YouSaid · the spoken record

Nick Weaver

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24
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2016-09-16
most recent
2016-09-16
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1
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  1. “You know, if you fundamentally believe that all these products and experiences in our homes are going to be either connected or delivered over the internet, then having an incredibly fast, reliable, and performant network is critical. And it actually starts going further than that. Really, you can think of the network as becoming the central nervous system of the home. You know, if all of our content's delivered over the internet, if all of our devices are connected to the internet, then you really have the opportunity here to build the central nervous system, something much more than just a Wi-Fi network. This is all about continuing to build great products and continuing to build a great team that's excited to really shape connectivity in the home over the next five years and beyond.”

    2016-09-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Eero's Nick Weaver on Why You Have To Grow One Stage Ahead of Where Your Business Is At and Why If You Want A Great Customer Experience, You Have To Own All The Parts · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “I miss definitely pieces I miss being exposed to so many different businesses, so many different types of products and challenges. At ERA, I'm really focused. But at the end of the day, one of the things I like the most is building a great team. And that's something I really love doing at ERO.”

    2016-09-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Eero's Nick Weaver on Why You Have To Grow One Stage Ahead of Where Your Business Is At and Why If You Want A Great Customer Experience, You Have To Own All The Parts · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “I'd probably read term sheet every morning. So it's a great way to still stay. Informed about what's happening in the VC and private equity world.”

    2016-09-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Eero's Nick Weaver on Why You Have To Grow One Stage Ahead of Where Your Business Is At and Why If You Want A Great Customer Experience, You Have To Own All The Parts · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “Yeah, as we look at the type of brand we want to build at ERO, first it's all about having great customers and customers that become advocates for us. To do that, you have to stay focused on delivering a just fantastic product. You have to treat your customers with respect, having open and honest conversations with them. It's also about maintaining this level of approachability so that you get people's feedback and they feel personally invested in helping build the brand.”

    2016-09-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Eero's Nick Weaver on Why You Have To Grow One Stage Ahead of Where Your Business Is At and Why If You Want A Great Customer Experience, You Have To Own All The Parts · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “Yeah, in one of our investor meetings, I got posed with how are you going to triple the size of the team and who on your team is going to be able to scale into that new role of having to manage a much larger organization? If you think through hiring, I got to get these next five people. It's very much focused on the immediate. When you step back and say, all right, I'm here a year from now. I need to be double or triple the size to be able to support everything we want to do. It really reframes the question as like, do you have a team that's going to be able to scale to manage just a significantly more complex organization?”

    2016-09-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Eero's Nick Weaver on Why You Have To Grow One Stage Ahead of Where Your Business Is At and Why If You Want A Great Customer Experience, You Have To Own All The Parts · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “So, one book I keep coming back to is Man's Search for Meaning by Victor Frankel. It's all about what are the driving forces and how people live their lives. In his book, it's a focus on how people find purpose and finding purpose ends up being one of the biggest drivers for people having a fulfilling life.”

    2016-09-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Eero's Nick Weaver on Why You Have To Grow One Stage Ahead of Where Your Business Is At and Why If You Want A Great Customer Experience, You Have To Own All The Parts · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “Well, with hardware, you have a lot of upfront costs, whether it's tooling or manufacturing line support, but you also have to build up the team before revenues hit. You need to make sure you have a big enough team to then be able to support all your customers. You almost have to grow one stage ahead of where the business is. That's one of the critical reasons why we took a decent amount of funding ahead of the product being launched, because we had to go build up a team. We had to build up all the infrastructure to be able to not just ship the product, but then also support everything once it got in the field.”

    2016-09-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Eero's Nick Weaver on Why You Have To Grow One Stage Ahead of Where Your Business Is At and Why If You Want A Great Customer Experience, You Have To Own All The Parts · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “You know, we've been fortunate enough to have some great investors and we've raised four rounds of financing recently raised our Siri C. All of those processes have gone fairly smoothly. One of the great things from my time at Menlo is that we got to see hundreds of companies come in and present to the full partnership. You really start picking up on how do you tell a story in a compelling fashion? How do you tailor that message to your audience? And that's a skill that helps in fundraising, but it also helps in talking to customers, also helps in recruiting. Being on the other side has really helped in, you know, how do you think about Euro as a company, as a product, and then also as an investment opportunity?”

    2016-09-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Eero's Nick Weaver on Why You Have To Grow One Stage Ahead of Where Your Business Is At and Why If You Want A Great Customer Experience, You Have To Own All The Parts · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “Guess the simple answer there is yes. In hardware, what's challenging is you have all these different teams on very different cadences. Ultimately, there's specific milestones, whether it's a new feature launch or a new product launch or a new retailer launch, where you have all these teams on different cadences and timing has to align perfectly so that you can execute properly. And so at any given moment, there's work on sourcing components and building new product and adding new features, fixing bugs, talking to customers, building a brand. There are so many different components here, and they all have to be sequenced perfectly.”

    2016-09-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Eero's Nick Weaver on Why You Have To Grow One Stage Ahead of Where Your Business Is At and Why If You Want A Great Customer Experience, You Have To Own All The Parts · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “Tall order and it's incredibly complex. So all the complexity that comes with a hardware business ends up being a pretty significant barrier to entry.”

    2016-09-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Eero's Nick Weaver on Why You Have To Grow One Stage Ahead of Where Your Business Is At and Why If You Want A Great Customer Experience, You Have To Own All The Parts · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “Not a unique problem. Whenever there's a new startup that's doing groundbreaking work and is showing some early signs of success, there's always going to be copycat products that appear very quickly. In a software-only business, your barriers to entry are much, much lower. What's great here is, you know, you hear this phrase all the time, hardware is hard. That actually ends up being a pretty big competitive advantage. There's all these moving pieces. You have to build all this infrastructure because it's not just about delivering an experience in a web browser or a mobile app. You're actually delivering physical goods to customers all over the country and even across the world. It's one thing to announce a product. It's another to be able to ship a great product, handle all the influx of customers, support them. Also at the same time, expand your distribution and expand your feature set. It's just a really”

    2016-09-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Eero's Nick Weaver on Why You Have To Grow One Stage Ahead of Where Your Business Is At and Why If You Want A Great Customer Experience, You Have To Own All The Parts · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “To do is rapidly evolve our software and stay focused on delivering a great customer experience. And as our distribution grows, as our team grows, we'll be able to continue to build just a great business while being nimble enough to address all the feedback we get from the field.”

    2016-09-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Eero's Nick Weaver on Why You Have To Grow One Stage Ahead of Where Your Business Is At and Why If You Want A Great Customer Experience, You Have To Own All The Parts · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “Here, I think of entrenched is really not an advantage. Entrenched means you have a way of doing business and you've been operating in that cadence for many, many years. You know, what's happened in the networking space is the problem statement has changed very dramatically in a very short period of time. You know, it was only a few years ago when our connection speeds were in single digits in terms of megabits per second. And the number of devices connecting to our networks were only a handful. And in a very short period of time, we've gone to connection speeds that are hundreds of megabits a second, you know, homes have dozens of devices connected. And so our competitive advantage, again, is we own that whole stack. We're able to react really quickly. And we're also pouring all of our focus into one product instead of a massive portfolio of undifferentiated products. What that allows us”

    2016-09-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Eero's Nick Weaver on Why You Have To Grow One Stage Ahead of Where Your Business Is At and Why If You Want A Great Customer Experience, You Have To Own All The Parts · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “There are times when it can, but there's nothing more rewarding than seeing your team execute and grow. And, you know, there is the flip side of if you're spending a lot of your time focused on hiring great people, very quickly you get to see all the great work they do. And, you know, I've been fortunate here to, you know, just see some of the amazing things that folks at ERO do on a regular basis. I could spend more time writing product specs or working through sales analyses. And I enjoy that work. But at the end of the day, you have to keep scaling the company and scaling the organization and hiring great people is one of the most important things I can do for the business.”

    2016-09-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Eero's Nick Weaver on Why You Have To Grow One Stage Ahead of Where Your Business Is At and Why If You Want A Great Customer Experience, You Have To Own All The Parts · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  15. “And what we have planned having that full end to end team from the design of the hardware to our own operating system to our own cloud to our own mobile applications and all the tools and plumbing kind of behind that to validate our product and make sure it's working as intended for as many customers as possible. It's a huge strategic advantage and something I'm really glad we started investing in from the earliest days of ERA.”

    2016-09-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Eero's Nick Weaver on Why You Have To Grow One Stage Ahead of Where Your Business Is At and Why If You Want A Great Customer Experience, You Have To Own All The Parts · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  16. “Yeah, so when we were making kind of a strategic decisions around what parts of the product did we want to own in-house and what parts did we want to work through with a partner, one of the biggest guiding principles was really around how do we react quickly to customer feedback and are able to be really responsive to the needs of the market. You know, as we went through the process, it just became more and more clear that if we wanted to be able to react quickly to our customers, most importantly provide a great customer experience that we were in full control of. We just had to own all the parts. The flip side of that is you need a bigger team. It's harder to hire some people with specialized skills. And we just made a commitment to spending a lot of our time focused on just recruiting great people. And today I still spend close to half of my time in recruiting. Looking at what we've achieved and”

    2016-09-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Eero's Nick Weaver on Why You Have To Grow One Stage Ahead of Where Your Business Is At and Why If You Want A Great Customer Experience, You Have To Own All The Parts · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  17. “Yeah, so we're a month into selling in physical retail. Best buys are our launch partner. And frankly, sales are very strong through that channel. At least living in Silicon Valley, it's easy to think that everyone just presses a button and has packages show up two days later. But if you look at kind of purchasing patterns across the country, physical retail is still a very dominant force. One of the things it does provide that you don't have in an online experience is product discovery. There isn't a great online substitute for walking down the aisles of a Best Buy and seeing all the new products, especially in the early days of us being in the market. It's a great way to have customers discover our product and ultimately become advocates for ERA.”

    2016-09-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Eero's Nick Weaver on Why You Have To Grow One Stage Ahead of Where Your Business Is At and Why If You Want A Great Customer Experience, You Have To Own All The Parts · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  18. “Provide great customer support. B, have great marketing, and C continue to invest in R&D. And so a lot of this is driven off of, hey, this is how much each unit costs. And then these are the other things that we need to be able to invest in. So there is a large formulaic approach to it. But at the end of the day, setting that final price, it is a little bit of an art.”

    2016-09-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Eero's Nick Weaver on Why You Have To Grow One Stage Ahead of Where Your Business Is At and Why If You Want A Great Customer Experience, You Have To Own All The Parts · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  19. “With a great product he wants to get in and into the hands of everyone at the lowest price or as you said it's a relatively higher price point at the time. So what was the thought behind the pricing mechanism? Yeah, with hardware there's hard costs. It's not like a SaaS product. One thing we've spent a lot of time looking at is what type of margin structure do we need to have to be able to support omnichannel distribution so that's Euro.com, places like Amazon online and then places like Best Buy and Store. You know, you need to have enough margin to”

    2016-09-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Eero's Nick Weaver on Why You Have To Grow One Stage Ahead of Where Your Business Is At and Why If You Want A Great Customer Experience, You Have To Own All The Parts · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  20. “Look at all the trends up until we start at Euro, you'd actually see a declining ASP. So people were spending less and less money on their networks. Or there are two factors there. One was upgrade cycles were lengthening and then costs were continuing to drive down. Since we started ERO, what we've seen is actually the amount of money people are spending on their networks is increasing pretty dramatically. And that's because our networks are running the core infrastructure of our home. When we started ERO, it was pretty contrarian to say people are going to be willing to spend $500 to have a great home network today. We're really seeing that there's actually a huge portion of the market that is willing to spend just about anything to make sure they have great connectivity in every corner of their home. How did you think about pricing in the early days when you had the product and no pricing mechanism? What was the thought process around that? Was it the typical kind of engineering?”

    2016-09-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Eero's Nick Weaver on Why You Have To Grow One Stage Ahead of Where Your Business Is At and Why If You Want A Great Customer Experience, You Have To Own All The Parts · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  21. “We're beginning to connect to the internet, and streaming was still kind of in its early trajectory was nowhere near as dominant as it is today. And so in the beginning of 2014, kind of with all those data points started ERA with my two co-founders, Amos and Nate, it's been a pretty wild two and a half years. Really interesting that you said about kind of great team, great product, but if the market's not there, it's a tricky uphill battle. I'm intrigued then as to what makes a really good and appetizing market for an entrepreneur going in when you were doing your market validity studies, which I'm sure you did as an XVC, what was it that made a great market great? Well, so there's, what are the gaps in product solutions is usually the first place to look. And then the second is the insight that you have that others don't see. And so, you know, when you look at the connectivity market, if you”

    2016-09-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Eero's Nick Weaver on Why You Have To Grow One Stage Ahead of Where Your Business Is At and Why If You Want A Great Customer Experience, You Have To Own All The Parts · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  22. “Have great technology, you can have a great product, but if you don't have a great market, you're really not going to have this amplification effect. I started to see just how reliant people were on connectivity in their homes, how more and more products.”

    2016-09-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Eero's Nick Weaver on Why You Have To Grow One Stage Ahead of Where Your Business Is At and Why If You Want A Great Customer Experience, You Have To Own All The Parts · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  23. “Honest, I have been frustrated with my home network basically my entire life. From growing up, I helped manage and install networks and homes and in businesses. And then another thing I did at Stanford was I was a network admin. So I've been frustrated with these products for a long time. The connectivity in our homes is now just as important as our running water and our power. And there weren't any products on the market that were able to provide a great experience. And frankly, when I was at Menlo, I spent a lot of time looking for this, looking for Ero as an investment and couldn't find it. I always wanted to start a company and be even more immersed in technology than I was from a venture standpoint. One of the things I really took away from my experience at Menlo was you can have a great team.”

    2016-09-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Eero's Nick Weaver on Why You Have To Grow One Stage Ahead of Where Your Business Is At and Why If You Want A Great Customer Experience, You Have To Own All The Parts · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  24. “Nick, such a pleasure to have you on the twenty minute of EC. Thank you so much for joining me today. Thanks for having me. Now, I'd love to kick off today by hearing what your root intervention was first, and then how you came to make the transition to founding Ero. On boards, participating in all of our investment decisions. So it was a great way to learn. The business. Also, how the best, some of the best entrepreneurs choose to build their teams, build their companies, and ultimately build some pretty incredible businesses. So what then was the founding kind of aha moment for you then with ERO that made you leave the world of venture to be an entrepreneur?”

    2016-09-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Eero's Nick Weaver on Why You Have To Grow One Stage Ahead of Where Your Business Is At and Why If You Want A Great Customer Experience, You Have To Own All The Parts · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source