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Parker Thompson

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33
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2016-12-21
most recent
2016-12-21
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1
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  1. “Yeah, right, well, awesome. Yeah. So shout out to the Commonwealth, folks. Hopefully, it will be everywhere soon who wants to call Comcast, right?”

    2016-12-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: AngelList's Parker Thompson on How He Evaluates Startup Founders & Why The Move To Series A Is Harder Than Ever? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “The technology is at a place now that it wasn't 10 years ago when maybe some other folks tried to do this. And I think there's some interesting parallels to what happened in the commodification of data center technology. So we're sort of, this is maybe a parallel wave there. And then I think when you look at the incumbents and their cost structure, right, you're competing against incumbents that people hate who are digging ditches to every house. And so if you can solve this last mile problem with wireless, I think you create a fundamentally asymmetric cost structure. And so you've got a great team working in a space with a potentially asymmetric price advantage. And you've got an answer to the question, well, why does it make sense to do this now versus 10 years ago? So we'll see how it goes. I'm actually not sure that I was their first customer, but I am one of the first customers, and we're doing this call over Commonwealth.”

    2016-12-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: AngelList's Parker Thompson on How He Evaluates Startup Founders & Why The Move To Series A Is Harder Than Ever? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “Ah, awesome. My most recent publicly announced I did this one a while ago, but we just announced it last week on the Angelist radio show. I did an investment in a company called Commonwealth Network, which is a wireless ISP. And sort of tell you how I thought about it from a people perspective and from a market perspective. So from a people perspective, the CEO is an old friend of mine. He was one of our early engineers at Pivotal, super talented, left Pivotal to join the Square founding team as an engineer, spent a number of years there, co-founded the startup with one of his colleagues that he'd worked with there for years, which is always a great sign. A good friend of mine had worked with that guy before. We had a lot of data on the team, and I just thought it was a phenomenal team. And looked at the business. And I think Commonwealth is interesting to me because I think it satisfies a couple interesting criteria. One is there's this interesting why now answer, right?”

    2016-12-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: AngelList's Parker Thompson on How He Evaluates Startup Founders & Why The Move To Series A Is Harder Than Ever? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “Crushing it I think for me, I really get a lot of satisfaction out of the day to day, and I think that's hopefully the way that people think about their startups as well. It's like for me, it's like when we talk with founders, I get to meet founders all the time and just sort of help them on their journey to meet with our syndicate leads who are people who are phenomenal people hustling to make something happen, some of them trying to bootstrap their own VC careers, some of them trying to just invest in great friends who are building meaningful things, like helping these folks working with these folks and to some extent the LPs, I mean, they're wonderful folks as well, but, you know, it's great to just meet with folks and get value out of the day-to-day versus the bigger picture stuff, which is a little bit less attached to the customer. So that's, I mean, that's what keeps me going.”

    2016-12-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: AngelList's Parker Thompson on How He Evaluates Startup Founders & Why The Move To Series A Is Harder Than Ever? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “So, my number one, I would say if I had to pick one, I'd go with Stratecary. I just love what Ben Thompson is doing over there, no relation, by the way. Every day I do tech me, I do nozzle, I do a ton of podcast tech and non-tech, but we'll just say, of course, the 20-minute VC, you got to listen to that.”

    2016-12-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: AngelList's Parker Thompson on How He Evaluates Startup Founders & Why The Move To Series A Is Harder Than Ever? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “Be interesting getting a valley's perspective on this. I think from my perspective, when we think about what we're trying to do, we think a lot about helping startups, right? We have a cheesy sign in the office that's like, you know, startups are here to save the world. And it's cheesy, but we believe it's true. And I think the hard thing is, you know, you're sitting there in this business and there's syndicate leads and there's investors and there's sort of all these other people that aren't startups calling you every day. And I think it's really hard to stay focused on the mission when there's all these other folks that are trying to pull you onto their mission. I think if you're not conscious and clear about your mission, it's easy to get pulled off. So I think that happens for other people. It's maybe not unique to us, but I think it's particularly challenging for us just because the startups are busy not calling us, right? They're busy. So our customer doesn't want to talk to us very much, right?”

    2016-12-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: AngelList's Parker Thompson on How He Evaluates Startup Founders & Why The Move To Series A Is Harder Than Ever? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “Apparently, it makes you sick, but a good buddy of mine said recently, he's like, you know, I was reading about the microbiome and I realized that if you're trying to invent a product to destroy your microbiome, it would actually be soylent. And I think that's reflective of a broader concern I have about food science, which is just I believe that there's still so much that we don't know that we want to be really humble about trying to engineer things that we think are the perfect food when in fact it probably is the case that what we've been eating for a long time is the perfect food”

    2016-12-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: AngelList's Parker Thompson on How He Evaluates Startup Founders & Why The Move To Series A Is Harder Than Ever? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “I'm going to give an answer that hopefully no one else has given on the podcast and say the modernist cuisine book, which I think are great because it is great science porn, great food porn, and just phenomenal photography. So if you like science, you like food or you like photography, these books are just excellent.”

    2016-12-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: AngelList's Parker Thompson on How He Evaluates Startup Founders & Why The Move To Series A Is Harder Than Ever? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “Phenomenal company, right? They talking to Deshaun, the founder there, he's like, look, we took the investment, and I forget exactly how long this was after. He's like, look, now we're sitting in a meeting with Procter& Gamble talking about the gap in the market and how they might build products with us to really address our customer base. And I mean, that's a meaningful service that Andreessen is providing that I'm not calling Procter& Gamble and getting to show on that meeting, right? So I think what they're doing is interesting, and I would love to see more people trying to create new models, not for the sake of doing it, but because I think that they're doing something different and people should consider them and go call other BC and say, hey, how are you going to compete against this?”

    2016-12-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: AngelList's Parker Thompson on How He Evaluates Startup Founders & Why The Move To Series A Is Harder Than Ever? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “Yeah, I mean, look, those returns both on an unrealized and realized basis were pretty good from my perspective. I think they said something thoughtful to their investors, which was, as reported by Mark Andreessen, right? Like we're going to go big or we're going to leave a big crater. I think they're aligned with their investors. They seem to be doing pretty well. More importantly, I think, if you're a founder, they do a pretty good job, right? Like what they're doing with their management fees, in my mind, is fairly disruptive, right? Like you and I were talking a little bit for the podcast about the size of that team. I mean, I invested in a company, took a series A from those guys, and it was a African American Health and Beauty company, Amy.”

    2016-12-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: AngelList's Parker Thompson on How He Evaluates Startup Founders & Why The Move To Series A Is Harder Than Ever? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “I'm not sure that when we talk about disruption, I'm very skeptical that where we're going to be in 10 years is everything is initial coin offerings and there's no VCs.”

    2016-12-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: AngelList's Parker Thompson on How He Evaluates Startup Founders & Why The Move To Series A Is Harder Than Ever? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “Yeah, I mean, I think the way that we think about it as angelists, and I started to use this phrase of cap table engineering, right? I think that we are on this trajectory, generally speaking, of founders being able to exert more control over the process, over who invests, over how they invest and whatnot. So I think that's generally where we're going. And I think in large part, that's a function of the amount of money that's trying to pour into the space, right? More money is trying to pour into the space. It creates pressure, right? And the constraint is still talent. It's still these innovative companies, right? There just aren't enough of them for all the money that wants to come into the market. So I think that's the broad dynamic. At Angelist, we're trying to take advantage of that dynamic by building the syndicate model and creating really interesting way of putting more useful people on your cap table. I think there are big firms trying to take advantage of this dynamic. They see it. They're obviously seed folks thinking about it as well. So that's the dynamic.”

    2016-12-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: AngelList's Parker Thompson on How He Evaluates Startup Founders & Why The Move To Series A Is Harder Than Ever? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “Like that's your mentality. And we're having a conversation. I'm already biased against investing in you. It's just a negative signal all around. But it's like, look, be rational about it. And you just do the math. I've sat down and done this spreadsheet with a couple people and you're like, look, let's imagine we're building a billion dollar business. Here's what happens in a scenario where you raise two on six versus three on six. It seems like a big deal to you, but it turns out your boat is going to be just as big, right? Like let's focus on the opportunity, not dilution. And I think generally that's the right way to think about it. I don't know if that quite answered your question.”

    2016-12-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: AngelList's Parker Thompson on How He Evaluates Startup Founders & Why The Move To Series A Is Harder Than Ever? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “I mean, I think about it in terms of where you're raising money and where do you need to get to. So if I'm talking to a pre-product company, right, typically my advice to them would be raise as much money as possible because you have no idea where you're going to be in a year. You just have no idea, right? If you're a company that has a product in the market and you have some customers and you understand where your resource constrained, particularly if you have some level of product market fit, I think it's easier to make a specific budget. I tend to talk to founders about focusing on how much money you need and what you think you can accomplish. And my general rule is figure out what you think you need and multiply by 1.5 because something's going to go wrong. But for you as a founder, the results are pretty binary, right? Like if you're on a venture track, it tends to be fairly binary. And so I tend to think that where people mess this up is they try to optimize for dilution. And I think anybody who's optimizing for dilution, first of all,”

    2016-12-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: AngelList's Parker Thompson on How He Evaluates Startup Founders & Why The Move To Series A Is Harder Than Ever? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  15. “Some of them do it with uncapped nodes, some of them do it, and we like that less. Some of them do it by finding interesting price points between the seed price and the A price and say, let's put another million dollars into this company so that they can raise a much stronger A. We love those rounds. So we're working more and more with small funds that want to do that because that's a great pattern.”

    2016-12-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: AngelList's Parker Thompson on How He Evaluates Startup Founders & Why The Move To Series A Is Harder Than Ever? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  16. “You per se fucked up the last one because you shouldn't be asking for me this. So I think there's a lot of strong rounds, but they're very hard to see. So my personal opinion is bridges are a great way to make money because these are strong companies and actually a lot of risk has been taken out of the business with very little valuation bump. But I think the Angelists sort of way of thinking about it is unless you're deep in the details of these companies, it's very hard to tell the difference between investors insiders typically lead these rounds. It's very hard to tell the difference between people throwing good money after bad and people doubling down on companies at a good valuation. So where we tend to bias is more towards a different pattern of investment, which is the preemptive bridge. And you see more and more of these today because the Series A folks have very sharp elbows with respect to pro rata, let's say, right? So you see more and more seed firms taking their prorata early.”

    2016-12-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: AngelList's Parker Thompson on How He Evaluates Startup Founders & Why The Move To Series A Is Harder Than Ever? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  17. “Yeah, exactly. And I knew Paul and I'm like, hey, here's this interesting company. They're looking to raise this seed plus. They've raised maybe a million and a half to date. And I think their number is pretty good. And Paul actually, I was surprised by his response. He's like, actually, these guys aren't far enough for us. And here's where I think the A milestones are, but we're interested in the space. And I was really surprised because now I've got Paul telling me this company with good product market fit, growing revenues, revenue expansion within existing customers, six, nine months of trailing data with good retention. Like, I'm looking at this thing going, like, this, it's not quite ready for an A, but it's ready for Paul. And Paul saying, you know what, actually, here's where our bar is today, right? So the bar is getting further out, and I think a lot of companies just don't see it. They don't know what the goal is that they need to hit. And so they're in this, they end up in this constant fundraising mode. And each time you raise a tranche, it gets harder and harder because it's like, come on, guys.”

    2016-12-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: AngelList's Parker Thompson on How He Evaluates Startup Founders & Why The Move To Series A Is Harder Than Ever? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  18. “I think often not, although it's very hard to tell if you're a new investor. I mean, I just sent a company that we did a little investment at Angela Syndicate in a company about a year ago that's, in my opinion, got some phenomenal traction. They got a graph that's up into the right, and I sent them to a firm that's known for doing these bridges in a really smart way, bullpen. I'll actually just save them because I think they're awesome. I had bull mountain”

    2016-12-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: AngelList's Parker Thompson on How He Evaluates Startup Founders & Why The Move To Series A Is Harder Than Ever? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  19. “My advice to founders is to get some data points. So I spent a lot of time with people raising seed grounds, right? And so I say to them, look, like let's work backwards from the A. So as you're out raising, be explicit about the milestones that”

    2016-12-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: AngelList's Parker Thompson on How He Evaluates Startup Founders & Why The Move To Series A Is Harder Than Ever? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  20. “Leading my round, right? Like Mark's not stupid, you know, like, and he doesn't want to waste his time. So if your mentality is, I'm going to go in and try to get value out of these conversations. They're probably going to love to meet with you. And if not, it probably is a waste of your time.”

    2016-12-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: AngelList's Parker Thompson on How He Evaluates Startup Founders & Why The Move To Series A Is Harder Than Ever? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  21. “I mean, I do think it's helpful to build relationships to VCs, but I don't think it's necessarily about raising. I guess I think a missed opportunity for many founders is there are a lot of really smart people out there sitting inside Venture Firms, and they have a broad perspective on the industry that you will never have. Many of them have great operational experiences. So I think you can meet with those people when you're not explicitly raising money. They can be useful to you in terms of giving you feedback on your business, giving you advice, a byproduct of those conversations can be that you are building good relationships, they're seeing longitudinal data, which makes them comfortable when you go to ask for money. You're actually getting good advice and building relationships. So you're thinking about them and whether you want to work with them. And that doesn't have to be pre-transactional, right? It doesn't have to be the case that you're like, all right, I need to raise around an 18-month, let me meet with, you know, Mark Seuster because I want to try to trick him into.”

    2016-12-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: AngelList's Parker Thompson on How He Evaluates Startup Founders & Why The Move To Series A Is Harder Than Ever? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  22. “So, if you're talking to a partner who doesn't have a lot of influence and they don't push your deal through, it should be the case that you're talking to three other firms and if you're a good company, you are. And so any given decision, someone who falls out of your pipeline just shouldn't affect your ability to find good partners.”

    2016-12-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: AngelList's Parker Thompson on How He Evaluates Startup Founders & Why The Move To Series A Is Harder Than Ever? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  23. “I'm not as big on that. I generally tend to think that entrepreneurs are better served building a great business and understanding generally speaking what milestones are going to take risk out of the business and where to focus their energy and the fundraising. You still have to run a process and we can talk about that, right? Like it's not that fundraising doesn't matter, but I tend to think that people spend far too much time trying to lawyer the process and game the system. We talk about signaling risk and all this stuff, but build a great company. And so I think you want to know what partners are going to be interested. You don't want to pitch people who just aren't interested in your business. So I think you want to find people. You want to build a list of investors to talk to who have some relation to your field or business or whatever, and then obviously try to get warm introductions. But I'm less interested in the partnership dynamics, particularly like if you're running a good process, you're talking to a bunch of people in parallel.”

    2016-12-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: AngelList's Parker Thompson on How He Evaluates Startup Founders & Why The Move To Series A Is Harder Than Ever? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  24. “Give me money, and it's like, well, no, the person who came in before you and the person that I'm talking to later today are just better bets, and it's not against you, that's just the market.”

    2016-12-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: AngelList's Parker Thompson on How He Evaluates Startup Founders & Why The Move To Series A Is Harder Than Ever? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  25. “Anyway, that said, there are obviously businesses where you can't get them started without a lot of capital, so you need to raise money for your product. There's some teams that are so talented that they're going to raise money without a product at all. And so if you're going to invest, you need to make that decision at that stage. So I think it's really a function of who the team is, what the market is, what the market needs in terms of capital to get to something, to milestones, right? And each is case by case, but if you're a founder, I think the thing you got to do is just understand what the market is, right? Understand if you went to Stanford and I went to whatever community college, we're going to have different bars for where we need to get in terms of being pre-product or post-product. If you were on the Twitter founding team, maybe it's different than, you know, if I'm coming out of Pivotal, for example, so I think as a founder, you just got to understand what the market is. And that's a big mistake founders make. They just go out and they're like, you should.”

    2016-12-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: AngelList's Parker Thompson on How He Evaluates Startup Founders & Why The Move To Series A Is Harder Than Ever? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  26. “World is that's what startups are about. In terms of what I look for and what I think traction is, I think it's really dependent on the market. And again, I think it's all about risk, right? Like we're trying to invest in things that have as little risk as possible and can make money in the future, right? So I tend to think that the way the useful way to think about early stage startups is I'm looking for good teams, which we talked a little bit about working in large markets and ideally building something that we have some indication that people want, right? So I think generally speaking, I'm looking at the kind of businesses generally speaking that can get customers without a lot of capital. And so I'd ideally like to see a few customers and be able to talk through their experience and maybe even talk to them. But I consider it all to be qualitative, right? Like I'm more interested in the value that you're delivering than, for example, how much money you're making because you're not making real money.”

    2016-12-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: AngelList's Parker Thompson on How He Evaluates Startup Founders & Why The Move To Series A Is Harder Than Ever? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  27. “Yeah, I mean, just to speak to that response for a second, that drives me insane, right? And you say you don't have enough traction, right? You're either not able to articulate something actionable or you're just trying to be nice and you really don't like the people and you want them to go away. So I think as a founder, it's fair for you to say, great, well, I won't hold you to it, but help me understand what kind of traction you're looking for and how that relates to the risk that you see in the business. Because I think oftentimes the real problem is I don't buy one of your assumptions about your business. And so there's a risk that I perceive in the business that you don't perceive to be there. And so that's how I try to answer that question is to say, look, here's what you believe about your business that I don't believe. And if you showed me these pieces of data, I would understand that I was wrong and we'd be on the same page. And of course, then I'd invest in your business, right? So I think it's much more constructive for investors and entrepreneurs to relate in that way. And it's okay, right? Like let's just disagree about how we think the”

    2016-12-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: AngelList's Parker Thompson on How He Evaluates Startup Founders & Why The Move To Series A Is Harder Than Ever? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  28. “No, I think they're more roundabout questions. So I like asking people questions about their customers. And I think people who are learning quickly know a lot about their customers and a lot about their product. So for example, you know what your customers like specifically about your product. You know the customers who have churned what they didn't like about your product. You can off the top of your head tell me the three things you're going to do to improve your product. You talk about your roadmap vis- ⁇-vis why customers are bailing on it today, right? So you've got your mind around this machine that you're building that is making your existing customers happier, making the product more valuable for them and expanding the audience of your product as you go. So good teams, they don't necessarily articulate it that way, but I think good teams just very naturally have that orientation around the customer and the problem. And bad teams don't have that data. And I don't mean quantity.”

    2016-12-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: AngelList's Parker Thompson on How He Evaluates Startup Founders & Why The Move To Series A Is Harder Than Ever? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  29. “Of the ideas change, the models change, the markets change. Generally speaking, you can't change the people. So, I mean, I think when I look at a team, I think a lot about, you know, what is the heart of this team? What are they going to need to be successful? Often, by the way, I think when that's a founding team at the idea stage, you know, you look at this team and the reality is that some of these people aren't going to be here in a year. And that's just, we don't think about that. We don't talk about it by the time the successful company, there's a team and those are the people you remember. But I mean, I think you look across the table at these people and you ask yourself, like, great, where's the heart of this team? Why are they going to keep going when it's completely the rational thing for them to give up? How are they going to deal with adversity? How fast do these people learn is something I focus more and more on? So I try to ask people questions that give me insight into their learning process and their velocity of learning because I think at the early stage that seems to be a strong predictor of success.”

    2016-12-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: AngelList's Parker Thompson on How He Evaluates Startup Founders & Why The Move To Series A Is Harder Than Ever? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  30. “It's interesting. I mean, Angel List is, as I mentioned, a little bit different. So when we're sitting there, we're relying pretty heavily on our syndicate leads and our institutional partners, right, folks that are leading, pricing, doing diligence on these rounds, to really evaluate the team and get comfortable with the team. We're typically not meeting the team. We're not talking to them. We're maybe looking at some information about them to give us context on the deal. doesn't really think as much about the team and I think that that's that that works if you're doing 200 deals a year in a fund right you can you can play the odds on these things and work with smart partners and use the transit of property of diligence on people that said and when i'm looking at deals personally or sitting inside 500 it's an old vc cliche that the team is what matters but it's a cliche for a reason and it's correct right like the people”

    2016-12-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: AngelList's Parker Thompson on How He Evaluates Startup Founders & Why The Move To Series A Is Harder Than Ever? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  31. “Yeah, boy, what was there like 150 now? It's amazing Dave scaling like crazy. I mean, I think it was an interesting firm in that, you know, 500 is not a traditional VC and Angelist is not a traditional VC, right? So my whole experience as an investor has been in these weird organizations. I think we struggled with all of the things that operational companies struggle with. You hire people. Now you have to figure out how to manage and support these people. You have to figure out how to coordinate the team. And then you've got all of these companies who are effectively your customers. And we were doing, boy, when I started, we were probably doing 40 deals a quarter. And by the time that I left 500, we were doing four times that maybe. So, I mean, it's managing scale, right? Which is, I think, a problem that's very common across operational companies, as I say, less of a problem for VCs who typically are scaling by adding a part.”

    2016-12-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: AngelList's Parker Thompson on How He Evaluates Startup Founders & Why The Move To Series A Is Harder Than Ever? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  32. “There, San Francisco accelerator built up the team there and spent a couple years really focused on the early stage, high volume accelerator model of investing. We ended up leaving there and jumping over to Angelist, which is a little bit more operational of a role, a little bit more like a product company, real technology working with programmers again, which is always fun. And there I'm working on the deal committee. So we look at deals on the platform and invest on behalf of the community and then working with our marketplace, trying to get everybody to onboard and doing deals. So it was a little bit serendipitous. There you go. So, you know, guy called me, which is, I think, for a lot of people how they end up in DC.”

    2016-12-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: AngelList's Parker Thompson on How He Evaluates Startup Founders & Why The Move To Series A Is Harder Than Ever? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  33. “Sure, and I'll try to give you the super brief CV. Prior to working in VC, right before I came into VC, I was working in a company called Pivotal Lab where I spent about seven years all in from it being a couple people in a room up through selling the company to EMC and then I spent about a year there after we sold the company managing the integration and kind of getting the company on track, which as many folks probably know can be a challenge when you get swallowed by a giant company. Somewhat out of the blue, a guy named Dave McClure gave me a call and said, hey, I'm building this firm. He was about a year and at the time to his fund. 500 startups and he offered me a job, which ended up being a really pretty interesting transition for me. So I came into 500 startups when it was about 10 people, which for VC fund seems like a big team, but they're a little bit weird. Came in, started doing seed investing there, and then built out.”

    2016-12-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: AngelList's Parker Thompson on How He Evaluates Startup Founders & Why The Move To Series A Is Harder Than Ever? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source