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Nick Beim

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32
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2015-08-19
most recent
2015-08-19
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1
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  1. “My most recent investment is a big swing fintech idea, very big swing, that is currently in stealth mode, but it will come out of stealth mode shortly. But I said yes because the two founders were just astonishingly talented. I mean, these are just off the charts, talented people, and one of whom in particular knows the field they're going after better than almost anyone. I mean, knows the deep insides of the industry that even most people in the industry don't know. And they're trying to remake a trillion dollar industry. And I think it has the opportunity to become a very significant company. And certainly the existing competition is very weak. The kind of legacy players. And if I were in this industry, I would not want to compete against these two guys.”

    2015-08-19 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 064: Finding Exceptional People with Big Ideas with Nick Beim, Partner @ Venrock · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “Yeah, fantastic book. And I think it was interesting he didn't even write that. It was sort of brought together by lecture notes, which interestingly was also the case with Aristotle's books. And all of his books disappeared and what we have are just as lecture notes. But I think Peter's such a creative thinker and I hope you will write more.”

    2015-08-19 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 064: Finding Exceptional People with Big Ideas with Nick Beim, Partner @ Venrock · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “You know, I'm intellectually attracted to longer form thought pieces that are eye-opening kind of contrarian, not obvious. I like Reed Hoffman's blog.”

    2015-08-19 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 064: Finding Exceptional People with Big Ideas with Nick Beim, Partner @ Venrock · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “You know, there was a book that had a big impact on my life, and it was under $100. It was Man's Search for Meaning by Victor Frankel, who was a Holocaust survivor and a world-class psychologist. And he really got to the essence of the question of finding meaning in life and what that means. In a nutshell, he found that even in the harshest environments like concentration camps where he spent a lot of time, man strives to find meaning and can find it and be happy even in those environments if he finds love and purpose. And I, you know, that's very philosophical book, but I think it was a very powerful one.”

    2015-08-19 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 064: Finding Exceptional People with Big Ideas with Nick Beim, Partner @ Venrock · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “Boy, so many I think taking a long-term view, I think Mike Moritz has been very successful at Sequoia. I think more recently I was very impressed with what Fred Wilson had done without the existing platform or assets that some of the longstanding West Coast firms have had.”

    2015-08-19 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 064: Finding Exceptional People with Big Ideas with Nick Beim, Partner @ Venrock · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “Earlier stage companies, maybe they're a little higher on the west coast, I think partly that may result from the fact that if you look at the set of founders on the West Coast, many of them may come from extraordinarily pedigreed networks, from Facebook or Google. They may have deep domain expertise or functional expertise in the companies they've been at. So maybe a bit higher on the West Coast for the earlier stage.”

    2015-08-19 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 064: Finding Exceptional People with Big Ideas with Nick Beim, Partner @ Venrock · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “I think for companies that are working very well, there's no major difference. I think the companies that get the biggest valuations are companies that are working extraordinarily well and actually would add one thing, which is companies that capture the imagination of the investment community with regards to their potential to disrupt huge existing industry and be very big. So Facebook and LinkedIn and Google all did that on the West Coast, I think looking at some of the leaders on the East Coast, I think DataMiner certainly is an example of a company that has immense promise to disrupt lots of industries and it got a great valuation. It got sort of a West Coast valuation. And I think for very good reason. I think that was a smart investment by those investors. So I think for companies that are working very well, it's not that different. I think for”

    2015-08-19 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 064: Finding Exceptional People with Big Ideas with Nick Beim, Partner @ Venrock · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “And you can see this in some emerging financial services companies. Data miner is maybe another example, Bloomberg obviously more historical. So I think there's certain areas, certain industries that certain types of companies that New York”

    2015-08-19 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 064: Finding Exceptional People with Big Ideas with Nick Beim, Partner @ Venrock · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “That it is two things one, it has extraordinary talent communities, some of the most talented people in a lot of functions and industries, so great design talent, great marketing talent, for example. But also it is the world capital for many major industries or major capital, so from financial services to real estate, media, advertising, fashion. You know, if you're going to create a disruptive company in those sectors and you need domain expertise in those sectors and a customer base and a partner network that are, you know, they're typically local, having been invested in guilt when it was just three people, I can promise you you could not have built that company to the same degree of success on the West Coast because all of the fashion brands are in New York, all of the great merchandising talent design talent, buying talent, and much of the customer base is in New York as well. And so I think that”

    2015-08-19 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 064: Finding Exceptional People with Big Ideas with Nick Beim, Partner @ Venrock · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “Reductions in cost of software start a business. But I think it's greatly opened the aperture of who can be a credible entrepreneur in the late 90s if you wanted to start an e-commerce firm that would cost $30, $40 million. You'd need 30 MIT engineers. Today you can do it over a weekend for less than 2,000 and certainly to scale it takes great engineering. But I think that change has been a fascinating global one where you see these urban centers like New York and interestingly like San Francisco where most of the action is gravitating on the west coast. You see it in Boston, the movement from 128 to Cambridge, you see it in the rise of Shanghai and Sao Paulo, London. So I think there's a whole set of firms that can be built in these applied tech ecosystems. And I think what characterizes so many of those ecosystems and what characterizes New York and Spades, it”

    2015-08-19 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 064: Finding Exceptional People with Big Ideas with Nick Beim, Partner @ Venrock · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “Yeah, it's a great question. David is a good friend and always ask good questions. I think the biggest difference between New York and Silicon Valley is that New York is fundamentally an applied technology ecosystem. I was on a panel recently with an investor from a top West Coast firm, and he just said, you know, New York will never be a significant ecosystem because it doesn't have an anchor engineering university like Stanford or MIT. And I fundamentally disagree with that. I think one of the most interesting developments in the last 10 years is that for so many businesses, both consumer and enterprise, the technology part has gotten dramatically easier. And it's based on the emergence of open source computing stacks. It's based on great developments in cloud computing.”

    2015-08-19 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 064: Finding Exceptional People with Big Ideas with Nick Beim, Partner @ Venrock · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “This is a good question. And NROC is not planning an impact investing fund anytime soon. I'll certainly post you if that changes. I have been working with a group of colleagues who are some of whom are real thought leaders in this area, and we are there are a number of things we're doing, and I can't announce them yet, and most of them are sort of in process, but I think I would love to be a part of the creation of some significant institutions that really help push this field forward. In addition, I'm on the board of a nonprofit called Endeavor that has been hugely successful, that supports entrepreneurs in developing countries. So that is an example of an area, and I help them create a fund that is a great impact investing vehicle to invest in those entrepreneurs and the returns have actually been great. So I think that's another channel where I will hopefully make a difference.”

    2015-08-19 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 064: Finding Exceptional People with Big Ideas with Nick Beim, Partner @ Venrock · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “Well, I think it depends on the field, but let's say your field is international development. I think job creation in a specific country and maybe high wage job creation, really sustainable job creation that will help generate wealth for those who haven't had opportunity is really important. I think if you're interested in women's treatment in the workforce, I think you can very clearly see the metrics and policies of companies who care about that and maybe equal pay. I think in environmental areas, you can look and increasingly measure environmental impact of what a company does. So I think it depends on the area, and I really think there will be hundreds of different themes of social impact, and some will be more easily measurable than others. But I think even where they're not easily measurable, people will do the best they can in putting together”

    2015-08-19 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 064: Finding Exceptional People with Big Ideas with Nick Beim, Partner @ Venrock · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “Billions, even hundreds over time, hundreds of billions of dollars of investment for people who care about it. And I think most people do care about it. And this would just be a new set of ways to, you know, pursue those interests with investment dollars.”

    2015-08-19 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 064: Finding Exceptional People with Big Ideas with Nick Beim, Partner @ Venrock · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  15. “And I think the last piece of the puzzle that's really required for the impact investing industry to boom, and I think this will be coming, is measurable impact metrics. So what are the elements of social impact that this investment will have? And how can we measure it and how can we see improvement? And my strong bet is that these types of metrics will evolve and that say in the next five years many major institutional investors and every major consumer internet platform like Fidelity or Personal Capital will offer access to some kind of social impact funds. They don't care both about their returns and their impact. I think in a nutshell it's a higher leverage way of doing social good than philanthropy alone. And there could also be, you know, this could channel tensions.”

    2015-08-19 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 064: Finding Exceptional People with Big Ideas with Nick Beim, Partner @ Venrock · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  16. “Sure, very exciting trend. I think the impact investing wave is definitely coming. And so what is impact investing? It's for-profit investing that also seeks to have a positive social impact. And the investors who are excited about it, which increasingly includes huge pools of capital, including the Rockefeller Foundation and BlackRock in Bain and pension funds, there's a lot of people who want to invest in these kinds of investments. They don't see a conflict in those two ends, but rather kind of two were the ends that overlap in an interesting number of cases, and they really seek to double down in those cases. Some impacting investors may be willing to get a slightly lower but still respectable.”

    2015-08-19 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 064: Finding Exceptional People with Big Ideas with Nick Beim, Partner @ Venrock · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  17. “I think it's great to talk about it. I really do. You know, like a lot of issues of unfairness, potential bias, I think having an open discussion, you know, data-driven statistics that people should be aware of. I think once people start to think about it, it will limit the bias of a lot of the players, and particularly when they become aware of how significant some of these upcoming wins are, they'll be much more inclined to invest in female entrepreneurs. I think also celebrating the successes of female entrepreneurs, as the industry does with all entrepreneurs, is very important in just helping spread the awareness.”

    2015-08-19 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 064: Finding Exceptional People with Big Ideas with Nick Beim, Partner @ Venrock · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  18. “Silent sort of faction of venture capitalists who were still maybe a little hesitant to invest in phenial entrepreneurs actively. So I think there are more women getting into venture capital, which is very promising as well. So on the whole, I'm very optimistic on this issue, but there's a lot of work to be done.”

    2015-08-19 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 064: Finding Exceptional People with Big Ideas with Nick Beim, Partner @ Venrock · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  19. “Young white men. And I think for many of them, they may look at female entrepreneurs and say, huh, well, I just, we haven't seen many female entrepreneurs be really successful. And of course, in venture, you always aim for the huge win. But I think what's really, what leads me to be really optimistic is there is a pipeline, and I've actually done some research on this and wrote a blog on it. It's about a $60 billion pipeline of very successful female founded companies, including Epic Systems, Theranos, the Ventbrite, Howe's Guilt, many others. And when that group exits becomes fully part of the consciousness, I think it is a set of facts that's too big to ignore for anyone's pattern recognition. So I think it is that set of emerging facts that will be the most helpful in shifting the attitudes of sort of the silent majority of venture capitalists. I don't even know if this is a majority.”

    2015-08-19 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 064: Finding Exceptional People with Big Ideas with Nick Beim, Partner @ Venrock · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  20. “She's extraordinarily productive, you know. I were both a part of that and I've just seen her do an astonishing job despite that no issue. So I do think that sort of old-fashioned biases is diminishing, but it's still, and particularly in more senior generations, I think still there. I think that there's a broader bias. It's a more subtle one. And I don't think it's sort of malign at all unintent, but it's rooted in the way that venture capitalists think. I think venture capitalists, when you really get down to it, invest primarily in the basis of pattern recognition. They see things working and they see similar opportunities. And that helps them de-risk their investment. And I think there have not been a sufficient number of successful female entrepreneurs for that to register in the pattern recognition a lot of investors. They're used to investing in young men.”

    2015-08-19 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 064: Finding Exceptional People with Big Ideas with Nick Beim, Partner @ Venrock · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  21. “I do. You know, I think there's been a great deal of progress made. There's some phenomenal female founders, CEOs, senior executives in really promising startups. And I think we're in the midst of a sea change. But in direct answer to your question, I think it still is harder for female entrepreneurs to raise money. And it's sort of an uncomfortable truth in the industry, but I do think it's important to call out. And I think there are a few reasons for that. There's some bias, what I'd call kind of an old school bias, that is disappearing as younger investors take the leadership positions in the industry, which worry about, hey, if women have children or they're going to have children, how can they possibly be as productive as men? I actually married a female entrepreneur, and we have two kids, and she's just, you know,”

    2015-08-19 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 064: Finding Exceptional People with Big Ideas with Nick Beim, Partner @ Venrock · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  22. “It's always a good sign. Yeah, custom around. In fact, one of the customers wanted them to build a fund with them and a billion dollar fund and split the fees. And DataMiner didn't do that, but it was an interesting indication of how powerful the technology was. So then after that, they raised an institutionality. It was a big round because it was a very promising company. So it was a $30 million round, and we led that round and I joined the board.”

    2015-08-19 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 064: Finding Exceptional People with Big Ideas with Nick Beim, Partner @ Venrock · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  23. “It was their first institutional round, so they had raised a small seed round, and then, very funny story, they had a few beta customers in the financial services sector, in the hedge fund world, and the beta customers love the product so much that they insisted on investing.”

    2015-08-19 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 064: Finding Exceptional People with Big Ideas with Nick Beim, Partner @ Venrock · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  24. “That's a good question. In early stages of any company, founders may look for a set of things and they may have slightly different emphases, but I guess I think on the whole they are looking for kind of similar general things. One is they want someone who can really add value to their business, who can really move the needle for them. Yeah, so very exciting to be a part of the company.”

    2015-08-19 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 064: Finding Exceptional People with Big Ideas with Nick Beim, Partner @ Venrock · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  25. “Yeah, and so I got very excited. And they just have a fantastic group of founders. So it was a super competitive financing. It happened very fast. I feel very lucky to be working with the team. So that's a quick overview on DataMiner.”

    2015-08-19 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 064: Finding Exceptional People with Big Ideas with Nick Beim, Partner @ Venrock · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  26. “Reliant on real time information. So, really interesting company who ain't got involved, as I had heard what they were doing. It was a very secretive super self company, and I had heard about what they were doing, and it took a while, but I finally was able to get a meeting with the founders. And they showed me their capabilities and how much they had discovered way before existing news sources. So for example, they had identified the assassination of bin Laden 28 minutes before Bloomberg in the New York Times. Wow. Which was an epic discovery.”

    2015-08-19 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 064: Finding Exceptional People with Big Ideas with Nick Beim, Partner @ Venrock · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  27. “Which are outdated in most cases, they just can't compete with this kind of information discovery. They also serve governments in the public safety area, so from fire departments to search and rescue, and they can really save a lot of lives there. And they also were asked by Twitter to build a news product, which they did, and it's now become the dominant real-time newswire for the whole industry. I think they will ultimately disrupt a lot of industries because more and more industries are increasingly”

    2015-08-19 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 064: Finding Exceptional People with Big Ideas with Nick Beim, Partner @ Venrock · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  28. “So they effectively discover news before it's news. They discover market moving information before markets move. Someone once said the future is unevenly distributed. I think knowledge of the present is also unevenly distributed and Data Miner is sort of like an X-ray vision that can see everywhere in the world and virtually every sphere of human activity what is happening as it happens. And they focus on financial markets, which are obviously interested in learning information. And by the way, this is all based on public information, so there's no insider or anything and no privacy questions. They focus on the financial sector because they're sort of replacing the existing sources of news like Bloomberg and Thompson Reuters.”

    2015-08-19 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 064: Finding Exceptional People with Big Ideas with Nick Beim, Partner @ Venrock · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  29. “Sure, a data miner is a really intellectually interesting company. For somebody describe what it does, Data Miner is in the business of real-time information discovery. And what that means is they have access to some of the largest real-time data sets online, and they're constantly adding additional data sets. The biggest and most significant of those data sets right now is Twitter. They have real-time access to the Twitter fire hose. What they do is with all this data is they look at the emerging digital signatures in the first milliseconds of events in the real world as they are starting to happen. It's an interesting characteristic that in today's world, events start to leave digital signatures in their very early moments. And so DataMiner sees those and figures out what the events are, how significant they are, and to whom they're relevant.”

    2015-08-19 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 064: Finding Exceptional People with Big Ideas with Nick Beim, Partner @ Venrock · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  30. “The better option was matrix partners, a firm that I was a partner at for 12 years. Matrix had done very well in Boston and is great from very good at infrastructure investments in particular. And when I moved to New York and jumped to Venrock just because I think Boston is still great at a number of areas, but I think New York has really become by a significant margin the most exciting startup pub on the East Coast.”

    2015-08-19 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 064: Finding Exceptional People with Big Ideas with Nick Beim, Partner @ Venrock · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  31. “Is really going to leave. So I did, and I ended up finding a better offer, a more interesting offer. And I informed the venture firm that had been courting me that I was going to take the offer. And so I did, and I was off to the races, and that's how I became a venture capitalist. And I worked for eight years in Boston and then moved to New York because it was increasingly becoming the center of start of activity on the East Coast. And I've been here ever since.”

    2015-08-19 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 064: Finding Exceptional People with Big Ideas with Nick Beim, Partner @ Venrock · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  32. “Sure, I got into the venture industry serendipitously and rather unexpectedly. It's a funny story. I got an offer out of the blue to join a venture firm where I knew one of the partners. And I think for the sake of propriety, I probably shouldn't identify the firm, given the story. At the time, I was working at the tech group at Goldman Sachs. But when I told Goldman I was going to go, they got very upset at the firm for making the offer, particularly since this venture firm had poached two great people from Goldman's Tech Group before they approached me. And Goldman basically said they had to draw a line in the sand and told the firm that if they hired me, they would stop working with them. The venture firm told me that they thought they might be able to work out a compromise with Goldman over several months and that the best thing I could do in the meantime was to get some other offers to show Goldman out.”

    2015-08-19 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 064: Finding Exceptional People with Big Ideas with Nick Beim, Partner @ Venrock · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source