YouSaid · the spoken record

Nina Achadjian

lines on the record
44
first
2024-12-19
most recent
2024-12-19
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

  1. “Well, again, I think that there were some big things that folks were waiting for, potentially the election and again, like what's going on with rates. I think those are really important. And so hopefully we'll see the IPO market open up very soon.”

    2024-12-19 · Odd Lots · Nina Achadjian on What It Takes to Win in VC Right Now · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “Yeah, well, I think everyone's been holding their breath to see what happened with the election, as well as how the stock market performs given the question around interest rates and inflation and what's the real strength of the underlying economy. You know, I think that there are a ton of companies that are having these conversations in boardrooms saying, okay, when the IPO market opens, are we ready? And they're getting their systems, their CFO, their IR person all ramped up.”

    2024-12-19 · Odd Lots · Nina Achadjian on What It Takes to Win in VC Right Now · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “Exactly, exactly. It's not like a sales AI agent. Let's put that aside. It's basically like a command box where you say, okay, please book my trip to Italy and here are some broad parameters. And here's my credit card. Go. So a lot of companies are building agents, but not a lot of people are thinking about the infrastructure or operating system for these agents to interact with one another. You know, if you think about it, probably an agent will have to take your credit card and then interact with another agent that is doing the hotel or flight booking, et cetera, and being able to share personal data or financial transactions is really a complex problem. And so one of the investments that we're excited about is building the operating system for these agents to be able to interact with one another.”

    2024-12-19 · Odd Lots · Nina Achadjian on What It Takes to Win in VC Right Now · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “Well, we have an unannounced seed investment that I'll talk about. It's in the agent space. So everyone is talking about agents, right? Like agent for this, agent for that, you know, one agent to rule them all.”

    2024-12-19 · Odd Lots · Nina Achadjian on What It Takes to Win in VC Right Now · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “Investing in absolutely. I'd say like time to Europe as a market for US based companies is getting shorter and shorter. And that's also one of the reasons why people pick index because they want a VC fund that kind of has one team across Europe and the US that can help these entrepreneurs expand from being only US customers to then, of course, a huge market in Europe.”

    2024-12-19 · Odd Lots · Nina Achadjian on What It Takes to Win in VC Right Now · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “Five to ten minute drive of where this conference was, everyone from Dario at Anthropic to Ali from Databricks and the list goes on and on and on. Fantastic. So I think the density of talent still in San Francisco. But Google had a huge deep mind presence in Europe, for example, and we've been seeing a lot of companies spin out of DeepMind and Meta there. I think Mistral is a great example. They're one of the fastest growing open source models. So there's definitely talent there because a lot of these big tech labs have had presence in Europe for a while in AI.”

    2024-12-19 · Odd Lots · Nina Achadjian on What It Takes to Win in VC Right Now · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “Yeah, well, I think, again, it all comes back to the density of talent, which I know everybody was talking about like the Doom loop in San Francisco and all of that. But I have to tell you, I was at a conference a block away from here yesterday, Eric Newcomer's cerebral value conference. And literally it was like probably the top 15 minds in AI that all of their offices are within a”

    2024-12-19 · Odd Lots · Nina Achadjian on What It Takes to Win in VC Right Now · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “And so I think there's like 1,400 SaaS companies that were unicorns in 2021 and 2020 that haven't fundraised in the last like 18 to 24 months. And that's because they have extended their cash runway. I expect those to come to market. I also expect a lot of consolidation to happen amongst startups. There are so many companies going after the same space and just kind of like race to the bottom in terms of unit economics to like undercut one another. I think if they're not success, if one of them is not successful in breaking out is the clear winner, I could see startups starting to join forces and go after the space together.”

    2024-12-19 · Odd Lots · Nina Achadjian on What It Takes to Win in VC Right Now · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “Oh, yeah, there's so many of them. I mean, I focus a lot on vertical software, which is software for one particular industry. So software for architects, software for car mechanics shops to run their business, software for HVAC, electrical, and plumbing to run their business. And these are incredibly important, mission-critical industries that I think AI will certainly be a feature for. But fundamentally, there are things that people need software to run their everyday business, like dispatch or customer CRM or figuring out procurement and supply chain type of problems. And so I think that there is a huge opportunity. The challenge is though, a lot of those companies raise at very high prices. Then they cut burn, they laid off a bunch of people in 2022, 2023, and as a result, their growth rate has stalled.”

    2024-12-19 · Odd Lots · Nina Achadjian on What It Takes to Win in VC Right Now · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “That does seem to be a strategy. But I mean, if your core function is not AI native, and then within AI, valuations range from even half a billion dollars for some new seed companies because they're run by incredible technologists. So I think there's a broad sense that this is real. The market is huge and people want to have the right ships on the table. There's also a lot of demand for these limited amount of individuals that have very specific AI talents and experience. There's not that many of them in the world. And most of them are in San Francisco, where all the VCs are. So basically, I think it's a combination of limited talent supply for people going out to solve really, really hard problems within AI and then also capital that's kind of flocking to those types of individuals. And supply drives demand and supply is what drives valuations. And so that's why we're seeing that.”

    2024-12-19 · Odd Lots · Nina Achadjian on What It Takes to Win in VC Right Now · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “Yeah, so could not be a bigger difference between AI company valuations and non-AI company evaluations. Like, for example, if you are just a regular SaaS company and you're making a million dollars of revenue, it's really hard to raise over a hundred million dollar valuation, which would be 100x multiple.”

    2024-12-19 · Odd Lots · Nina Achadjian on What It Takes to Win in VC Right Now · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “Or HM dress, or whatever it was, he was like, let's preserve the human creativity and then just use AI to automate all the painful tasks of taking that sketch into something that can be totally manufactured.”

    2024-12-19 · Odd Lots · Nina Achadjian on What It Takes to Win in VC Right Now · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “Okay, so let's think about the physical world. So this table, these chairs were sitting on, the sneakers you're wearing, all of the items that you see in the physical world have been designed by an industrial designer. So an industrial designer usually starts with a sketch like zero to one, they draw the next Air Jordan's Ferrari, whatever it is. And then they have to do this painful process of taking this sketch and turning it into something that can actually be manufactured. The textures, the color library, the specific way that the shoe shows up or the materials that they can use. And that is a very manual process. So almost a year ago, I invested in this company called Vizcom, the founder Jordan worked as a car designer for Honda. And instead of replacing the human creativity of drawing that next incredible IKEA chair.”

    2024-12-19 · Odd Lots · Nina Achadjian on What It Takes to Win in VC Right Now · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “And then, second, you really have to take a view of where is your user spending time? You have to really understand their day-to-day. And just throwing an AI feature that reads, for example, like legal contracts is not enough. You either got to be like, okay, this is the version control. Or you're going to get like so much more information, or it's just such a more delightful tool that you as a lawyer spend your entire day in. That's the companies that we're excited about because otherwise it's really a race to the bottom of how much you can charge on top of these foundation models.”

    2024-12-19 · Odd Lots · Nina Achadjian on What It Takes to Win in VC Right Now · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  15. “Yeah, so I think actually history teaches us a lot about this. If you think about SaaS software as a service, there's no technical mode. If somebody wanted to rebuild, there was always this question that a lot of VCs would ask is like, if Google threw 10 engineers at this, would they build it? And like an honest founder would be like, yeah, you know, if they threw 100 engineers, they'd build it in this amount of time. But I think finding one white spaces that have been ignored, which I like to invest in a lot of what I call like the forgotten functions and forgotten industries, which we can talk about”

    2024-12-19 · Odd Lots · Nina Achadjian on What It Takes to Win in VC Right Now · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  16. “Yeah, my view is kind of dust is settling and consolidating with these players. And I think it's really hard to catch up. I think what's been really interesting, however, is these smaller models that are very domain specific. So they're really good at one particular industry or one problem they solve. And their value proposition is not we're going to be better than the underlying models. It's actually, hey, as the underlying models get better and AI generally gets better, our technology also improves. It's like rising tide lifts all boats. And they figured out how to incorporate AI, not to just be this feature, but actually something that solves a real workflow problem for their end customers and has a real ROI. And so I think that's the areas that we're really excited about.”

    2024-12-19 · Odd Lots · Nina Achadjian on What It Takes to Win in VC Right Now · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  17. “I mean, yes and no. For example, I think you do need to have a view on foundation models, right? These are the models that power ChatGPT and Claude and Gemini and some of these others because there's still many, many entrepreneurs that are coming out and saying, hey, I want to build like a better, faster model. And I'm going to raise hundreds of millions of dollars. And I think having a view on okay, has it already consolidated? Have we kind of already reached like the horizontal model penetration with these four or five players? Like that's definitely a market view that you need to take.”

    2024-12-19 · Odd Lots · Nina Achadjian on What It Takes to Win in VC Right Now · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  18. “Yeah, I mean, I think the analogy is probably number one, like you're serving customers at the end of the day and for us. We're serving our LPs and entrepreneurs. Number two, you actually have to be like quite collaborative because one person is like making the layers and the dough like super thin. Someone else is perfecting like the pistachio like mixture that's like perfect. Somebody else is doing like the sugar syrup and to bring it all together, it really does take a village. And I think the analogy is to build an amazing company. It takes a village. And then third, you just got to like roll with the punches. Like, you know, the oven goes down or somebody doesn't show up to work or whatever it is. You just got to roll up your sleeves and help those things, I think, have been good training grounds for being a VC.”

    2024-12-19 · Odd Lots · Nina Achadjian on What It Takes to Win in VC Right Now · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  19. “And so I was really fortunate to get this offer at City, and I really wanted to be on the high-old Bondas because the number one trader, this guy Scott Goodwin, who now runs an incredible fund himself called Diameter, was running that desk. However, I had this terrible time of graduating college in 2008. And so a lot of the funds called individuals and were like, hey, would you defer your offer for a year? And I had like my apartment in New York setup, roommate the whole thing. So long story short, I applied for a Rockefeller Fellowship, which asks you if you could go anywhere in the world, where would you go and what would you do? And I decided to write a proposal to work at Abaclava Bakery because food is the perfect intersection between Armenian and Turkish culture. And so, yeah, when I got it, call my parents, they were like,”

    2024-12-19 · Odd Lots · Nina Achadjian on What It Takes to Win in VC Right Now · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  20. “It was just like I knew that it would take so long for me to actually do what I thought a lawyer did based on what I saw on TV. So I asked a couple of my friends who had done some finance internships what their experience was like. And most of them were investment banking, which honestly sounded very similar to doing the, you know, lawyer path of just sitting and doing spreadsheets and PowerPoints. But a few of my friends had done trading. And I just, it just struck me as, wow, like here's something where you can like. Form conviction very quickly, you have an opportunity to put your money where your mouth is, and I was like, this seems like the most intense job I could possibly do after college. So if I do this as like a training ground, worst case scenario, any other job after this would be like a cake walk.”

    2024-12-19 · Odd Lots · Nina Achadjian on What It Takes to Win in VC Right Now · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  21. “Yes, sure. So I grew up in the Bay Area. I'm Armenian. My parents moved to US from Iraq actually. We're part of the Armenians that originally lived in the southern part of Turkey before the Armenian genocide. And basically my parents raised me with this philosophy that I was so lucky to have the right to work in the US. My dad, who had the equivalent of a PhD in electrical engineering, when he moved here, he had to wait seven years for a green card. And so, you know, I grew up with this perspective that, wow, I'm so lucky to be able to even work in the United States and, of course, speak English. And so that really always drove me and of course my Armenian heritage. And so when I got to college, as many immigrant kids do, it was either like become a lawyer or a doctor. And I thought, you know, I'd love to be a lawyer. So I originally decided to study pre-law and then I interned at a law firm one summer and I was like, this is just.”

    2024-12-19 · Odd Lots · Nina Achadjian on What It Takes to Win in VC Right Now · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  22. “And that's where a lot of people, I think, feel very uncomfortable because it's one thing if you can sell a product. It's another thing if you can convince someone to take a bet on you as a board member and being able to articulate like your personal pitch and why you I think is really important.”

    2024-12-19 · Odd Lots · Nina Achadjian on What It Takes to Win in VC Right Now · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  23. “Yeah, exactly. The dopamine hit of like, I'm good at this. At VC, like in VC, you really don't get that because it's like years before you know. And anyone that tells you like any company has only been like good news and up into the right is lying to you because it is such an emotional roller coaster. Things go wrong. You know, things go right. You think you're a genius one day and then the next day it's very humbling. So I think like those are core attributes that you should have. And then finally, of course, you need to be able to sell yourself.”

    2024-12-19 · Odd Lots · Nina Achadjian on What It Takes to Win in VC Right Now · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  24. “So oftentimes VC firms are pretty lean. That means a lot of responsibility for a young person. So that means, hey, you met a great founder at a conference. Like it's on you to figure out like how we get a second meeting. You know, do you write them a really thoughtful email? Do you invite them to this dinner? Follow up, follow up, follow up. And then the third thing that I don't think a lot of people really appreciate is these very long feedback cycles, right? So again, type A people are usually like very, you know, driven by positive affirmation because, you know, you do something, you do well, great. Next thing, next thing you get.”

    2024-12-19 · Odd Lots · Nina Achadjian on What It Takes to Win in VC Right Now · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  25. “No one is going to tell you how to spend your time. Of course, like you get some guidance on, hey, find a market, go deep, find the founders. So that's one, thrive in ambiguity. The second thing is being able to take the ball.”

    2024-12-19 · Odd Lots · Nina Achadjian on What It Takes to Win in VC Right Now · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  26. “Lot of type A people try to get into VC, myself included, right? Like where it's like, give me the milestones, tell me what the goalposts are, and I'm just going to like crush them. Well, when you get to VC, you don't really have that. It's like make magic, make money, find great entrepreneurs. And you're like, where do I start? So you really need to love thriving in ambiguity and kind of breaking down.”

    2024-12-19 · Odd Lots · Nina Achadjian on What It Takes to Win in VC Right Now · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  27. “You know, if even that sentence inspires you, you know, I would certainly encourage you to think about venture capital. The beauty is right now there's so much information about VC. When I tried to get into venture capital back in 2015, 2016, there was nothing. Like VC firms didn't have websites. There was no YouTube videos, podcasts. So the first thing I would say is try to determine if you get excited listening to invest like the best or some of these a lot of these VCs that share their journey and how they think about their day to day and what the trade-offs are of investing at this stage. Second, I would say in order to be good at this job, you kind of have to have some raw ingredients. One of them is definitely thriving in ambiguity. So when you show up at a VC fund, usually you're given a laptop with a blank calendar.”

    2024-12-19 · Odd Lots · Nina Achadjian on What It Takes to Win in VC Right Now · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  28. “Yeah, so first, it goes without saying for me at least that I think this is one of the most incredible jobs in the entire world because you are getting to be on the front row seat of technology and innovation and the people you interact with. I mean, every day I have to pinch myself that I'm getting to meet these. This is how tracing that. Yeah, it's incredible, right? Like, you get to meet these incredible people who are putting their life on the line to pursue something because they think, you know, this business or this product or this broken system needs to be fixed. And so”

    2024-12-19 · Odd Lots · Nina Achadjian on What It Takes to Win in VC Right Now · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  29. “And so I try to map out the entire process of, okay, if they're going to sign by x date, and most likely we're going to give them a term sheet on this date, what needs to happen in that gap of time? And it could be like this touch point, this thoughtful note, this special event that we're going to invite them to. And so What I do in which order.”

    2024-12-19 · Odd Lots · Nina Achadjian on What It Takes to Win in VC Right Now · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  30. “Talking to other people that know them and trying to understand what they care about. And then in terms of the winning, you know, I think the hardest part that a lot of people don't share is once you've issued a term sheet to someone and you know that they have term sheets from other VC firms like what happens in that gap of time until they sign.”

    2024-12-19 · Odd Lots · Nina Achadjian on What It Takes to Win in VC Right Now · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  31. “Yeah, well, I don't want to share all my secrets. To share one. Okay, okay. So look, I think winning is this incredible art where you have to really try to get as many data points about the entrepreneur as you can. So for example, even before I meet a founder, let's say that I'm really excited about and have a thesis about, I will watch every single podcast, video, Twitter, LinkedIn post to try to gauge like, what is this person like? Are they going to respond to a super aggressive, hey, I'm leaning, let's do this, let's go, which some founders love that. Or are they more like, I want to get to know you? Maybe I invite them over to my house. They get to meet my husband and my kids. Maybe we bond over our love for Formula One, or maybe they want to hear about my values as a board member. So I try to custom tailor the interaction with the founder based on the data that I can get outside in. And of course, that means”

    2024-12-19 · Odd Lots · Nina Achadjian on What It Takes to Win in VC Right Now · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  32. “So I think less players now and then also founders have really recentered on the original value proposition of venture capital, which is having someone along your side who can really help you build this business.”

    2024-12-19 · Odd Lots · Nina Achadjian on What It Takes to Win in VC Right Now · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  33. “Getting the real unfiltered view of what's going on in the company, it becomes very difficult to actually know, like in these private companies, what are the challenges, what's going well, being able to have that authentic conversation with the entrepreneur. Now, a lot of those people have exited a lot of the smaller funds have not been able to raise a second time fund. I think that the players have consolidated back to a lot of these enduring platforms and institutions that have kind of gone through a lot of these cycles. And by the way, I think founders realize that those who took the money from those firms that were more like, I think someone else threw this phrase out like ATM, like VC ATM, when times got tough, those players were not around because they weren't on the board. They had totally set expectation of that. And the founders realized they really needed someone to help them walk through how to do their first riff or how to restructure the company or what to do, take a down round or take debt.”

    2024-12-19 · Odd Lots · Nina Achadjian on What It Takes to Win in VC Right Now · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  34. “Happy to give you an example there. So in 2021, yes, absolutely, that's accurate. It was crazy. We'd meet a company at 9 a.m. and by 4 p.m. they would send us a text or an email saying, hey, we have four term sheets. What's your decision? And we sat a lot of those out for a couple reasons. One, we didn't feel like we did our fiduciary duty by actually doing the diligence. And number two, it felt extremely transactional. You know, and I think that there were some players that had very large funds that could afford to do that kind of investing that have really exited the VC game today because they realized that, again, unless you are”

    2024-12-19 · Odd Lots · Nina Achadjian on What It Takes to Win in VC Right Now · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  35. “And so actually being able to convince the entrepreneur that you are the person and the firm that is going to work the hardest, be there for the founder, and also that you have a really specific investment vision and thesis that aligns with their vision, I think is really important. So the process of, you know, once you know you want to invest in this company, actually getting that founder to choose you is actually quite difficult and takes a lot of time. And then there's, of course, being a board member and then finally exiting the company IPO or acquisition.”

    2024-12-19 · Odd Lots · Nina Achadjian on What It Takes to Win in VC Right Now · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  36. “Yeah, so maybe he's taking a step back. So the job of a VC is number one sourcing, which means being able to find interesting opportunities or having those entrepreneurs come to you. Number two is, of course, doing the diligence where you're making sure that the market thesis is right, the product is great, the team is excellent. Number three is winning, which I don't think a lot of people actually talk about. So people think that you sit in this room in San Francisco in this nice office and people just come to you and, you know, you say, oh, yeah, this is a great idea. Where do I sign the check? But that's not actually the case. Usually when you identify a great entrepreneur, chances are somebody else has also recognized this person is spectacular.”

    2024-12-19 · Odd Lots · Nina Achadjian on What It Takes to Win in VC Right Now · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  37. “Well, it probably depends on what you're investing in. Generally, we would do a lot of that technical diligence at the time of investing to make sure that what the founder is saying is built the way that they're presenting it and that there's no loopholes and that we feel really good about the engineering team. So we will often bring in also deeply technical experts to help with that diligence. But in general, I'd say going forward, it's much more on the business building and also giving feedback on the team. At the end of the day, because these companies start so small, the people that they are bringing around the table and what the bar of excellence is for the entrepreneur is really important because that's the foundation of who's going to build that next source code or that next product or that next go-to-market motion. And so that's where we spend the majority of the time, the business and the talent.”

    2024-12-19 · Odd Lots · Nina Achadjian on What It Takes to Win in VC Right Now · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  38. “Yeah, so typically if it's a well-run board meeting, the materials will get out, be sent out 24 hours in advance. And usually it's in a memo format. Actually, a lot of our founders write a CO letter where they say, here's what's on my mind. And it's like stream of consciousness, like what went well, what didn't go well, what they're struggling with, things that they want the board's view on. And then the ideal board meeting is you come in, everybody has looked at what happened in the past quarter, what are the open questions. We collect some data to help the entrepreneur if they're like, hey, I'm thinking about changing my usage from seat base or my pricing from seat base to more like usage base. How has that gone? What other companies?”

    2024-12-19 · Odd Lots · Nina Achadjian on What It Takes to Win in VC Right Now · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  39. “What are some topics? And then before the board meeting, I talked to the CEO and say, like, hey, these are some of the things that are on my mind just so they didn't feel like they were blindsided. So taking that extra effort to feel like an extension of the company, not just like I show up, I grill you at the board meeting and then I go away. Like it's sort of neutral.”

    2024-12-19 · Odd Lots · Nina Achadjian on What It Takes to Win in VC Right Now · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  40. “To know exactly what is going on at a company and not feeling like a lot of founders, I didn't appreciate this for a long time, they would have so much anxiety preparing for a board meeting. You know, they would tell me like the night before they wouldn't sleep. They'd be all worried about what's going to come up in a board meeting. A lot of founders have a fear of getting fired by their board that I never, you know, really thought about or appreciated because for us we're like, it's all about the founder. We're here to back you and your vision. And so I think being able to have a conversation that kind of transcends the board meeting where, for example, on the first company that I took a board seat of, I would actually fly down the day before the board meeting and spend a ton of time with everyone who was going to speak in the board meeting plus they're like minus ones to really get a good sense of what's going on in the company, what are they worried about.”

    2024-12-19 · Odd Lots · Nina Achadjian on What It Takes to Win in VC Right Now · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  41. “Yeah, well, I can tell you at index, we don't pride ourselves on being the cheerleader for a founder. Many VCs. No, many VCs, they show up to board meetings and they're the cheerleaders, which is an important role, right? You want to have that positive energy in the board meeting. For us, we really want to be business builders along with the founders. So what does that mean exactly? Number one, we try to be a mirror to the entrepreneur. So that could mean in a board meeting if they have a blind spot on, let's say, like an executive that they've had around that has been incredibly loyal to them for years. It's often hard to see, you know, because we are going to all of these board meetings in the quarter. We can kind of calibrate, hey, this CRO is excellent, or hey, maybe you've outgrown this particular person and you need to think about augmenting them or putting them into a different role. So being a mirror is difficult because oftentimes you have to share with the entrepreneur something that they don't want to hear or maybe they don't see yet. And so that's one thing that we definitely think about. Second, I think being able to”

    2024-12-19 · Odd Lots · Nina Achadjian on What It Takes to Win in VC Right Now · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  42. “to know the individual because at the end of the day, when you're investing in venture capital, you're really taking a bet on the trajectory of someone, which oftentimes is really hard to see when you're talking to a very young first-time founder.”

    2024-12-19 · Odd Lots · Nina Achadjian on What It Takes to Win in VC Right Now · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  43. “Yeah, well, I think to answer that, it's helpful to know a little bit about the history of index. So index started in Europe almost 30 years ago and was one of the first VC funds to really believe that entrepreneurship could come from anywhere, not just Stanford, Silicon Valley. And we've really had a global mindset. And so today we have offices in New York, San Francisco, and in London. And the way that we think about investing is first and foremost, it is truly all about the people. So when we hear a pitch, we actually spend a ton of time diligencing the entrepreneur and trying to build a foundation of trust to understand what motivates this person, what is truly this person's spike. And we try to see them in many different settings, in our office, in their office, in a comfortable situation, in an uncomfortable situation, in a professional setting, or, you know, having dinner at a restaurant. And so we spend a lot of time really getting.”

    2024-12-19 · Odd Lots · Nina Achadjian on What It Takes to Win in VC Right Now · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  44. “Well, our job is to find exceptional entrepreneurs, really build trust with them, and be part of their journey in building a generational company.”

    2024-12-19 · Odd Lots · Nina Achadjian on What It Takes to Win in VC Right Now · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source