YouSaid · the spoken record

Peter Wagner

lines on the record: 68
first: 2024-03-06
most recent: 2024-03-06
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Yeah, I mean, I think it's this interesting combination of you bring the right raw material in first. And then you give that person both enough rope to hang themselves so that they're feeling tremendous accountability will be called a sleepless night factor, but also guardrails that protect them from making really egregious blunders, right? And so this combination of guardrails and enough rope to hang yourself is sort of the magic of it. It accelerates learning tremendously. And it's done in sort of a non-hierarchical fashion too. So we were aspiring to the flat partnership, which means even the most junior people, the brand new associate like me, you know, sort of had an equal voice and okay, yeah, there was people with a lot more experience, but you sort of felt like you were, you know, you were a peer, even if mainly some of that was optical and you were forced to behave like that and approach decision making in that manner.”
2024-03-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: 27 Years of Investing Lessons on Picking Founders, Price Discipline, Reserves and Selling Positions | Can Seed Investors Compete with Multi-Stage Venture Firms | Why Returns Will Not Worsen Moving Forward with Peter Wagner, Founder @ Wing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. You know, in terms of the things that the firm did really well that have allowed it to be as successful as it is today, one was developing next generation venture capital investors.”
2024-03-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: 27 Years of Investing Lessons on Picking Founders, Price Discipline, Reserves and Selling Positions | Can Seed Investors Compete with Multi-Stage Venture Firms | Why Returns Will Not Worsen Moving Forward with Peter Wagner, Founder @ Wing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Absolutely, yeah. I mean, but it doesn't mean that they can't accomplish great things on their own, but they can accomplish more, greater things with the good business partner. The very best founders that I work with are also the ones where we have the highest bandwidth engagement get to the root of issues and come up with better answers together most frequently. I think there is a high correlation between the caliber, the founder, and also their ability to get the most out of the relationships they have with their investors and their board members.”
2024-03-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: 27 Years of Investing Lessons on Picking Founders, Price Discipline, Reserves and Selling Positions | Can Seed Investors Compete with Multi-Stage Venture Firms | Why Returns Will Not Worsen Moving Forward with Peter Wagner, Founder @ Wing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't know. Sometimes I might not advise that and I might just say, okay, we're going to do the 10 on 52, you know, because in some cases that might be the answer, but you sort of have to be, you have to be selective.”
2024-03-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: 27 Years of Investing Lessons on Picking Founders, Price Discipline, Reserves and Selling Positions | Can Seed Investors Compete with Multi-Stage Venture Firms | Why Returns Will Not Worsen Moving Forward with Peter Wagner, Founder @ Wing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And working with the founders to build the foundation the right way. That's a very attractive place to invest if you're someone with a lot of capital under management.”
2024-03-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: 27 Years of Investing Lessons on Picking Founders, Price Discipline, Reserves and Selling Positions | Can Seed Investors Compete with Multi-Stage Venture Firms | Why Returns Will Not Worsen Moving Forward with Peter Wagner, Founder @ Wing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's a great question, Harry, right? I mean, it's like one of the existential questions. And I think they can, and we do it all the time. There is a risk here. And so there's certainly lots of otherwise good opportunities that have been polluted or dragged down by whatever softbank showing up or any other number of people we can name, but it just means like if you're the focused player, you know, in our case, the early stage investor in the long-term company builder, you know, you've got to find that model that's sort of harmonious to what I sometimes call the aircraft carriers, which are these kind of multi-product line, multi-geography, multi-strategy capital deployment operations. And, you know, so how do you leverage that force to your benefit and not be run over by it? And so I think, you know, in our case, many of the sort of very scaled up capital deployers sort of recognize the quality of the early stage work that we're doing. And in many ways, a company where Wing has been very handy.”
2024-03-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: 27 Years of Investing Lessons on Picking Founders, Price Discipline, Reserves and Selling Positions | Can Seed Investors Compete with Multi-Stage Venture Firms | Why Returns Will Not Worsen Moving Forward with Peter Wagner, Founder @ Wing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Or get too far off strategy by playing super heavy in those types of financings and would prefer to preserve the capital for that next early stage company.”
2024-03-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: 27 Years of Investing Lessons on Picking Founders, Price Discipline, Reserves and Selling Positions | Can Seed Investors Compete with Multi-Stage Venture Firms | Why Returns Will Not Worsen Moving Forward with Peter Wagner, Founder @ Wing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That we see so many opportun Well, you know, the sort of backup the truck on your winners thing that's a strategy that works, I think, for an asset gatherer. There's sort of two business models in venture. You know, you can be in the assets under management game or you can be in the generate best possible returns game. You know, if I'm an asset gatherer, I need places to put assets that deliver, quote, good enough returns. You know, if I'm a return generator, you know, then I'm actually looking to really maximize multiple uninvested capital and I'm not just sort of deploying at scale. Anytime you meet an investor that talks about the amount of capital they deploy per year, you know you're talking to an asset gatherer. And so in our best companies, they may be doing large high price later stage rounds. How do we participate as, you know, one of the initiating investors, one of the really early investors? Are these things on model or off model for us? And generally, we don't attempt to drag down the return.”
2024-03-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: 27 Years of Investing Lessons on Picking Founders, Price Discipline, Reserves and Selling Positions | Can Seed Investors Compete with Multi-Stage Venture Firms | Why Returns Will Not Worsen Moving Forward with Peter Wagner, Founder @ Wing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think about that today with AI, I'm just too intrude. I know we had a Aaronber Still Then you also have to understand that it could be the next super cycle, in which case you can't miss it. How do we balance that in your mind? Yeah, well, I mean, I think it is the next super cycle. So you can't miss it. But then the question is, okay, how to participate? And so, you know, there's lots of ways to invest in that AI first transformation of business where we haven't been investing is the super capital intensive, very, very high priced LLM development shops or other sorts of similar projects. And it's not to say that those aren't important technologies and companies, and it's not to say that people won't make money there, but it's just not the strategy that we've chosen.”
2024-03-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: 27 Years of Investing Lessons on Picking Founders, Price Discipline, Reserves and Selling Positions | Can Seed Investors Compete with Multi-Stage Venture Firms | Why Returns Will Not Worsen Moving Forward with Peter Wagner, Founder @ Wing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“being fresh I think one of the behaviors in Venture, which you just noted kind of safety in the herd thing, and I believe within firms and partners and not incorrect, that if they're making the same mistake that everyone else in the industry is making, they probably won't be punished for it because, you know, the capital has to go somewhere. So the real dangerous thing is to make the unusual mistake that no one else made. It's one of the things that kind of drags down returns in the industry. It's one of the things that makes it a very cyclical business. You know, the flip side of sort of maintaining discipline is sometimes, you know, missing out on a huge sort of acceleration. And I certainly saw that back to the late 90s. There were people, good venture capitalists that were like, you know what, these valuations are just too high. I'm not investing in these internet companies. It just doesn't make sense. And, you know, they kind of missed out on a pretty transformative phase. This horse race between fear and greed, as an old professor of mine used to say, it continues to play out.”
2024-03-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: 27 Years of Investing Lessons on Picking Founders, Price Discipline, Reserves and Selling Positions | Can Seed Investors Compete with Multi-Stage Venture Firms | Why Returns Will Not Worsen Moving Forward with Peter Wagner, Founder @ Wing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, it's a double edged sword, right? So it can be very good in terms of building credibility and some reputation. And that certainly was the case, you know, for me. And so it brought me sort of more relevant and interesting to founders. On the other hand, maybe I skipped over some of the important lessons that one needs to learn early in one's career. And, you know, it's not that those lessons weren't there. I just ended up learning them in the post to dot-com bust downturn when all the cracks were revealed. might have been better to have some experience with some of those things up front, but you play the cards you dealt.”
2024-03-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: 27 Years of Investing Lessons on Picking Founders, Price Discipline, Reserves and Selling Positions | Can Seed Investors Compete with Multi-Stage Venture Firms | Why Returns Will Not Worsen Moving Forward with Peter Wagner, Founder @ Wing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Pretty quickly, actually, I was pretty lucky too, Harry. Like, if you remember, you know, those days, you know, joining in 96 and working in the late 90s, I mean, the internet boom was on, you know, the Netscape IPO had happened. A lot of things were happening that no one had really seen before. And so it was really fertile ground. It was really fun. I got very lucky with a number of my early investments.”
2024-03-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: 27 Years of Investing Lessons on Picking Founders, Price Discipline, Reserves and Selling Positions | Can Seed Investors Compete with Multi-Stage Venture Firms | Why Returns Will Not Worsen Moving Forward with Peter Wagner, Founder @ Wing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And how you got into Vancha there? It was kind of an accident. I was trying to get a job in a startup and I inadvertently became a venture capitalist. I was a product manager at a company called Silicon Graphics, which was a high flyer in the early nineties we were doing 3D graphics and digital media. And I'd been there about four years. You know, the reason I'd gone there was to try and get the base of experience that could make me somewhat valuable in a startup. So I was starting to talk to some startup opportunities and got to know a few of the venture backers and the course of that. It turned out that none of those startups were quite right for me, but some of the venture people said maybe you might want to come and work with us for a while. And I thought that might be a decent position to identify a better startup opportunity. So I ended up joining Excel. I took a pay cut to do it. And I thought of it as like, and I wasn't making a lot of money at SGI. So that kind of tells you how the industry worked then. But I thought I might be there for like 18 months and it's been a little.”
2024-03-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: 27 Years of Investing Lessons on Picking Founders, Price Discipline, Reserves and Selling Positions | Can Seed Investors Compete with Multi-Stage Venture Firms | Why Returns Will Not Worsen Moving Forward with Peter Wagner, Founder @ Wing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This is such a joy to do. I've heard so many great things from many different members on your team and founders that you've worked with. So thank you so much for joining me today. Yeah, thanks for having me. I'm a big fan of your work, big fan of the show. Great to be here. That's very, very kind of you. I would love to start with a little bit of scene setting, though. You joined Venture a In July 96, how did you get the job at Excel? Can you just take me to that?”
2024-03-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: 27 Years of Investing Lessons on Picking Founders, Price Discipline, Reserves and Selling Positions | Can Seed Investors Compete with Multi-Stage Venture Firms | Why Returns Will Not Worsen Moving Forward with Peter Wagner, Founder @ Wing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
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2024-03-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: 27 Years of Investing Lessons on Picking Founders, Price Discipline, Reserves and Selling Positions | Can Seed Investors Compete with Multi-Stage Venture Firms | Why Returns Will Not Worsen Moving Forward with Peter Wagner, Founder @ Wing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
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2024-03-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: 27 Years of Investing Lessons on Picking Founders, Price Discipline, Reserves and Selling Positions | Can Seed Investors Compete with Multi-Stage Venture Firms | Why Returns Will Not Worsen Moving Forward with Peter Wagner, Founder @ Wing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
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2024-03-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: 27 Years of Investing Lessons on Picking Founders, Price Discipline, Reserves and Selling Positions | Can Seed Investors Compete with Multi-Stage Venture Firms | Why Returns Will Not Worsen Moving Forward with Peter Wagner, Founder @ Wing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The very best founders that I work with are also the ones where we have the highest bandwidth engagement. You need to have just some glaring deficiency in the current approaches. And so you almost need to find founders that are like just pissed off about, you know, the way that they've been forced to do something. This is 20 VC with me, Harry Stebbings, and I'm so thrilled today to be joined by an OG of the Venture Space, Peter Wagner. Peter made his foray into Venture 27 years ago as an associate at Excel, where he spent fourteen years culminating in his being managing partner before leaving to found his own firm Wing. Peter has led investments in dozens of early stage companies including Snowflake, Gong, Pine Cone, and many other incredible companies that have gone on to successful IPOs or acquisitions.”
2024-03-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: 27 Years of Investing Lessons on Picking Founders, Price Discipline, Reserves and Selling Positions | Can Seed Investors Compete with Multi-Stage Venture Firms | Why Returns Will Not Worsen Moving Forward with Peter Wagner, Founder @ Wing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source