YouSaid · the spoken record

Paige Craig

lines on the record
25
first
2016-03-30
most recent
2016-03-30
sittings or episodes
1
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podcast

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  1. “Closing right now, so I can't tell you the name of the lady, but it is a woman we met via a company I founded years ago in LA. And we decided to do the deal after talking for a couple hours. She spoke to one of my associates and our EIR, and they felt that she was the right personal fit for the company. And I met her and I was just struck by her brilliance, her focus. her passion for her business, the intensity. And there's all these personal qualities. And after two hours of meeting with her, I called my partner Jeff and said, this is the kind of lady that we invest in. And that just happened and we're getting that done right now.”

    2016-03-30 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: 'The Best Seed Investors Hunt' with Paige Craig @ Arena VC · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “The next man, the whole world, but man, let me pick one. I think government is absolutely horrible and screwed up, and it's hard to imagine how a for-profit company can go disrupt it, but I'm very open to founders who are disrupting government. I have no idea what to disrupt, but maybe go fix maybe a maybe magic or like service, but for government, a text in your face to our local government. The other area I'm interested in are nonprofits taking activities that nonprofits have traditionally done, but doing them in a for-profit way. An example that is we invest in a company called Andela, which is changing educating education in Africa right now, and they took on a traditional nonprofit mission of education. They made incredible for-profit model that is changing how we educate kids in Africa right now. So those are two off the top.”

    2016-03-30 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: 'The Best Seed Investors Hunt' with Paige Craig @ Arena VC · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “One of the guys' earliest I met who took time to give me some advice was Brad Feld. And this was back when I was a nothing angel, but Brad gave me tremendous advice on portfolio theory and bet sizing and how to work as an investor. And I respect the fact that he lives a sort of pay it forward life and takes care of people who are levels and levels below him. And I try to practice that I really respect someone who can take time out of their day to help others.”

    2016-03-30 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: 'The Best Seed Investors Hunt' with Paige Craig @ Arena VC · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “I read Mattermark actually. Mattermark is a... Madam Mark Daly, I read it probably two to three times a week. They collect the best articles and blog posts across venture from founders and VCs.”

    2016-03-30 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: 'The Best Seed Investors Hunt' with Paige Craig @ Arena VC · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “Oh man, Lyft, so I don't have to waste time driving. I get lots of work done in my lift cars. I use pipe drive for CRM and to stay in touch with all the deals that we're running. Gmail and the Notes app is rudimentary as it sounds. I use Notes, the Notes app all the time versus Evernote to keep simple lists of things I need to do. That's about it, man.”

    2016-03-30 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: 'The Best Seed Investors Hunt' with Paige Craig @ Arena VC · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “Ender's game. I read that when I was a little kid and it just made me feel like I was so fucking right that I need to go out there and like do my own shit and shape the world.”

    2016-03-30 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: 'The Best Seed Investors Hunt' with Paige Craig @ Arena VC · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “I think the value of my existing portfolio, so I haven't written about this yet, but I wrote probably the very first check into a company back then known as Context Logic, which is now Wish.com. They're a very large e-commerce play now, billions of dollars. That came from an introduction from Brian Wong of Keep. I really believe in staying in touch with all my founders, not just helping them, but great founders attract other great founders. And so they're an amazing filter for me as I think about meeting people. I constantly ask my founders. In fact, we just closed a deal or closing a deal this week in New York, which came via a founder that I backed five years ago. And I really value the founders I work with, not just in the transactional mode of the companies that are building today or the companies that may build five years from now, but my founders have great opinions and great networks of their own. And I really value the introductions they make for me.”

    2016-03-30 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: 'The Best Seed Investors Hunt' with Paige Craig @ Arena VC · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “I guess it depends on your skill. I feel very confident that I can spend days with people. These are long sessions too. Most of these sessions turned into three hours, six hours, eight hours of meeting with people. But that's plenty of time to understand if these are the people that we want to invest. Spending a week with a new team is a lot of time.”

    2016-03-30 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: 'The Best Seed Investors Hunt' with Paige Craig @ Arena VC · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “Move faster, just like founders, VCs need to execute. So these days I decide very quickly, and when I make a decision, I act upon it, which is two different things that people forget. Many times in life, we make decisions in our head and we fail to translate that decision into action. So that Airbnb experience led me to making decisions and then following that up with, you know, an offer or a check or just getting shit done versus letting that decision sit around my head and get permutated and changed over time.”

    2016-03-30 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: 'The Best Seed Investors Hunt' with Paige Craig @ Arena VC · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “I know that the good ones who are early stage are hunters because, you know, if you're further up the ecosystem, if you're a series A, Series B, VC, obviously all the great founders have been funded by someone. So naturally, a lot of your deals are going to come through sort of the trading and sometimes the trapping and sometimes the farm mentality. But as an early stage, you know, a precede seed investor, all the good ones go out there and hunt, which doesn't mean everyone does, but all the good ones do hunt.”

    2016-03-30 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: 'The Best Seed Investors Hunt' with Paige Craig @ Arena VC · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “I'm naturally a hunter. I love going out to the hackathons and the house parties and on the street and to the accelerators. I love to go out there and hunt and meet new founders all the time. That is by far my favorite activity. Yeah, that's my favorite activity.”

    2016-03-30 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: 'The Best Seed Investors Hunt' with Paige Craig @ Arena VC · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “It's a very big difference in terms of responsibility, but I really don't feel it's that much different nowadays because I came into being a VC after having many years of investing my own money. I feel super comfortable in this world. I know how to find deals. I know how to evaluate them. I have my own thesis, my own frameworks. I know everything from the finances, the legal, the operations. I'm really experienced. So I feel very natural moving from being an angel to a VC. The biggest thing is that I have a great team of people around me that can help me close deals and find deals. And we write bigger checks. Other than that, the process of finding the deals and closing the deals seems very, very much like I used to do as an angel just with a better team around me.”

    2016-03-30 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: 'The Best Seed Investors Hunt' with Paige Craig @ Arena VC · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “Going to invest other people's money, you should at least have a few years experience investing your own money or have been investing money another fund and have true performance. Please don't treat Angel of Syndicates as a way. This is my own biased opinion, not Angelist, but don't treat Angelist syndicates as training wheels for becoming an investor is a very real step into being an investor. So please come armed with experience and your own money. That's my own biased opinion.”

    2016-03-30 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: 'The Best Seed Investors Hunt' with Paige Craig @ Arena VC · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “If you want to join a syndicate, I'd say go out there and just look around the list and people. I think most syndicate leads actually respond to the people so you can reach out to them depending on your check size. If it's very small, you may just want to watch people and observe what deals they do and look to their blogs and see you connect with. But at the end of the day, if you're going to go back syndicates, it's a portfolio play. So go find a syndicate lead or two that you like and try to back as many deals as possible. You're better off investing in our portfolio, whether it's mine or Jason or Tim's or someone out there invest in their portfolio not one deal. If you're going to start a syndicate, please do it once you have some real fucking experience because there's a lot of people start syndicates who have no business doing so. But it's the same with people who start funds and have no business doing so.”

    2016-03-30 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: 'The Best Seed Investors Hunt' with Paige Craig @ Arena VC · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  15. “100%. I think it's not necessarily that angelist moves into it. It's that the ticket leads and other players will use Angelist to do pre-seed, to do seed, to do A, to do B.”

    2016-03-30 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: 'The Best Seed Investors Hunt' with Paige Craig @ Arena VC · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  16. “And so you have to have an angelist profile. And by doing that, if you want people to pay attention, you have to put your portfolio up there. And increasingly, Angelus is getting more information about when you did that deal, how much you put into the deal, what your returns are. And so I think Angel is driving more transparency into the environment, which is good for all of us. It's good for founders. It's good for LPs. It's good for syndicate backers to have that transparency.”

    2016-03-30 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: 'The Best Seed Investors Hunt' with Paige Craig @ Arena VC · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  17. “I think it's one more animal in the kingdom. There's going to be late stage funds and there's going to be early stage funds and there's going to be crowdfunding and everyone's figuring out how to work with this new crowdfunding movement. We've adopted our strategy, which is to run a traditional fund plus crowdfunding together. But I don't think it displaces any key categories. I think it does threaten early stage funds that maybe are weaker. I think that Angelists definitely brings more transparency to the world of angel investing and early stage investing. Nowadays, if you're an investor and you're not on Angelist, it's sort of like a couple years ago when people are like, oh, you don't have a LinkedIn profile. How do you actually have a job?”

    2016-03-30 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: 'The Best Seed Investors Hunt' with Paige Craig @ Arena VC · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  18. “think people in general, I mean VCs are just people, so you'll find VCs who are very intellectual, some VCs are very diplomatic, some VCs are very aggressive, some VCs are fucking idiots, some VCs are genius. It's an entire range of unique personality. It's definitely unique personalities. If you look at the tops, you're not going to find so much averages, but you will find very unique and interesting people. I know all investors are not aggressive. It's a different range of personalities.”

    2016-03-30 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: 'The Best Seed Investors Hunt' with Paige Craig @ Arena VC · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  19. “Yeah, I'd say if you know me well, I love the people I work with and back. I can also get extremely irritated and aggressive, which is good. in some situations where we need to fight with regulators or we need to fight with competitors. I can be very, very aggressive. And I have to think of that consciously all the time. Luckily, my co-founder, as well as my girlfriend, Lura, are amazing balances for my natural tendency to want to go into fight mode versus sometimes negotiation mode. And so that's the thing I have to work on and keep my head constantly is that I'm a natural fighter. I'm very aggressive, but that's not always the best answer to every situation.”

    2016-03-30 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: 'The Best Seed Investors Hunt' with Paige Craig @ Arena VC · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  20. “I'd say, so my biggest quality, when I looked around and built our team, so we're a team of seven people here at ARNA. The biggest thing I look for in an investor is someone who innately wants to help. As an investor, I view our biggest responsibility after looking for our LPs and picking the right deals is my job is to want to help a founder. And whether that is stealing talent for you, getting a partnership together, thinking of you and making the right connections every day, I think great investors genuinely love the people in the businesses they invest in and they have a natural quality about themselves where they want to help and serve those founders. So that's by the most defining thing about us.”

    2016-03-30 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: 'The Best Seed Investors Hunt' with Paige Craig @ Arena VC · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  21. “Probably because we tell people about it. I mean, we tell people on email and we tell people in conferences and we tell people, hey, this is what we're doing. We're not ashamed of it. So we talk about it. I think if you look at any of the other top syndicates out there, you'll find that the people who have top syndicates have gone out there unashamedly and told people, hey, I'm doing this my flag. And after that, I think they look at our performance and our history. And some people probably talked to the founders we've backed and realized that we're good people and we actually give a shit about the founders and we have had great results. So I think it's a combination of telling the world, hey, we're doing this. And two, when you do look at what we're doing, we're actually really good at it.”

    2016-03-30 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: 'The Best Seed Investors Hunt' with Paige Craig @ Arena VC · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  22. “Other early stage investors who could all benefit from how we run our fund. And the way we work is that we are reinventors invest. And every time we invest, we share a part of that deal with the angelist community and they get to invest in that deal at the very same terms that we do. And it's an amazing opportunity. This has never existed in the world before. And I wanted to do it very selfishly. I love the cause that Angelist is behind and I wanted to support them and also do well by ourselves.”

    2016-03-30 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: 'The Best Seed Investors Hunt' with Paige Craig @ Arena VC · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  23. “I did it because I talked to Jeff, my partner last year, and sort of I seed funded Angelist about five years ago because I believed in the vision of crowdfunding back then. And finally, this year or last year, it was a reality that we could actually pull in investors, not just the already wealthy with their big funds, but we could run a fund and do well by our LPs and ourselves, but we could also extend investment to other savvy investors who may be businessmen or business women in their own industries. These could be professors. They could be engineers. We could bring early stage investing to the masses of accredited investors by doing syndicates through Angelist. And that excited me, the opportunity to bring in each deal 80 to 90.”

    2016-03-30 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: 'The Best Seed Investors Hunt' with Paige Craig @ Arena VC · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  24. “I think it shaped me because sort of like a novice founder, I walked into investing, knowing nothing, and so having no preconceptions about what was right or what was wrong. And because they didn't know anything, that ignorance led me to doing what I thought was right, which was to focus on the people. And so I've since day one always focused on the characteristics and the behavior and the attitude and the drive of the founders first. That's my first filter for how I think about investing. And then second, I think about the product and the market and the business, which is important, definitely. But to me, the qualities of the founders are the most important, the most enduring part of any company. And the only thing you can truly understand as an early stage investor. And I'd say that my ignorance led me to that realization.”

    2016-03-30 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: 'The Best Seed Investors Hunt' with Paige Craig @ Arena VC · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  25. “Yeah, man, you know, I spent most of my life, the first half of my life in the military and national security community, very different from tech. I built up a private military, sold that business, and about eight years ago decided to go start working with entrepreneurs. And I just started writing checks. And honestly, I didn't know a damn thing when I started. I just tried. Like founders would try. I tried and failed and tried and failed as an angel investor. And eventually over years and years, I think I got a little bit better. I got a little bit more experience. And I realized I love what I do. And I started a fund early this year with one of my best friends, Jeff Lowe, called Arena Ventures. And all we do these days is invest in founders very early, usually the first money in. And we're very active investors. That's sort of the short summary of my life.”

    2016-03-30 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: 'The Best Seed Investors Hunt' with Paige Craig @ Arena VC · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source