YouSaid · the spoken record

Niki Scevak

lines on the record: 46
first: 2020-11-17
most recent: 2020-11-17
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

“Think it was the belief of those initial investors in our fund. I should have said that Rick and I had no track record as investors. We had not done anything really successful before Blackbird and Venture Capital was a dirty word in Australia. Waves of firms of forest had largely failed. So there was this kind of scorched earth feel to the industry in 2012 and there were 97 people. We had 522 meetings to raise that first fund over two years to get 97 people to say yes to $29 million. And I think I will always be forever grateful to those people for taking a chance on helping to build what we have at Blackbird.”
2020-11-17 · Invest Like the Best · Niki Scevak - Wild Hearts and Wild Ideas - [Invest Like the Best, EP.200] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I love podcasts like this one. Mel has done a number of great podcasts. I think how I built this, did a great episode with her and how she's built the company. She did a great episode with Jason Calicanis on this weekend startups. I think those are the two that come to mind to appreciate the journey and the uniqueness of Canva.”
2020-11-17 · Invest Like the Best · Niki Scevak - Wild Hearts and Wild Ideas - [Invest Like the Best, EP.200] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Focused on all levels of the organization. And so they've developed, as one example, wonderful advisory board around internationalization of the product. They've got all of the best people in the world to be advisors to the internationalization team. And so I think that lesson of how to build a great company, Canva has pioneered and had fresh thinking in so many ways of building a great company.”
2020-11-17 · Invest Like the Best · Niki Scevak - Wild Hearts and Wild Ideas - [Invest Like the Best, EP.200] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That stands the test of time, but rather just is copy and pasting all of the same lessons of okay companies and perhaps even great companies, but copy and pasting them in another time where those lessons don't make sense because so many of the lessons of building great technology companies are perishable and specific to the time that you're building a company. So I think Canva has always had a very unique organizational structure in designing it as a team of teams and dividing autonomous units of the organization such that even with more than a thousand people they can continue to make progress at an incredibly fast rate. I think one very interesting concept that I always tell other companies we invested in is typically founders get advisors or an advisory board around the top level of a company. Canva has instituted advisory boards and advisors at all levels of the organization so much of the sort of help to a startup is focused on the founder rather than focused on all of the senior management team. And I think in Canvas unique and”
2020-11-17 · Invest Like the Best · Niki Scevak - Wild Hearts and Wild Ideas - [Invest Like the Best, EP.200] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Set of lessons in a startup can roughly divide into two categories how to build a great product, but then how to build a great company. And sometimes founders interested in the first but not interested in the second. The magic of Canva has been the way that they have built the company and designed the organization for different stages of growth and really thought deeply about how to do that in a first principles way and not do the copy paste. Again, that sort of dirty word of playbook, I think Canva has developed up and coming hungry talent rather than wholesale kind of imported proven talent and part of that is a constraint of building a company in Sydney, Australia versus building a company in the Bay Area. But ultimately, if you do that well, that is a much better way to build a company than to have this sort of merry-go-round of mercenaries joining the company every couple years and people collecting one year of vested stock options on their resume and not really creating something.”
2020-11-17 · Invest Like the Best · Niki Scevak - Wild Hearts and Wild Ideas - [Invest Like the Best, EP.200] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think it is that sense of democratization. If you use the product, you create something great and you build that self confidence that I think people used to use Microsoft Paint and have mixed results whenever they tried to do something uncomplicated related to graphical design. And I think that satisfaction of the end product of your own creation that then feeds upon itself. And so it's simply that delightful experience of the end product actually being good.”
2020-11-17 · Invest Like the Best · Niki Scevak - Wild Hearts and Wild Ideas - [Invest Like the Best, EP.200] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Color scheme, you can only use this presentation template organizations, and the team version of the product is actually people are paying lots of money so they can use less of Canva, which again is counterintuitive.”
2020-11-17 · Invest Like the Best · Niki Scevak - Wild Hearts and Wild Ideas - [Invest Like the Best, EP.200] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What I mean by that is it's designed to help the productivity of a single user. Canva now have launched Canva for enterprise, which is much more of a teams product and the sort of teams use case is you're a company, you have a marketing department who defines the company's look and feel and ran guidelines. What is the version of the logo that should be used in what different use case? different color sets are the approved way a sales presentation looks the approved way a research report looks and so canva for enterprise allows those teams to define the central repository of assets and how each document should look and then allows all of those employees to then easily create those different designs and those different documents so canva overall it's wide open you can do anything platform for free people are actually paying money to do less so you can't use all of that you can only use this version of the logo you can only use this”
2020-11-17 · Invest Like the Best · Niki Scevak - Wild Hearts and Wild Ideas - [Invest Like the Best, EP.200] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Love to see in an early stage startup very quickly that was switched to given that majority of really engaged users were content marketers who were posting on multiple different platforms, the feature that Canvas saw people using the most was they were creating a design, but they were then modifying that design into eight different sizes, one for Pinterest, one for YouTube, one for Facebook, one for Twitter, one for Instagram, whatever manual process of fitting it to the sort of specifications of each different platform. Canva launched a feature called Magic Resize, which allowed someone to create the design, but then to have that design be exported into all of those different sizes automatically. And then that was, I would say, the most successful feature of the platform early on. And they built a subscription product around that. So Canva Pro subscription is a single user subscription.”
2020-11-17 · Invest Like the Best · Niki Scevak - Wild Hearts and Wild Ideas - [Invest Like the Best, EP.200] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Canva has not thought about monetization very much from the beginning, and that sounds silly, but actually, if you look at the world's best businesses, they have concentrated wholly on product in the beginning. The first idea of monetization for Canva, which is not the idea for monetization for Canva now, was with people creating their own graphic designs, when they wanted to use a stock photography image or when they wanted to use a graphical element that was designed by someone else, they would pay $1 for the right to use that in their specific design. So Nelly, every single design was unmonetized, and only those sort of small fraction of users that chose to use stock photography element or some other paid template would pay the $1 on a per use basis. And even that because of the very fast growing user base and very engaged user base was a significant revenue line in the beginning and raw revenue that you would”
2020-11-17 · Invest Like the Best · Niki Scevak - Wild Hearts and Wild Ideas - [Invest Like the Best, EP.200] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Or blogs, and so on. And so they, as well as creating what they needed to for their daily lives, were creating things and sharing things about their experiences with Canva. And that, I think, was the initial prompt for the flywheel to start turning. And then other organic channels like SEO and so on, which I think SEO is an interesting one where people start and try to concentrate on SEO in the beginning versus thinking of SEO as an amplification or something that enhances that kind of user love in the beginning and certainly the initial set of users being the happiest users being content marketers was incredibly important for Canvas early growth.”
2020-11-17 · Invest Like the Best · Niki Scevak - Wild Hearts and Wild Ideas - [Invest Like the Best, EP.200] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“From the very beginning, you could measure the impact of the product Canva had on its users. People were hashtag that was invented very early on Twitter, CanvaLove. You could see people creating YouTube videos as to how to accomplish certain things within Canva and teaching other people how to use Canva. There was just that authentic happiness of customers, I think Rome research, which is in a cynic way a note-taking tool. But if you look at the magic of that community, which is around a note-taking app, it had a very similar feeling to the early days of Canva where this community was self-organizing and forming and expressing their love for Canva. I think the other really fortunate beginning of Canva was the initial set of users were content marketers. So those who managed a company's blog or social media. And so by definition, those people were creating a whole host of content, either on Twitter or Facebook or YouTube.”
2020-11-17 · Invest Like the Best · Niki Scevak - Wild Hearts and Wild Ideas - [Invest Like the Best, EP.200] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's so abstract and non actionable to say that it was very important that Canva launched with a great product. The sort of example of that is a company was started in 2011. This was right around the time, I think when Eric released the Ling startup book, everyone was launch early, get feedback, validate custom demand. Canva, I think their initial launch date was coming up and there were used user testing.com and they a bunch of feedback and they actually made the decision to say, hey, we're not going to launch. We're going to take another, I think, six or nine months to get this right. And I think every investor and someone around the company was saying, no, you need to prove out that people want the product and don't be afraid to launch an embarrassing product and blah, blah, blah, blah. And they had the foresight to say we are going to get this right and we're going to launch something that is meaningful and starts at the right place. With that, it was the early love, word of mouth. Again, it's this incredibly high level thing.”
2020-11-17 · Invest Like the Best · Niki Scevak - Wild Hearts and Wild Ideas - [Invest Like the Best, EP.200] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, and I think also just this safe environment is very hard to wander off the reserve of great design in Canva versus if you start from that blank sheet of paper, it's very easy to create something that is horrible.”
2020-11-17 · Invest Like the Best · Niki Scevak - Wild Hearts and Wild Ideas - [Invest Like the Best, EP.200] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Very much in this sort of default mode of their mission is to allow anyone to create great graphic design regardless of who they are”
2020-11-17 · Invest Like the Best · Niki Scevak - Wild Hearts and Wild Ideas - [Invest Like the Best, EP.200] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Canva is a graphic design platform that allows anyone to create great graphic design. And so if you think of design, I'm sure your mind will race to Adobe and Photoshop and so on. If you think about design, that's because you need to go to university to get qualifications to be a designer and then you join an organization as a designer and you spend tens of thousands of dollars on professional design tools. It's this incredibly narrow set of people with those design skills. The idea of Canva really is to allow anyone to create great design. And then in terms of the need for great design, it's only increased in this world that we live in so much of our communication is visual, either in written form or through sort of social media platforms or sales presentations, research reports, whatever it might be. So the aim of Canva is to allow everyone to create great graphic design and to do that mainly for free. They do have a paid offering, but it's”
2020-11-17 · Invest Like the Best · Niki Scevak - Wild Hearts and Wild Ideas - [Invest Like the Best, EP.200] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think appreciating flawed characteristics and how they might be good at action. Even the investing world, we actually say naivety is a good thing, embarrassment is a good thing. These words that are traditionally only negative versus those types of words and look for what might be positive about them, why naivety, why do people with no experience in that particular industry succeed in dramatically reshaping it? And I don't think they would have started the company if they knew the reality of the world. You need that naivety to dive in and to try and make a difference. And so there are so many of these types of words and types of traits that are so fascinating to kind of appreciate.”
2020-11-17 · Invest Like the Best · Niki Scevak - Wild Hearts and Wild Ideas - [Invest Like the Best, EP.200] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One of the main lessons is the psychological makeup of founders and what it takes to succeed. And it's almost like the English language is so limited because we use different words for the same emotional base trait of someone. So if someone fails, we call them arrogant. If someone succeeds, we call them confident. There are these double-edged emotions and there's so many of them that lead to these complicated characters and the psychological makeup of them. As I said, when they succeed, we describe them in this heroic fashion. When they fail, we describe them in a sort of harsher context. So I think it's that psychological makeup of someone and assessing the drive that leads them to succeed. And I just have loved the relationships and observation I've got to have with so many people who've gone both ways in the world. That's been the most fascinating part of the job for me.”
2020-11-17 · Invest Like the Best · Niki Scevak - Wild Hearts and Wild Ideas - [Invest Like the Best, EP.200] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Percentage of product slides. I think that's actually an interesting forward predictor of success. Canva, which is a wonderful business that we've been fortunate enough to be involved in right at the beginning, it's multi hundreds of millions of dollars of ARR. Every board deck is still 90% product slides. And so I think argue in love with the product roadmap is really the key question to answer in any investment and particularly at the later stages of investment versus the early stage, which I think everyone has sort of accepted that is an important question.”
2020-11-17 · Invest Like the Best · Niki Scevak - Wild Hearts and Wild Ideas - [Invest Like the Best, EP.200] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sort of ask a series of questions, and even founders can go onto our website and see the 40 questions we ask ourselves when we make an investment decision. The most important one is, are we in love with the product roadmap? That is the only sort of long-term determinant of a great business that can continue to grow over a long period of time. Yes, there are a lot of other things that need to go right, but essentially at the heart of it is this idea of a great product being built that has the responsibility to fully solve a problem. And so we've even measured this in follow-on investments where in the beginning the fundraising decks are full of product slides. Over time in each different board meeting as time goes on, the board deck loses product slides and adds sales efficiency and whatever financial sort of sales and marketing reporting. And really that if you track the board decks of companies over time, the percentage of sales and marketing slides versus the”
2020-11-17 · Invest Like the Best · Niki Scevak - Wild Hearts and Wild Ideas - [Invest Like the Best, EP.200] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think right from the beginning, it is this sense of responsibility to fully solve a problem. You can choose to bite off little pieces, but I think it's beginning to get started. But always from the beginning, it's this sense of responsibility to make sure that problem is completely solved. Back to the example of Zooks, they weren't just building the software. They had the audaciousness to completely reimagine what the vehicle might look like. They have the ambition to create a consumer service around that offering. It's really that, I think, sense of responsibility. Obviously, Apple is probably the greatest example of someone taking responsibility for a delightful end product rather than being happy to be a cog in the wheel or being happy to be a piece of the daisy chain.”
2020-11-17 · Invest Like the Best · Niki Scevak - Wild Hearts and Wild Ideas - [Invest Like the Best, EP.200] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think the original thesis was let the worker make the decision to buy the product rather than the important senior IT leader make the decision. And that is non-controversial now. But back then it was controversial for all types of enterprise software, whether it was begrudgingly you can do that for the first million ARR, but it's going to run out at 10 million ARR and then companies started to prove that to be wrong. And then it was, well, you can do that for SMBs, but for enterprise, big grown-up enterprises, that's never going to work. And then that was disproven. So I think particularly if you look at just a big customer acquisition wave, I think those who started call it a decade ago with the idea that the world's largest organizations would just love to buy the software in this sort of thousand credit card decentralized decision that is horrifying to a CIO way and that would be the best way to build a company with the best quality of growth and efficiency. That was very unique that perhaps now is accepted.”
2020-11-17 · Invest Like the Best · Niki Scevak - Wild Hearts and Wild Ideas - [Invest Like the Best, EP.200] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In case they were buying keywords for Enterprise Wiki for 10 cents a click, it's probably $100 a click. There's always this sort of temporal nature of customer acquisition. And if you've heard of it or it's a playbook, that's usually an anti-signal. If it sounds strange or it's some unique way that a company has approached customer acquisition, that's usually a very encouraging signal.”
2020-11-17 · Invest Like the Best · Niki Scevak - Wild Hearts and Wild Ideas - [Invest Like the Best, EP.200] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I frame it as going back to what do you want to find out in the seed round. And I think you want to find out who's a good customer and who's a bad one. So in the customer acquisition sense, do people say yes quickly and do they complain about price as two guiding principles of is someone a good customer or a bad one? I think in terms of customer acquisition approaches, it's this concept of is there a unique insight into customer acquisition if people are repeating playbook is a very dirty word in customer acquisition. playbook by definition means that someone has already succeeded with it and probably a number of other people have already succeeded with it and so by the time it is a playbook you are the thousandth person to be implementing that playbook and again it's this sort of unoriginal thinking means that you're unlikely to succeed because you're too late to the game i think when you have strange ideas around customer acquisition whether it is”
2020-11-17 · Invest Like the Best · Niki Scevak - Wild Hearts and Wild Ideas - [Invest Like the Best, EP.200] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think interestingly, in the software world, if you put it on a 30-year arc, I would say that the gross margins have gone in a one-way direction down when you just sold a software on a CD-ROM that's super high margin compared to selling a SaaS company where you have to pay the AWS bills. So that first minor movement downwards. But actually, even when building something around that uses AI to fundamentally reimagine a product, that's currently a lower gross margin software business because of the cost primarily of GPU compute such that the sort of newer companies are testing this slightly lower gross margin, hopefully it becomes cheaper and cheaper, such that it returns to higher gross margin. But there's also the case to say that just like profits are to be competed away, perhaps high gross margin is to be competed away and software businesses will have to become lower gross margin businesses over time.”
2020-11-17 · Invest Like the Best · Niki Scevak - Wild Hearts and Wild Ideas - [Invest Like the Best, EP.200] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Higher is better. I think of it as room for error or margin of safety. If you think about businesses in a traditional sense and lower gross margin businesses, particularly businesses that require you to hold inventory, it's simply just lower margin for error. If you grow quickly, you actually have a higher chance of failure in those types of environments versus in a software company. And so going back to this concept of why do all of these unqualified people succeed in the grandest of ways? And I think it is a little bit because software businesses with high gross margins and no inventory, it's like this training wheels environment. It's very hard if you're growing to screw it up. Certainly if you build something that no one cares for, you're going to fail. But if you succeed, there's not that risk of dying because you are succeeding versus in the sort of low gross margin world or the have to have inventory world, there's actually a high chance of dying when you're successful.”
2020-11-17 · Invest Like the Best · Niki Scevak - Wild Hearts and Wild Ideas - [Invest Like the Best, EP.200] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it's the increasing ambition of the products and the solutions to problems. So I think AI is, I almost cringe saying it because it is such a big word and such a generic word, but it really has provided the prompt for founders to be able to really fundamentally reimagine existing products if you build it with the heart of AI. But perhaps even more interestingly is to solve different problems now that we're impossible to solve with software before. So self-driving cars, diagnosing medical conditions, discovering drugs, all of these endeavors that were previously impossible, but now with the advent of AI, I think AI becoming so cheap is more of the near-term catalyst to be able to again solve these problems that previously would have been unimaginably solved with technology.”
2020-11-17 · Invest Like the Best · Niki Scevak - Wild Hearts and Wild Ideas - [Invest Like the Best, EP.200] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Similar wide bread breadth of companies and ideas and so on, it's Australia and New Zealand are not going to win the most gold medals, but they will win some gold medals and we think an increasing amount of them. And so whether that's in clean meat or space or robotaxis or industrial robotics or healthcare AI or these are all the same contests that Kiwi and Aussie founders are competing in. It's just in a lower volume and you might only meet one person who's competing in that event versus in Silicon Valley where you might meet 50.”
2020-11-17 · Invest Like the Best · Niki Scevak - Wild Hearts and Wild Ideas - [Invest Like the Best, EP.200] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“CIO or the senior important person at an organization simply because it's very hard to speak to someone when the time zones don't overlap. It's very hard to manage a remote sales office for hiring someone that takes 12 months to sign the first big sale and so on and so forth. Instead, let the product be the salesperson. Let someone use it for free, put down their credit card and let hundreds or even thousands of those decisions play out such that you end up in the same result. You end up with sort of millions of dollars in ACV from a very large company.”
2020-11-17 · Invest Like the Best · Niki Scevak - Wild Hearts and Wild Ideas - [Invest Like the Best, EP.200] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, when we started eight years ago, there was this sort of paradox there were a set of successful companies, but there were no real successful venture investors that were built in Australia, I think, back in the 2012 time period, Axcel was the most successful Australian venture capitalist, even though they didn't have any local office they'd invested in Atlassian and campaign monitor and 99 designs and a few others. I think the sort of type of company back then and the original thesis of Blackbird was the idea that you could build a global software company from Australia. Australia is far away from anywhere else and is in the worst time zone probably compared to the majority of the global population. And so you had this particular constraint that led to many of those global software companies to build themselves, to build their customer acquisition philosophies around bottom-up adoption of their products. And Atlassian was one of the sort of pioneers of sell your product to the worker who actually uses it rather than sell your product to the”
2020-11-17 · Invest Like the Best · Niki Scevak - Wild Hearts and Wild Ideas - [Invest Like the Best, EP.200] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's more technical milestones. Again, it's more of this psychology of do they get a lot done with a small amount of time and a small amount of resources. People generally are very smart, but smart people divide into those who talk about things and those who go and do things. And it's silly and abstracted to say, but it's so rare to see people who just go and do things, don't complain about the sort of non-perfect set of structures or non-perfect set of resources. They just go and do something. And so I think that do things rather than talk about things is another super positive signal at the early stages.”
2020-11-17 · Invest Like the Best · Niki Scevak - Wild Hearts and Wild Ideas - [Invest Like the Best, EP.200] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think when you invest, it's on the premise of is the person asking the right questions rather than do they have the right answers? And so I think in the first initial 12 to 18 months, usually that is around, are you building something that people care deeply about? So anything around making a transformational impact on that customer's life, whether that is in their working life or otherwise, do they completely change the way that they spend their day or is it a sort of minor optimization or they use it occasionally or it's one of many things they might use. So on some general level, you're looking for that sort of deep customer love. I was described sort of the definition of a business is happy repeat customers. So how obsessed is the founder over that degree of happiness in their customers? So a small amount of evidence around that is forward predictor of great success. Sometimes in more sort of technical endeavors,”
2020-11-17 · Invest Like the Best · Niki Scevak - Wild Hearts and Wild Ideas - [Invest Like the Best, EP.200] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That diversity of thought right from the beginning. And as you scale that, you think of that as 5,000 people per year. You have a real chance to have an impact into how every startup team is constructed in Australia and New Zealand. And could it be 20% of all employees of every startup that came through this program? And once you get to that stage, I think that's the measure of something that has an impact at scale. And then the other idea is even to create a city. So if you think about what did the most ambitious people do 300 years ago, they sailed around the world and they founded countries and set up cultures through legal systems and the American dream as a mission. And could you create even a startup as a set of people and could you create something where it attracted tens of thousands of people in that sort of scale to a single location with a single set of shared values and a citywide Aesop and so on and so forth?”
2020-11-17 · Invest Like the Best · Niki Scevak - Wild Hearts and Wild Ideas - [Invest Like the Best, EP.200] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think there's two answers. One is more of a practical near term answer and one perhaps a little wild, long-term answer, I think in the beginning, it's about helping startups, what does that mean? You give a company money and they spend all of that money hiring people and building the team that determines whether the company will be successful. So it's all about people. We have started through StartMate, which is an accelerator that is under the umbrella of Blackbird, which is translating people in corporate careers, banking, consulting, legal, whatever it might be, and helping them navigate the shift into working for a startup. And so it's an accelerator, but instead of for founding a company, it's for someone's career. And we have scaled that. We did program for five people in the beginning last year. Now the cohort is 100 people. We would hope next year that 300 people would go through that program. We've decided to focus it on women and helping teams build with.”
2020-11-17 · Invest Like the Best · Niki Scevak - Wild Hearts and Wild Ideas - [Invest Like the Best, EP.200] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The management company, if you think about all of the world's greatest private equity firms, I think they've done a much better job of building these durable teams and durable organizations. And so while that hasn't happened in Venture, it's more of an anomaly compared to other sort of areas of investment management. I would say Rick and I, my fellow co-founder, Rick Beck and I in Blackbird were totally of this view. We wanted to be the Craigslist.”
2020-11-17 · Invest Like the Best · Niki Scevak - Wild Hearts and Wild Ideas - [Invest Like the Best, EP.200] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Was a blog post by Aaron Hoffman early last year that said that why aren't the management companies of venture capital firms as ambitious as the companies that they invest in? And if you think about the traditional arc of Silicon Valley venture firms and the greatest ones, it's structured more like a suburban accounting firm where you have either people's names on the door or a series of partners and then a couple of support staff and that's sort of it and the sort of default story is that the old guys hang on too long for the young folk who generate the more recent returns and then it all collapses when those people leave and start their own firms and the cycle repeats. If you think about all of the great lessons that you get to learn as an investor in these companies, I think the universal one is how to build a great company and how to build a great culture that attracts the greatest people and have them do their best work and the design of an organization. And so I think taking the lessons of those great companies and applying it.”
2020-11-17 · Invest Like the Best · Niki Scevak - Wild Hearts and Wild Ideas - [Invest Like the Best, EP.200] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You create a great venture capital firm outside of the United States? And that's really the mission. And we think if there's enough gold medals being won by Australians and New Zealanders, certainly we have the chance to be one of the best venture firms in the world.”
2020-11-17 · Invest Like the Best · Niki Scevak - Wild Hearts and Wild Ideas - [Invest Like the Best, EP.200] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think even the way you described you don't want to be the best Australian venture capital firm that's a tallest dwarf contest. We want to be one of the best venture investors in the world. And I think to me, the venture capital industry is a single global industry. So think of it as the Olympics and hopefully Blackbird can be the Australia and New Zealand's Olympic teams. And we're all competing to win gold medals. I think people acknowledge that different countries win different amounts of gold medals, but we want to help Australians and New Zealand founders win the most gold medals. And there's one prize, this sort of global prize of great companies. I think at the moment it's not a controversial thought to think that great companies can be created outside of Silicon Valley or even outside of America. Obviously with China, but also Shopify and Atlasian and so on, these are some of the best companies in the world that have been created outside of the United States. The sort of second corollary to that is”
2020-11-17 · Invest Like the Best · Niki Scevak - Wild Hearts and Wild Ideas - [Invest Like the Best, EP.200] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Minute of the day, they're thinking about it in the shower when they go to bed and so on. And really that depth of thought and that clarity of thought is obvious when you see it and when you hear it has been, I would say the best forward predictor of success is the ambition worthy and has the sort of founding team thought about it in such a detailed way, the sort of love theres and horowitz way of thinking about the idea maze. I think that's again a similar concept, how deeply has someone thought about it and what are the words in which they used to describe the mission that they're on.”
2020-11-17 · Invest Like the Best · Niki Scevak - Wild Hearts and Wild Ideas - [Invest Like the Best, EP.200] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think it's the clarity of thought. It's starting with the beginning of a great mission and the way that founders describe it. Essentially companies are a set of people, whether that be the employees that choose to work for the company and all of the investors and partners and so on. And so if you think about what is scalable in the world, people traditionally think of software. But if you think of the original scalable technology of the world and is language, and I think people come together around the stories and cultures and so on such that if you have the best people, it becomes more likely that a company will succeed. If a person has thought very deeply about it, again, investors always ask this false question of is it the product, is it the founder, is it the market? Is it the ideas aren't worth anything? I would challenge the last point and the sort of ideas matter so much. And particularly when you see getting back to if it is founders' life's work, they think about it every single”
2020-11-17 · Invest Like the Best · Niki Scevak - Wild Hearts and Wild Ideas - [Invest Like the Best, EP.200] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The name comes from the Blackbird fighter jet, which originally Lockheed Martin had tried to build the world's fastest fighter jet and really the cancer of middle management and a big company environment. They spent a lot of money and have spent a lot of time and achieved very much. Small group of people within the organization broke away. Into a sort of skunk works team without that cancer of middle management, without that inhibiting structure of a big company. You had this idea of success maximization. They had to succeed versus failure minimization versus the big company where if you don't fail, you survive versus in a startup where if you don't succeed, you don't survive.”
2020-11-17 · Invest Like the Best · Niki Scevak - Wild Hearts and Wild Ideas - [Invest Like the Best, EP.200] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We first met a guy called Tim Kentley Clay in early 2014, and Tim is the founder of a company called Zox, which is a robo taxi company. And back in early 2014, it was a wild idea to think that a car could drive itself. And it was even... Think a wilder idea that you would take the responsibility to develop all of the software, all of the hardware, all of the consumer service to bring that into kind of a perfect realization that allowed consumers to love a service. And so I think certainly we took inspiration from Tim and Jesse at Zeux, and since then for what a wild idea might look like.”
2020-11-17 · Invest Like the Best · Niki Scevak - Wild Hearts and Wild Ideas - [Invest Like the Best, EP.200] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Ambition being this honeypot or ambitions leading to this network effect of progress. If you have a grand mission, I think you're more likely to succeed in business than if you don't have a grand ambition. People, particularly in countries outside of America, suffer from this confidence problem and fall into this trap of if I'm half as ambitious, more likely to succeed versus actually if you're half as ambitious, you're half as likely to succeed. And so when spending your life on a business, make sure the mission is of grand ambition.”
2020-11-17 · Invest Like the Best · Niki Scevak - Wild Hearts and Wild Ideas - [Invest Like the Best, EP.200] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think Peter Thiel describes it as a vision that is charismatic, the sort of wild idea is an ambition that is a honeypot for the best people. So whether it is the best employees who will join and do their best work, it's the best investors that will invest at the best valuations, it's the best partners that will sign very quickly and work with a company because of its mission. And so the idea of”
2020-11-17 · Invest Like the Best · Niki Scevak - Wild Hearts and Wild Ideas - [Invest Like the Best, EP.200] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it comes in the clues of how they've spent their time before starting the company. As an example, Canva and Melanie, the CEO, her life's work has been about democratizing design, allowing everyone to create great design. And before the formation of Canva, she taught design at university. She had started a business with her partner Cliff and fellow co-founder at Canva Fusion Books, which was a high school yearbook business that allowed high school students and teachers and parents to collaborate and create high school yearbooks. you see these sort of clues of how people have spent their time before even starting the company.”
2020-11-17 · Invest Like the Best · Niki Scevak - Wild Hearts and Wild Ideas - [Invest Like the Best, EP.200] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A wild heart is someone who is doing their life's work, and I think all of the great businesses of our time started with this great mission that takes decades to accomplish. And it's really looking for that type of person that is willing to solve a big problem over a long period of time. And I think also the sort of concept of someone not from central castings. So you look at all of the most valuable companies in the world. At the beginning, the founder was not a qualified CEO. In fact, they most had barely finished university or just finished university. Google just finished university, Microsoft and Facebook didn't finish university. And so the word wild references that typically people do not look like they're from central casting and we would much rather invest in someone who is hungry rather than proven.”
2020-11-17 · Invest Like the Best · Niki Scevak - Wild Hearts and Wild Ideas - [Invest Like the Best, EP.200] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source