founder? What were the signals that happened there? What are the lessons I can learn? What are the things of founders that connect well with me and I connect well with them? What are the market dynamics at that time? What was the product like at that time? Those are things worth deeply investigating”
2025-04-04 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why To Win in AI, Investors Need to Change Their Approach | Why VC is Run by Principals and Associates and is a Broken System | The Bull Case for Anthropic & Whether Deepseek Changes Their Strategy with Nabeel Hyatt @ Spark Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Have I had a zero? I'd push back, man. I don't know that you should look at your losses. I mean, maybe if you felt like the decision that you made at the time, if you look back on it and like you just were in a bad place when you made the choice and you should try to not be in the bad place the next time you make the choice, you made the choice for the wrong reason. But I don't know, we're in the business of the things that work.”
2025-04-04 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why To Win in AI, Investors Need to Change Their Approach | Why VC is Run by Principals and Associates and is a Broken System | The Bull Case for Anthropic & Whether Deepseek Changes Their Strategy with Nabeel Hyatt @ Spark Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Pick a job or decision that is not solved by today's AI perfectly. Pick a job that you think it will be worth trying to pursue for the next decade because that's the nature of the startup. And so if you can solve it fully, which are the most satisfying things as a founder, I can satisfy this fully by the time I get to the end of my three-month incubation period in my little seed round, and I'll be done, then you probably are going to get lapped. If you think the best you can get is an MVP that hallucinates constantly because this particular problem is incredibly hard, but people will pay a little bit and I'll get a little bit of traction. And if I do that, I can make a little bit more progress. And I can imagine working on this project for the next 10 years and still innovating seven years from now. Okay, so now you're on the right path. And then, by the way, if the model takes an extra three months or more or three months left to hit its level of fidelity, you'll be okay.”
2025-04-04 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why To Win in AI, Investors Need to Change Their Approach | Why VC is Run by Principals and Associates and is a Broken System | The Bull Case for Anthropic & Whether Deepseek Changes Their Strategy with Nabeel Hyatt @ Spark Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“AI, it like solves it, and we're kind of done. If that's really the extent of your innovation, you're probably going to be awash with 50 other people who also joined all the other incubators and are also doing the exact same thing. And so your marginal benefit to the world is zero. If you are doing something at the very edge, I mean, I definitely am constantly trying to advise founders and encourage founders to think about what the models might do in six months or nine months and start to chart there.”
2025-04-04 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why To Win in AI, Investors Need to Change Their Approach | Why VC is Run by Principals and Associates and is a Broken System | The Bull Case for Anthropic & Whether Deepseek Changes Their Strategy with Nabeel Hyatt @ Spark Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I spend a lot of time thinking about it. I think most of them fall into, if you just really think through the second order effects of it, fall into kind of like near-term arbitrage, which might just take that whole market to zero, especially if you're meeting the market where it is today with the models of today. You need to assume that you still have a second, third, and fourth act in your business because you're going to need to keep innovating, or else how are you not going to get lapped by 25 other competitors who are also going to build call agents into your vertical market tomorrow? And so I think you do have to ask some of these questions, sensibly, how hard is the job to be done? This is a direct contrast. If I just took my 200K check and I just joined an incubator and I'm trying to show 10 or 10% week over week growth so I can raise my seed round in three months, then I want something that the models can solve for tomorrow. And so I might go into a market that I don't know, a little bit of transcription from.”
2025-04-04 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why To Win in AI, Investors Need to Change Their Approach | Why VC is Run by Principals and Associates and is a Broken System | The Bull Case for Anthropic & Whether Deepseek Changes Their Strategy with Nabeel Hyatt @ Spark Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The world would do in this situation. And so if you are running a next gen product with AI deeply embedded and you have the best users using that”
2025-04-04 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why To Win in AI, Investors Need to Change Their Approach | Why VC is Run by Principals and Associates and is a Broken System | The Bull Case for Anthropic & Whether Deepseek Changes Their Strategy with Nabeel Hyatt @ Spark Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I'll give you an example. If your descript today, you don't just sit on this amazing and wonderful interface, which kind of changed the market and reinvented what this was. You also sit on every single edit that every single person has done to try and go from a rough cut where somebody might like me comes on your podcast and says ridiculous things. you know cut that down to something that actually sounds like a wonderful production that's internalizing the wisdom of experts. One of the things that we're seeing right now in this world, open AI and lots of other companies are paying a bunch of PhDs to buy hand, go figure out PhD math equations so they can internalize the model. I think Web2.0 was very much the kind of wisdom of crowds and we're at an age where it's the wisdom of experts. We're not trying to get what the average output of every single human is. We're trying to get what really amazing people at whatever their field is across every field.”
2025-04-04 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why To Win in AI, Investors Need to Change Their Approach | Why VC is Run by Principals and Associates and is a Broken System | The Bull Case for Anthropic & Whether Deepseek Changes Their Strategy with Nabeel Hyatt @ Spark Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think when you're at the front end of innovation, when you're moving really fast, I think you want to be vertical. I think you want to have as much connectivity layer between the model you're trying to build and the thing that the consumer is trying to wrestle with the world to make happen.”
2025-04-04 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why To Win in AI, Investors Need to Change Their Approach | Why VC is Run by Principals and Associates and is a Broken System | The Bull Case for Anthropic & Whether Deepseek Changes Their Strategy with Nabeel Hyatt @ Spark Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Thinkanthropic wins the same way that every company wins, which is that they are executing very fast with taste. They are listening to their customers and delivering with their customers want.”
2025-04-04 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why To Win in AI, Investors Need to Change Their Approach | Why VC is Run by Principals and Associates and is a Broken System | The Bull Case for Anthropic & Whether Deepseek Changes Their Strategy with Nabeel Hyatt @ Spark Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't know that DeepSeek changes that much for the way that I think about the future, strangely enough. And maybe that's an odd thing to say when everybody in the world is freaking out about DeepSeek this week. I don't know that I ever really believed personally that the hundred billion dollar or $500 billion or $1 trillion training was the only barrier to entry for making these models. In fact, if we had believed that only capital was going to win, then we would not have invested in Anthropic because surely Sam was telling us and everybody else, like, we're going to win the Capital Game. Capital Game is the only way to win. And so there's no reason to build a competitor. So we didn't believe that back then, or else we wouldn't invest it in anthropic. And so it's still true today.”
2025-04-04 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why To Win in AI, Investors Need to Change Their Approach | Why VC is Run by Principals and Associates and is a Broken System | The Bull Case for Anthropic & Whether Deepseek Changes Their Strategy with Nabeel Hyatt @ Spark Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And if you own the interface with a customer, you have the chance to iterate on that interface with the customer and stay ahead of everybody else. So if you just look at Anthropic and you look at artifacts, right, which now OpenAI has copied, if you look at the next phase of the things, those are going to come out of insights with the customer. And those things matter. It's not just model quality. So I don't think foundational models are just model quality. It's also your ability to continue to innovate, your taste, your execution speed. And then do you have a relationship that's very direct with the customer with which you can still keep iterating with them faster than everybody else? So if I compare that to somebody who's spending a bunch of money on compute for an academic lab for a very large foundational model, I don't think those things accrue very well over time. I think you need to be full stack.”
2025-04-04 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why To Win in AI, Investors Need to Change Their Approach | Why VC is Run by Principals and Associates and is a Broken System | The Bull Case for Anthropic & Whether Deepseek Changes Their Strategy with Nabeel Hyatt @ Spark Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Deep seat. Do they have enough users and enough growth? No. Do they have enough scale? No. I think you want to own the interface with the customer.”
2025-04-04 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why To Win in AI, Investors Need to Change Their Approach | Why VC is Run by Principals and Associates and is a Broken System | The Bull Case for Anthropic & Whether Deepseek Changes Their Strategy with Nabeel Hyatt @ Spark Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Say it was the only competitive benefit, but for both of those companies, you said make the case for these. I think for both of those companies, I think that's a major, major case, right? They will have a user interface. They will have user data that will help them be smarter.”
2025-04-04 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why To Win in AI, Investors Need to Change Their Approach | Why VC is Run by Principals and Associates and is a Broken System | The Bull Case for Anthropic & Whether Deepseek Changes Their Strategy with Nabeel Hyatt @ Spark Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sure. The thing to understand about anthropic and open AI, ChatGP, they're direct competitors, obviously, is to think about it in the terms of this adaptation evolution evolution framework. I'll just use this thing we just talked about a minute ago as a way to make this point. If you are trying to make the next best model and you're running out of data, then what do you need? You need to understand how people want to use your model. If you want to understand how people want to use your model, then you need a lot of people using your model. And so the fact that those two companies have a user interface which has both insights to how a user would use it, but also, frankly, data exhaust on how people are trying to navigate a model and get through it gives you insight that no one in some academic lab somewhere just popping up a model is going to be able to advance as fast as you. You can make a faster algorithm, but you can't get new data and new data exhaust from consumers.”
2025-04-04 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why To Win in AI, Investors Need to Change Their Approach | Why VC is Run by Principals and Associates and is a Broken System | The Bull Case for Anthropic & Whether Deepseek Changes Their Strategy with Nabeel Hyatt @ Spark Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Absolutely. Yeah. I mean, we were early investor in anthropic and very happy about the investment and think there's a lot of head for it and feel really, really positive about it. Absolutely. And then on the other end.”
2025-04-04 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why To Win in AI, Investors Need to Change Their Approach | Why VC is Run by Principals and Associates and is a Broken System | The Bull Case for Anthropic & Whether Deepseek Changes Their Strategy with Nabeel Hyatt @ Spark Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We invest most of our largest exits at Spark over time and most of them are the most satisfying work over time has been on the revolution and sometimes the evolution category. So we have no desire to invest in anything that's an adaptation. We're trying to lean towards the more disruptive, the higher risk, knowing that that won't always work out, but at least it's a journey worth traveling.”
2025-04-04 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why To Win in AI, Investors Need to Change Their Approach | Why VC is Run by Principals and Associates and is a Broken System | The Bull Case for Anthropic & Whether Deepseek Changes Their Strategy with Nabeel Hyatt @ Spark Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We are in the industrialization of startups' playbook land where everybody's trying to churn out some piece of ridiculous arbitrage every week in order to get through the end of their incubator and raise their seed round. So we mostly have evolved products that are not good enough or we have adapted products with a coat of paint on top that says AI.”
2025-04-04 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why To Win in AI, Investors Need to Change Their Approach | Why VC is Run by Principals and Associates and is a Broken System | The Bull Case for Anthropic & Whether Deepseek Changes Their Strategy with Nabeel Hyatt @ Spark Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This actually is a framework that came in the mobile revolution for us at Spark and then reapplied. So this is an old lens reapplied, which is adaptation, evolution, and revolution. And there are versions of this that have existed, as people have talked about, AI generally. Can I use the mobile analogy to kind of get you there? So adaptation is the obvious, I'm going to take the thing and I'm going to make a copy of the thing for AI. And so in the mobile revolution, this was the New York Times makes New York Times.com on mobile. And that's the product, right? And that's obviously a world where 2023 was kind of the big adaptation push. And that was when Adobe Firefly launches. It's when Spotify DJ launches. It's when Canva create, I think it's called, it's when the big boys came to town with their AI products and everybody had like a year to go think about what they were going to do after the GPT era and like ship their incumbent advantage stuff. Like that's all adaptation. Evolution.”
2025-04-04 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why To Win in AI, Investors Need to Change Their Approach | Why VC is Run by Principals and Associates and is a Broken System | The Bull Case for Anthropic & Whether Deepseek Changes Their Strategy with Nabeel Hyatt @ Spark Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm not saying you never sell secondary. I'm not saying it never happens. Again, the primary job of trying to figure out a little bit about the future, listen to those founders who have that little glimmer of the future, have a beginner's mind enough to be open to it so that when somebody comes into you with some cockamy idea that was way off piece from how you thought the world was going to work, that you're open to shifting to it, like that takes time, energy, research. It takes trying every product. It takes curiosity. Like the question is, where are your hours coming in the day? And so sure, there's secondary that happens. Sure, there's later stage valuations that happen. Sure, you can decide to figure out you want to do growth. Sure, you could run a conference every month. Sure, there's a thousand things you can do. But doing the simple thing at the highest level takes time and energy. And I don't even think I'm good at it yet. So I'm still just trying to get good at my first job before I do the second, third, and fifth job.”
2025-04-04 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why To Win in AI, Investors Need to Change Their Approach | Why VC is Run by Principals and Associates and is a Broken System | The Bull Case for Anthropic & Whether Deepseek Changes Their Strategy with Nabeel Hyatt @ Spark Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Another good example of where we have a different world now that we had four years ago. That company will probably raise another hundred million, and then they might just die. In fact, they probably will die. Their probability of dying eventually, it'll take a long time because they got a lot of money, goes up. So then if that happens, if you feel like that company's raised too much capital, you can watch their hiring velocity. You can look at the quality of the people they're hiring, their execution speed, you can see it all teetering, and then maybe invest in something else in the market. Even though there's a lot of money in the market.”
2025-04-04 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why To Win in AI, Investors Need to Change Their Approach | Why VC is Run by Principals and Associates and is a Broken System | The Bull Case for Anthropic & Whether Deepseek Changes Their Strategy with Nabeel Hyatt @ Spark Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Minus Figma. It was quite a while ago now. It was still pre launch, so it was trying to write a very large check pre-launch. For me, it's that because also there was just like a connection with Dylan. It's not just that it was a large valuation. It's that I think that that journey would have been fruitful and interesting and an amazing way to spend five to ten years of your life.”
2025-04-04 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why To Win in AI, Investors Need to Change Their Approach | Why VC is Run by Principals and Associates and is a Broken System | The Bull Case for Anthropic & Whether Deepseek Changes Their Strategy with Nabeel Hyatt @ Spark Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Ownership properly, and it'd be a good partnership. But I just don't think this company will be different with this amount of capital into it. And so the company changes.”
2025-04-04 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why To Win in AI, Investors Need to Change Their Approach | Why VC is Run by Principals and Associates and is a Broken System | The Bull Case for Anthropic & Whether Deepseek Changes Their Strategy with Nabeel Hyatt @ Spark Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because we run a font the way that we run, a small number of investors, six investors with a $700 million fund is kind of broken in venture capital. And so what it means is usually it's not about valuation. Usually it's about check size. So in our model, if you really believe in the company and you want to have the ownership that you have and you believe that they're at the right stage, then it's about whether you're going to write a $5 million check, a $10 million check, a $15 million check, a $20 million check. So sometimes you say valuation, but I root back to maybe that founder is raising around and you don't think they're going to spend $20 million very well and it will mess up the company. There is absolutely a belief, for me at least, that too much capital can mess up a company. And so sometimes it's not about valuation, although obviously it's algebra. These things are all related. It's about a $25 million round here is probably going to kill this company. And so if it was a $10 million round I'd be in and also we'd have.”
2025-04-04 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why To Win in AI, Investors Need to Change Their Approach | Why VC is Run by Principals and Associates and is a Broken System | The Bull Case for Anthropic & Whether Deepseek Changes Their Strategy with Nabeel Hyatt @ Spark Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm not that price sensitive. I mean, there's always a number we could go through the deals that we didn't do because the price got away. There's always a price where it just doesn't make economic sense anymore.”
2025-04-04 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why To Win in AI, Investors Need to Change Their Approach | Why VC is Run by Principals and Associates and is a Broken System | The Bull Case for Anthropic & Whether Deepseek Changes Their Strategy with Nabeel Hyatt @ Spark Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Probably not. There's some world where you met them five years ago, you know them quite well. Chris from granola is a prior spark founder. And so he was one of the first people I met after I joined Spark because I was supposed to go sprinkle.”
2025-04-04 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why To Win in AI, Investors Need to Change Their Approach | Why VC is Run by Principals and Associates and is a Broken System | The Bull Case for Anthropic & Whether Deepseek Changes Their Strategy with Nabeel Hyatt @ Spark Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think the one hour call is the worst call anywhere because it's like too short to get a real read and too long to get the kind of speed dating version of the world. So a half an hour, I'm just trying to figure out whether I like the person at all and I want to have a second call, right? And then I'd rather go from a half an hour to two hours. So you do the first one and you're just trying to get a read. Is there a kismet? Is there a connection? Is there any chemistry here? Do you feel it? And then after that, it's like, yeah, we should just let's just go for a walk, man. Let's go have a conversation. Let's go really talk about everything.”
2025-04-04 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why To Win in AI, Investors Need to Change Their Approach | Why VC is Run by Principals and Associates and is a Broken System | The Bull Case for Anthropic & Whether Deepseek Changes Their Strategy with Nabeel Hyatt @ Spark Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's right. It's the way we conduct any deep level of investigation on a person. You're not asking them, give me your TAM answer and give me your margin answer. You're trying to figure out how they think about the things they're doing. And what are the best, if you're talking about an early stage startup, what is the thing they have thought about the most? They produced a tam slide or they produced something. They did that for the deck for you. So they put what, two hours into that, three hours into that? And nowadays they probably sent it over to Jem or some other product and just had it spit out those slides. If you're trying to get to what they have been obsessed about, it's like this thing that you're using, they've spent the most time thinking about. So it's where you're going to get the most insight into who the human is.”
2025-04-04 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why To Win in AI, Investors Need to Change Their Approach | Why VC is Run by Principals and Associates and is a Broken System | The Bull Case for Anthropic & Whether Deepseek Changes Their Strategy with Nabeel Hyatt @ Spark Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I don't think of product like am I the product master? I think of product as an instantiation of what the founder does. So let me recast it a different way. How do we separate hucksters from good executors? Because they're here pitching us as VCs. The way we separate hucksters who do a good pitch from people who are real executors is you look at the thing that comes out of their hands. You look at the thing that this petri dish of humans has created in the world and you try and evaluate and ask questions against that. So when you say I'm a product investor, I would push back slightly and that I've never evaluated a company by like looking at the product, using the website and being like, oh, this person should have a $15 million check. I don't think that's right. You look at the product and you try and learn about the humans behind the product by evaluating the product. It's the questions that you ask somebody like Kyle who started Cruz is now doing botko and you ask them why he made the decisions he made in this thing that you were using and that's where you can get a sense of who this is.”
2025-04-04 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why To Win in AI, Investors Need to Change Their Approach | Why VC is Run by Principals and Associates and is a Broken System | The Bull Case for Anthropic & Whether Deepseek Changes Their Strategy with Nabeel Hyatt @ Spark Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So you used market people and product as your three cores. I think if you just look at right now, market, do we understand any of these markets? How fast are they all changing in the world of AI? They're all shifting like crazy. And who knows which ones are going to become commodity markets with absolutely no margin whatsoever anyway. So if it's a big market, maybe it was a big market two years ago and it's about to become a really small market. And the same thing in reverse. People is very interesting. And I think there are firms that do a really good job at just making people bets. I think you have an instinct about people that just, you get over the line, you make your bet on people.”
2025-04-04 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why To Win in AI, Investors Need to Change Their Approach | Why VC is Run by Principals and Associates and is a Broken System | The Bull Case for Anthropic & Whether Deepseek Changes Their Strategy with Nabeel Hyatt @ Spark Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“New behavior looking for a new behavior where when you try it, just sears into your brain, you can't stop thinking about it. It sounds again, sounds simple, but if you just do that, is this really a 10x better product? You just don't see that many of those. That simple thing you just don't see very often at all.”
2025-04-04 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why To Win in AI, Investors Need to Change Their Approach | Why VC is Run by Principals and Associates and is a Broken System | The Bull Case for Anthropic & Whether Deepseek Changes Their Strategy with Nabeel Hyatt @ Spark Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Which is the cookie business Starbucks was also a venture back business. I didn't say they can't be good businesses, I said they're not Spark businesses. Again, we're not trying to canvass the entire world for every single possible thing that we can invest in. We're not trying to be the Brita filter of venture capital firms that has to look at absolutely everything. I need to do a good deal a year. That's the job. It's not that hard. It's incredibly hard to execute. It is a simple thing in its essence. And so if I try and win every single war across every single front, I will be average across the whole board. So we try to be good at what we're doing. We try to partner well with founders who want that product. We try to look for new market opportunities, which, by the way, in the world of AI, you can imagine why like I'm a kid in a candy store right now. I'm like the most excited I've literally ever been in my entire career, including as a founder. Like, it's just an amazing opportunity. And if you're asking what makes it new market opportunity, I think it's you're looking for a new.”
2025-04-04 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why To Win in AI, Investors Need to Change Their Approach | Why VC is Run by Principals and Associates and is a Broken System | The Bull Case for Anthropic & Whether Deepseek Changes Their Strategy with Nabeel Hyatt @ Spark Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We don't talk about or look at market size at all unless it's sometimes a confirmation that it's a small market. If the guy's starting an ice cream truck, then it's probably not for us. But usually you're creating a...”
2025-04-04 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why To Win in AI, Investors Need to Change Their Approach | Why VC is Run by Principals and Associates and is a Broken System | The Bull Case for Anthropic & Whether Deepseek Changes Their Strategy with Nabeel Hyatt @ Spark Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source