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

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

“I'm saying you have to justify it to yourself to go to sleep at night and maybe have some base where it says, for right now, this is what I think the barrier to entry is. This is how I think their next year is going to be good. But some kind of compounding effect where we think no matter what happens after this year, it's eBay. They just launch a product and 40 years later, the product looked basically exactly the same and it's just fine. Those ages are not right now. Those might metastasize inside of smaller vertical markets and AI in the next couple of years. But by and large, it is a sea of speed and taste at the same time right 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 think you have to find a founder who is continually innovating. You can ask all the simple questions about barriers to entry and all the rest of it and have some decent answers. But the truth is if you are not reinventing yourself, you still”
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 that is where I think the best founders can manage and understand at any given moment, what is the muscle that I'm using and how am I using it? I think the mistakes for founders is realizing that one, I like got them wrong on one of these axes, you know, quite a lot.”
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
“Real taste. And I'd say granola is a great example of a situation where everybody else competing in that market would have taken the execution angle. They would have built a Me Too product, slight arbitrage. Looks like fireflies or any of the other things with like a little bit faster or maybe a chat bot and a slightly larger box or whatever it is. And they would try to run faster than their competitors. Chris, his product changed completely from the seed round to the Series A, which we led, like complete reset. Even though the internal metrics were okay, and it was because it didn't feel right to him, he could kind of like self-inspect and realize it wasn't working. And that takes real taste. But he's in a competitive market, to be clear, and he knows it. Like he's got to be pretty high on the execution path as well. Oh my God.”
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
“Pretty clear, and even if it's not clear, some competitors are about to do it tomorrow, and so you could see it and you can run faster than them. And if you can aggregate everybody's innovation that's happening in industry across all 25 of your competitors, you will win. There's many other situations, especially for the deals that we do at Spark, which are often creating a new market that didn't exist before. You have to have incredible taste.”
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's just going to happen, right? So these two things are directly in conflict. If you are always the shoot first ask questions later person, you probably are not really deeply interested about the choices that you're making. You're just shiny penny running after whatever happened on Twitter yesterday. And if you are deeply, deeply, deeply full of taste, you didn't ship anything. Like you just sat navel gazing forever trying to find the perfect thing. And so the casting for a founder needs to match the opportunity of that startup. You have to have good taste, especially in this world, and you have to be very fast. But where you are on that spectrum is incredibly illuminating. You mentioned earlier you were totally getting at a company that was very, very competitive N of 35, should I invest in this thing? It's like, well, that's an execution play. That person needs to be in the top 0.0005% on the planet of being able to execute because the roadmap ideally is probably”
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 hasn't gone well for mostly two reasons. The first is that they're conflict avoidant, and I didn't pick up on it early enough. And it's very hard to pick up on early because you're going through a period where ideally you love them, they love you. There's not that much conflict. Maybe until late term cheat or something like that, but there's not that much conflict. And then you go through 25 conflicts in the first month of the company or three months of the company, and you realize that their conflict avoidance. They're not facing the problems of that company because every company has a thousand problems, obviously. That's the first one. You try to read for it, but you can get it wrong. The second one is that every founder is like, this is one of those things that I did not have as a framework 10 years ago. But after you make like a bunch of mistakes and you look back on things, they can become more clear. Every founder you want to move really, really fast. We all talk about execution speed. You want to say, you can imagine somebody on the very, very far end of execution speed. We also want them to have taste and judgment. We also want them to be, especially in the world of AI, only taste is going to matter in the future because...”
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
“Hopefully you have had many, many conversations before you get to that point. When I use a word like service or falling in love with a founder or being dedicated or loyal, that doesn't not come with tough love. That doesn't not come, you use the marriage analogy. If you're just smiling all the way through marriage, you're not executing it right. You need to have tough conversations. And so, yeah, sometimes you're having a tough conversation that you feel like that person has lost their way.”
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 again, I just say they're setting their bar too low. That's the bottom line. Like, they're settling for mediocrity because they're afraid of risk.”
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
“Price fuck off. Fine. I get it. But where you flip that to being the goal, mediocrity is the goal, that's not the goal. Every time you have an ability to have an investor or an employee or really anyone enter your orbit as a founder, your goal should be somebody who is going to be obsessed with you and think about your mission and try and help you. Otherwise, you shouldn't be engaging. And if you fail at it, fine.”
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 Why are we accepting mediocrity at that level? I think what you want is people who are engaged, who look at the details, who are invested emotionally, who want you to win and are doing the detail work to be able to not just give you armchair VC advice that they got from the one other board meeting they were in this week with the other hot company that they're in because every single startup is a different journey. And so until you get under the covers of what's really going on inside of this org, aka how do these co-founders fight? What are the problems inside of the executive team? Then you're going to give different advice to somebody if you really understand them. And so it's worth understanding them. If you can't, if you go out and raise a, look, I've had really tough rounds to raise, both as a founder and as a VC who's back to seed company or Series A that's not working out well. So look, if you cannot find that amazing and wonderful VC that you think is going to be deeply engaged and use your product, then go for the no-op VC.”
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 wouldn't be fine because the astronauts If your executive assistant or your VP of engineering or you had a product was fine, so why are we accepting?”
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
“Look, I had a bunch of venture that I raised as a founder. I raised eight rounds of venture capital as a founder. I never had a horror story from a VC. I had nobody who was like terrible and horrible. I basically had mostly VCs that were fine. They fall into the Keith for Boy camp. Like they show up to board meetings. It's okay. And I'm just going to run my company. I just imagine that in any other context of life, if I had somebody who was on my team, anyone else on my team, and they were fine, what would be the feedback?”
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
“Just got to hope that the cycle comes a background for them in exactly seven to ten years when those companies want to go public. And if it does, they'll do great.”
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
“Again, this is all amazing and wonderful pitches for 2021. Who knows what the public markets are going to like in AI in seven years? What are you doing? And so if you spend all your time trying to internalize what the public markets are thinking about this month, you are absolutely going to make the wrong calls. What do you think?”
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 just watch what our growth team does, and they do their job incredibly well. We talk about deals all the time. We talk in, again, there are seven people. They're also a small team. But they can be a little bit more hierarchical. They can have principles. They can have associates. They can do more diligence. You can look at the numbers. You can call 25 customers. I'm not calling 25 customers. Most of the time I'm investing, there aren't 25 customers. And so it's a different process. It's a different muscle. I'm not saying I couldn't do it. But in a world where, as you said earlier, just doing the job simply at the highest”
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
“Think our quality of investing went down on the early stage team. And has since recovered. Our growth team navigated it quite well. I think they actually did an incredibly good job of processing things. And there's a reason we have a separate growth team and an early stage team because I do think they're different sports, man. They're just different animals. And we do them in our spark way. Why do you think”
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 didn't write checks. The best thing I did during that era is while everything was being marked up like crazy and everybody was having GoGo a couple of years, I wrote the fewest checks I've ever written in my career. I think I wrote like two checks in a year and a half.”
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's kind of the worst version of venture of what I really didn't want startups to become, which is everything was pushing to Zoom. There's a reason we're doing this in person. I like making eye contact with people. I like connecting with people. It's the reason I like doing this. I like being service with founders. Well, I can't be in service with founders and trying to work with them if all we're doing is we're on Zoom for an hour and then I'm just writing our term sheet eight hours later, which was that era. I thought about leaving you.”
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's really hard because people call this in a apprenticeship business, but in many ways, especially the way that Spark does our job, it's more of a process of self-actualization. If I was trying to be Bajan when I joined or trying to be Santo when I joined, I can't be the mini-me version of that person. And so I think the mentorship has to come from that phrasing. It's really the journey of trying to get to know another person and trying to figure out what their superpowers are. How are they going to be the best partner to a founder? How are they going to fall in love with a founder? Because a lot of this really is falling in love and then pulling that out of them. If you're doing a good job with somebody, then three months in, six months in, you're noticing things about them, their pattern of investing, their weaknesses, why are the bad deals they fall in love with all the time? Like we call crap on each other all of the time. I would not want to do this alone because I actually think my partners know me better than I know myself. And they're like, we use a phrase internally being your brother or sister's keeper. We actually feel like the debate is not a political.”
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 do you remove the politics? I mean, I think venture. Somebody said at one point you probably know the quote because you're good with quotes per human inside of like almost any org. And I think there's a reason for that, right? The reason for that is that all of the measurements before exit are all false prophets until the thing is actually return back capital and you see this wonderful enduring institution, it's all just games and packaging. And that really means that if I internalize trying to build up respect with my peers in order to be thought of as being able to do good deals, I'm in a packaging product business for just my peers. So you just have to work with a point where you people start with respect.”
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's seven partners. I didn't say you have to write small checks. I said you have to be subjective and come from first principles and you're investing. And if you're spending all of your time trying to set up checklists for what is okay or not to bring into a partnership, if you're spending all of your time trying to work the politics of the org in order to get something done, that is all taking away from trying out the fundamental truth of whether this set of founders with this amazing idea is going to turn into something great. That's what I mean.”
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 that one feels like an easy no if you just don't feel like they have a competitive edge, then that's hard. Oh, all these things are going to be big. It's maybe not big enough. Or maybe if a small enough fund, but we're trying to invest in companies that we hope will be public long-lasting institution decades from now, you have to believe that they have some enduring value that will last for a long time, right?”
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
“Do they have some competitive barrier to entry, some reason that they might build a lasting institution? Or is it an iceberg in the sun?”
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
“Yes. Like, I reject that notion. This industry is all about exceptions. That's literally the industry we're in. Why are we building a bunch of playbooks if the whole thing is about exceptions? Like you have to build a firm. And as a founder, you have to be okay with the idea that there's going to be an exception next week to all the things you knew before, or else you wouldn't be doing this.”
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 is a different game, and we won't win all of those, and we absolutely have that same list. I have a same list of FOMO deals that you wish you had done, and then the price just got insane and got crazy. Were you best?”
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 we look back at this specific era right now, it will not feel that way. Most of the firms are executing strategies that are not particularly effective to this market. That means you're actually only competing with a smaller subsegment of people on any given deal.”
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 he is executing the strategy of Sequoia as if that is true and still trying to keep the rest of it compact and true, right? They're trying to abstract him, but they're doing all the things. I would argue.”
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
“Did. Like we had been very successful. We could have very easily raised $5 billion. We could have very easily tripled or quadrupled the size of the team. We didn't do that. We stayed seven people, six people partnership. We all write checks. We all do work with our founders. We like the service work. I would argue that made our job a lot harder four or five years ago, to be honest. And it makes it a lot easier now because we feel very well shaped for this phase.”
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
“No, I also think I was really badly shaped to be an investor in 2021. I mean, I think we got lucky. Spark was started in the early Web 2.0 era, like right at that age in the same cohort as USV and benchmark 2.0 that the beginning of the girly era and a handful of other firms that I think all treated mobile really well and did mobile really well, which felt similar. You didn't know what the metrics were supposed to be. It was a wide open, crazy world. And you're like looking at something that was maybe a FART app in the morning and then Uber in the afternoon. Like it was an insane situation. I think our DNA was very fixed by that. Our values were very set by that navigation. And I'll be the first to say that like, I don't know that we navigated the B2B SAS era four years ago, this kind of industrialization. We didn't do the things that a lot of our peer for.”
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
“Know, take all the founders, put them in the top, and then you hope you sift out a handful of the good ones at the bottom. And that's a very inbound, inbox-oriented view of the world. And if you do that, then your job is to tweet as much as humanly possible, market as much as humanly possible, bring everything into the top of the filter, and then do a really, really fast job filtering this incredible amount of inbound in order to be very, I would say call it like transactional nature, get through the funnel as quickly as possible, say no as quickly as possible to move on to the next one.”
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, but principles and associates don't even solve that problem, right? You have 100x increase in number of startups and you added like nine principles. I'm sorry, you didn't cover the industry suddenly unless you're doing pattern matching. And I think the more fundamental question is, can you pattern match in this market? I don't know that the Brita filter version of investing is the right way to evaluate, or at least I'm not executing the way that I want to do my job and the way that I think my partners should do their jobs together in that kind of like trying to get win the coverage game.”
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 understand it. I don't think it's good for startups, and I don't think it's good for founders. And I also, maybe more importantly than just some kind of value judgment, I think it's a losing strategy when no one knows what's about to be hot in nine months without being very, very deep in the 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
“And the industry have moves fast enough that they're not going to wait until an exit or cash to get that other job. You're giving them a promotion or you're giving them more respect in two years or they're going to try to go somewhere else that's better, right? So what does that mean? Well, that means if I want to get a promotion and I'm inside of shmobi shmobi VC firm, then I need markups. So if I need markups, how do I quickly get markups? I figure out what the guy one stage after me is interested in. And so my job is not really to go figure out what the future is or to go figure out how to be aligned with a founder and do great work or figure out how to get really deep with AI and figure out it's to go have a dinner with Kotu or however else and figure out what they're into this month and then invest in it one month earlier get the mark up four months later so they can get a promotion and that's basically the entire industry right 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
“Can I push back a little bit on even step up one level from even that? I think why did these simple heuristics revenue you can pick one, you have to hit 10 million, you can pick another set of metrics or dashboards that turn green so that you can get your partnership to agree to let you go do the thing you really want to go do. How did those things evolve? Because that's not how partnerships were 20 years ago. So why did that happen? That happened because you added people to the partnership. You have to look at the core of the org and then work downstream from that. What happens is if you take a room which used to have seven partners and that room becomes 25 partners or 30 partners or 500 partners at a certain set of firms, like what really happens? And I think the industry today is run basically by principals associates and junior GPs. That incentive system is what we're all swimming in, which did not exist 20 years ago. Why does that matter? Because what does a principle want? Well, a principle is not actually...”
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 you need to think like a founder. I think you need to be okay with a small team that makes subjective bets and think about the craft of what a founder needs today, which is that honestly, what a founder needed four years ago was a lot of playbooks. You needed every single arbitrage, simple way to make everything move a little bit faster. The conversations I have founders calling me about now after a board meeting, before a board meeting, they are all unknowables. They are all trying to like figure out what is the new user experience that I should use when models go multimodal. And there are explorations, not that not necessarily I have the answer for. They're not coming to me for answers. It's a sounding board, right? And they need a sounding board of board members that are actually using their products and actually have a curiosity to use the rest of AI products and get more native instead of just watching Twitter and looking what gets markups.”
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
“LPs want stability at a time when there's rapid change, so it's the wrong market fit. You have to ask if who's the person making that decision at that firm? So if they were sitting on all the wonderful amazing B2B SaaS markups from four years ago, and so now they're the head honcho at that place, do you think they're really making this call?”
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
“No, you know this cycle because the cycle in VC evolution is like horribly, horribly slow because it also loops back to LPs. They don't get to act on their own, right? They don't get to just like make a decision tomorrow. They have to go back and raise another fund against a new mandate, which probably requires like, I don't know, maybe you turn over half the team part of”
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, it is. I am not saying that if you built an awesome strategy to dominate the world, and therefore you're probably regarded as like a tier one brand or whatever you were four years ago, you're probably dead without completely changing. And that was exactly the right strategy for that era. You go tick down the box. We were kind of like in late stage capitalism for startups. Everything was red ocean. And so it was all about optimization and speed and like minor arbitrages. We are now in a world where like you need rampant creativity inside of an org. You need all of it is in the nuances. And so you need to build a firm that can kind of like rock to that. Do you think many events?”
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. So I've been a VC for a little bit over 10 years. So we're in the same generation in this sense of trying to think about unpacking this puzzle. I was a founder beforehand. I would say the early stages of venture capital, the real early stages of venture capital, if we think about the beginning of Sequoia and so on, that was all mysteries, man. Like that wasn't puzzles. And so I think the truth is, it may sound incredibly old school, but it's going back to the way things were really done before. It is an artisanal business. There's a reason it's an artisanal business. And that's because”
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
“Hundred associates to do all of the work to figure out exactly the right SaaS metrics and then grind it all out. And no one has any idea what a model is even going to do in a week. So I don't know how that isn't a mystery. And so I think you have to build a firm with that set of talent.”
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 it's happening already whether we like it or not, right? I think we can't really preach that a founder is supposed to adapt to a market and understand that the market is there. There's a thing called founder market fit. And there's also, frankly, a thing called VC market fit. And this market for AI is wildly different. I don't think anyone would argue it's not wildly different. And then the question is, in what way is it different? We had a B2B SaaS amazing, wonderful bull run in 2021 and a little bit afterwards. And I think we got really good at like Greg Treverton uses this phrase of puzzles versus mysteries, which is just like, puzzles are this thing that you can like, you know, use that raw horsepower to solve. And mysteries are, you know, there you have to go on the journey. There's like fog of war and you cannot work it out ahead of time. In many ways, like the BDB SaaS blow up of that era was all about the industrialization of venture capital. It was all about figuring out all the puzzles needed to hire”
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