YouSaid · the spoken record

Rebecca Kaden

lines on the record: 64
first: 2020-01-21
most recent: 2020-01-21
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

“We're navigating their own careers and had things that I could learn from, and were able to talk to me not only about quality of company or the kind of facts and nuts and bolts of investing, but how would integrate into my life and how be really thoughtful as both friends and mentors and co-investors has been one of the biggest catalysts, I think, of my venture career, but also something that I've just taken so much joy from. And I just think that whole community has a ton of kindness behind it.”
2020-01-21 · Invest Like the Best · Rebecca Kaden – Thesis Driven Investing - [Invest Like the Best, EP.155] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So many people do so many kind things for me. Campbell taking the time with me when I was a 24 year old who had been a journalist and showing interest and being thoughtful not only about what intros he could make but really thinking what would be best for me and the follow through on it I think is as kind as any professionally that I can think about and really mattered to me and as a model that I subscribe to. But I think that level of interest in helping others' careers is something that I've been”
2020-01-21 · Invest Like the Best · Rebecca Kaden – Thesis Driven Investing - [Invest Like the Best, EP.155] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, we don't do any how big is the X market top down analysis back into is there a kind of structured business opportunity around it? I guess my overall takeaway on investing is I actually think there's a lot of ways. There's certainly a lot of ways to be not a good investor because it's such a risky asset class. But there are a lot of ways to be a good investor and a lot of ways to build a really interesting strong venture capital firm. The ones I admire most are the ones that have a strategy and stick to it and have a point of view. And I think what I've learned from USV is there's a point of view here about how we should manage this firm and how we should approach investing and that if we come to things with a prepared mind and a commitment to the thesis, it's a good way for us. I think what I've learned about it is it takes a lot of commitment to your own ideas.”
2020-01-21 · Invest Like the Best · Rebecca Kaden – Thesis Driven Investing - [Invest Like the Best, EP.155] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And that's okay. But if we focus our energy and do the right stuff for us, it'll be really interesting and we'll have a good shot at it working. And so I really admire that about the approach at USV. And I think it's kind of infiltrated my thinking here.”
2020-01-21 · Invest Like the Best · Rebecca Kaden – Thesis Driven Investing - [Invest Like the Best, EP.155] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I think my partners love investing and they love new products and they invest in things that they can't imagine the world not having. And I love that. I admire that passion. And I think I've drank a lot of that Kool-Aid. Over the summer, I had this moment where I felt really overwhelmed by the market. I'm sure other investors maybe have felt the same where Series A's that maybe used to be five to seven were coming in and we're saying they're raising 20 and we don't really do that and there were just too many things going on and I was going so fast and I was having trouble kind of focusing my energy I feel like and I remember talking to Albert and he was like don't look at companies for a couple weeks just think about your ideas think about what you believe in and if you do that you'll get to the right place and that's counter to a lot of the kind of investing culture that certainly in Silicon Valley but even in New York and elsewhere and it says we're going to miss”
2020-01-21 · Invest Like the Best · Rebecca Kaden – Thesis Driven Investing - [Invest Like the Best, EP.155] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They're an amazing group of people. They are extremely thoughtful, very smart, very good investors. I think the thing that I've learned the most is that following your interests and passions in investing is a good enough reason or as good as any, meaning there are group people that you can send a business to and say, oh, this is the hottest deal in Silicon Valley right now, right? Everyone thinks this SaaS Analytics tool is the thing of the future. And they'll just be like, that doesn't interest me. And that we've designed a fund in terms of size and focus where that's an okay answer where you can say if we spend a lot of time in a room talking to each other and we come up with the things that we're interested in and we stick to those, this will work or we have a good shot of it working and it's the best way not only to block out the noise but to have a lot of fun doing this.”
2020-01-21 · Invest Like the Best · Rebecca Kaden – Thesis Driven Investing - [Invest Like the Best, EP.155] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Them and I think of all the times where I just make an email intro. Do you know what I mean? And you're like, check the box. I was asked to do something and I did it. Good for me. Good luck. Maybe you'll send a text and follow up. And it was just a different level of engagement and follow-up because when he decided he was going to do something, he did it. And he followed through. And I think we're all operating really fast. And there's so much going on, but I admire that level of focus when you decide it's something you're going to take on and only taking on the things that you feel like you could do that for.”
2020-01-21 · Invest Like the Best · Rebecca Kaden – Thesis Driven Investing - [Invest Like the Best, EP.155] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Why would you do that? I don't know why they would do that. And it was this honest feedback which I needed and was very true. But he said, I think you should think about venture capital. I think that would be a good fit for you. And even more so, I think you should go to Mavron, that the combination of their focus and their ability to mentor and the people there would be the right kind of place. What I think about when I think about that story and how I channel it to how I can try hopefully in the future to help people emerging in their careers is he had tons going on, way more big fish to fry than the GSB person who wanted a summer internship. But he was just, he was honest, he was thoughtful and he followed through. And I think about the follow through a lot. So he introduced me to the team at Mavaron. And I remember he called me before the interview. He called me after the interview. He called”
2020-01-21 · Invest Like the Best · Rebecca Kaden – Thesis Driven Investing - [Invest Like the Best, EP.155] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, mentor has gotten to be kind of a loaded word because it has this formality to it. But people who I've leaned on and have kind of granted me time and energy, particularly when the relationships at least started where I had more to take than to give have been really fundamental for me. And I feel like I've been lucky that I've had a bunch of them. Bill being one of them. So I, you know, when I was at Stanford, he was involved with the GSB and most of his time was spent coaching, as you said, these kind of wildly successful big name people, Steve Jobs and Eric Schmidt. But I got to know him and spent some time with him when I was in Palo Alto. And I remember going to him and saying, I was a first year business school student. I had been a journalist before and saying, I want to go to a tech company. And I was like, oh, you know, I'm thinking about Google or Facebook. And he basically told me, not only do I not know.”
2020-01-21 · Invest Like the Best · Rebecca Kaden – Thesis Driven Investing - [Invest Like the Best, EP.155] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I think it may look more and more like that because we have, if we want to find someone these days, there's a lot of ways we can find them. But that's not solving 100% of the puzzle here.”
2020-01-21 · Invest Like the Best · Rebecca Kaden – Thesis Driven Investing - [Invest Like the Best, EP.155] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Plan vacations together. And there were these photos posted that I said to Tanya were so amazing because there are these women on a beach vacation. And they're posting these photos of themselves and they're like, we would have never felt confident doing this if we hadn't met each other through DIA and had the supportive community. That takes a brand to a whole other level. And not every of your customers is going to feel that way. But if you can create that for some fraction of your customers, you go from a transactional brand to a trusted brand that might really have a shot to really stand the test of time. And that mechanic of community is something that I think will be applicable to a really large swath of consumer companies and the best ones will crack.”
2020-01-21 · Invest Like the Best · Rebecca Kaden – Thesis Driven Investing - [Invest Like the Best, EP.155] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Liking other people's posts, maybe commenting on other people's posts. Then they post about the box they got and they say, hey, I've never posted a selfie of myself to the internet, but I've been reading everyone else's and now I have this kind of confidence in doing so. So here is me and this dress I got from Dia and they get this affirmation and it's not affirmation of everyone being like every piece you got is amazing. You look great. It's honest, but it's supportive and it's welcoming. So then they start posting about their jobs and the job interview they're going to or what they bought on other platforms besides Dia. And I remember when I first saw that I said to Nadia, the CEO, is that good or bad? Do we want people posting on Dia's Facebook group about what they're buying on competitors? And she's like, I think it's great. Let this be their home where they feel comfortable. So they do that. Then this year was maybe the third or fourth year where groups of women from the platform who had never met.”
2020-01-21 · Invest Like the Best · Rebecca Kaden – Thesis Driven Investing - [Invest Like the Best, EP.155] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so an example I love is Dia. So Dia is a functional product. So you buy clothes on it. But the reason women like it is because it introduces them to this really valuable community that they have lacked in their lives, that they have not been, they feel like they're a customer that hasn't been prioritized. And now not only do they get these clothes that they love, but they get access to others who have felt the same way. And as we know, the idea of connecting with others who have a commonality to you is one of the most key things in the world to do and it's something that technology should really make possible in new ways. So they joined this Facebook group. Right now it's on Facebook. And one thing that interests me is a lot of these things are on Facebook or on this Mishmash of other channels and what will allow companies to own that in new ways. But for now it's on Facebook. Okay. So they join the Facebook group and you see this behavioral pattern emerge where the first thing they do is they start live.”
2020-01-21 · Invest Like the Best · Rebecca Kaden – Thesis Driven Investing - [Invest Like the Best, EP.155] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Important to you? How does it change how you interact with others on it? And I think there's tons of opportunity there. And similar to horizontal and vertical platforms, some of the opportunity may look horizontal where there are new social networks that focus on belonging and community over just connectivity. But some of it may look much more vertical. And we're seeing this in our portfolio companies where something transactional, something that's a really sharp tip of the sphere like a stash or a modern fertility has a product that they're selling, but to become a long-term valuable company, they're going to build a community on the back of it, where people take a modern fertility test, but then talk to each other and engage with each other, and that makes it into a sticky long-term brand.”
2020-01-21 · Invest Like the Best · Rebecca Kaden – Thesis Driven Investing - [Invest Like the Best, EP.155] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So that's the second bucket. So, the first is what's going on in healthcare and how it interfaces with technology and how we might be able to play. The second bucket, and this is one that I spent a lot of time in it what is community and belonging mean? I think that there may be nothing more core to our well-being than community and belonging. Loneliness is an epidemic. These two buckets of healthcare and non-healthcare definitions certainly bleed into each other. And technology has created connectivity, more connectivity than ever before. Networks and webs, but it hasn't cracked belonging for the most part. And it may not really have cracked community. What I think a lot about is what is the difference between networks and community? And the more I think about it, I think networks may be top of funnel, right? A network effect is how do you scale? How do you have structural growth? And how does the network get better with every user that joins it? But real engagement, I think that's belonging. How does it become?”
2020-01-21 · Invest Like the Best · Rebecca Kaden – Thesis Driven Investing - [Invest Like the Best, EP.155] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right now there is no answer to that. Ribbon Health is trying to solve that. That's one example of many that are in that kind of bucket of how do you build SaaS products that might support the consumer applications that digital health are coming up with. You can only invest in those if you believe that digital health is a market that can support that. But we definitely do. And when you look at FinTech companies like Plaid or Stripe started by this idea of supporting an emerging ecosystem of companies and as those companies scale, the underlying infrastructure scales and benefits along with them. We think that's a great model when you can get in early with startups that are emerging in interesting categories and be a support system of their scale. And we think in healthcare there's a big opportunity for that.”
2020-01-21 · Invest Like the Best · Rebecca Kaden – Thesis Driven Investing - [Invest Like the Best, EP.155] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And you do in some ways, but they need to see a doctor where they are. How do you get them to that doctor? How do you tell them where to go? You might now have to rely on a static database that you bought, that information, any information that's static we know is not very high quality at all. The information changes too quickly. So you need somewhere to look to get that information.”
2020-01-21 · Invest Like the Best · Rebecca Kaden – Thesis Driven Investing - [Invest Like the Best, EP.155] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Increasingly, though, I'm spending a lot of time thinking about the B2B opportunity here because I think there have been really interesting and kind of amazing innovations in healthcare in the last Call it four or five years that have changed or are changing how consumers interact with the system. NERCS is one or modern fertility, but there's lots of others from all these telemedicine applications and vertical pharmacies and all these kind of things. But they're all still built on old Rails and are missing fundamental elements of speed, convenience, and value that would make the system better. And so I'm interested in where there may be opportunity there. An example is a company we're non-investors in, but I really like called Ribbon Health. So what Ribbon Health is, is a referral network. So you're a telemedicine company. And you try to help the patient that you're on the phone with.”
2020-01-21 · Invest Like the Best · Rebecca Kaden – Thesis Driven Investing - [Invest Like the Best, EP.155] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You can do this on an app, and it's private, it's fast, and it's cheaper. That's NERCS. Modern fertility, this is a test that a doctor would tell you how long you had to wait before you took a modern fertility test. But with modern fertility, you can buy it yourself. You can have that information up front, and it's a fraction of the cost of what it would be through a doctor. And so these are”
2020-01-21 · Invest Like the Best · Rebecca Kaden – Thesis Driven Investing - [Invest Like the Best, EP.155] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I bucketed into kind of two things. The first is how healthcare is evolving. And this idea that consumers are taking a lot more interest and wallet share in their own well-being. And we called it well-being because we think wellness in healthcare are increasingly blended together, that as healthcare becomes more consumerized, a customer doesn't think, is this healthcare or is this wellness? They think of how do I feel? So how should I make myself feel better? And that could be solved in lots of different kinds of ways. And so that's one thing we're really interested on. We've been focused on it on the consumer side. So businesses like a nerx or a modern fertility that allow customers more control, a more autonomy, more access to their own information and do it at a cheaper price point than what would be accessible through a healthcare system. So you don't have to go and pay for a doctor.”
2020-01-21 · Invest Like the Best · Rebecca Kaden – Thesis Driven Investing - [Invest Like the Best, EP.155] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“On a brand marketing way, I think marketing is so interesting to me. I really like consumer businesses partly because this challenge of how do you get scale and distribution is so fun and hard. But tendencies of brand marketing and digital marketing, I think, are actually really different from each other. Brand marketing, I think that's true. You need a lot of consistency. Digital marketing on platforms like a Facebook, you actually, I think, need a lot of speed, but the two have to talk to each other, have the same voice, have the same consistency. And so it's this puzzle that really skilled marketers put together.”
2020-01-21 · Invest Like the Best · Rebecca Kaden – Thesis Driven Investing - [Invest Like the Best, EP.155] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, the thing that I think about masterful marketing is some of the best ones are old school, Disney. Disney is a masterful marketer. It is a product marketer as well as a brand marketer as well as a digital marketer. That's the goal we don't think about Disney in tech, but that's the answer. And so who do I think of that points to that? Yeah, I actually think Stash is a great example here. They've done a really, really good job on building a consumer brand that's really trusted, but also being very agile across channels so they don't lean too heavily on any individual spot and they iterate really quickly on what kind of message is going to work for each customer. Because one thing we also know that wasn't true before is the faster you change creative and copy on Facebook, the better it works. That's something that's emerged. And so products that lend itself to that we know work better.”
2020-01-21 · Invest Like the Best · Rebecca Kaden – Thesis Driven Investing - [Invest Like the Best, EP.155] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Roblox is this kid's game platform, but it's a platform, so other brands are integrating with it in these kind of cool creative ways, Twitch, different stuff. But by definition, those are more fragmented. Not everyone is on a roblox. Not everyone's on a Twitch. And so you're going to need a much broader set of strategies. And the arbitrage moment probably happens faster. So you're going to have to lean into them, see what works, go fast there, and then quickly pull back and move elsewhere as the opportunity moves around. And so you need a lot of agility, I think, to do that really well.”
2020-01-21 · Invest Like the Best · Rebecca Kaden – Thesis Driven Investing - [Invest Like the Best, EP.155] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And also some of these businesses that are now of huge scale are becoming significant acquisition channels. So something like a Fortnite, like a Roblox.”
2020-01-21 · Invest Like the Best · Rebecca Kaden – Thesis Driven Investing - [Invest Like the Best, EP.155] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Core skill of how do you optimize this one platform to a core skill of how do you quickly iterate and test around lots of channels, including new ones popping up, including offline and online, and product marketing and how brand marketing interacts with spend and the best digital marketers of the next 10 years are going to look like the fastest testers where they see opportunity in a new channel and quickly lean into it versus how good they are at optimizing certain platforms.”
2020-01-21 · Invest Like the Best · Rebecca Kaden – Thesis Driven Investing - [Invest Like the Best, EP.155] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Pick them off. That's incredible. And the platform itself had built these tools to help you do this. And so all of these companies and lots of venture firms gave billions and billions of dollars to Facebook to pay for scale of the businesses. That was in many cases good money spent. It fueled substantial growth. In a lot of cases, not good money spent. But in many it was. But over time, the platform itself has become more efficient. Facebook's job is to maximize its own margin. And so the customers have gotten more expensive. There are turning points for the businesses built on top of it where that customer is no longer efficient anymore. And you've got to look elsewhere. And also engagement of these core demos is starting to fragment. Not everyone's eyeballs are there with the same intensity that they were before. And so I think marketing itself is evolving from being this.”
2020-01-21 · Invest Like the Best · Rebecca Kaden – Thesis Driven Investing - [Invest Like the Best, EP.155] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Look, I think Facebook is this giant gorilla in the room that's every company's kind of dream and nightmare right now. It's not going anywhere. I don't think Facebook is going anywhere at all. And despite a lot of criticism in the market, core areas of it continue to grow really well. And so I think it will be there. However, two things have happened. One is over the last decade, Facebook has basically aggregated eyeballs and allowed all of these new businesses that have sprung up to pick them off in an increasingly efficient way, but for a long time not that efficient, meaning there was significant opportunity on the platform to acquire customers at lower prices than Facebook would optimize towards. That was a magical time, how wonderful that we had every billions of people in the world on one place and as a business you could go there and just”
2020-01-21 · Invest Like the Best · Rebecca Kaden – Thesis Driven Investing - [Invest Like the Best, EP.155] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And a mechanic I really like about Dia is a natural behavior is a woman gets a box of the clothes and they post it for their friends to see because they're trying to figure out what they're going to keep. And their friends comment and they say, oh, I like this or I'm not so sure about this as they help decide what they're gonna keep and what they're gonna send back to the company. They probably posted on Facebook, but maybe they show their friends who are stopping by, but there's a natural sharing rhythm to the product. That's a distribution angle. It's not the only one they lean on. There's lots of other things they have to do. But I like things that have some kind of inherent distribution moment as part of the core experience to it. I think that's powerful.”
2020-01-21 · Invest Like the Best · Rebecca Kaden – Thesis Driven Investing - [Invest Like the Best, EP.155] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is there a thesis that makes sense on how it might happen? And is the thesis not, we're going to run Facebook ads? Is there something about the product itself that lends itself to distribution? And that doesn't mean word of mouth. That doesn't have to mean that something about the product means everyone in the world's going to talk about it and we're going to cross our fingers and hope for organic quote unquote scale, but is there a hook in the product itself that lends itself to growth? And that really interests me. And that could be in a couple of different ways. I'll give an example. Dia& Co is a later stage e-commerce company that we invested in. It's a commerce platform targeted to plus size women. It's now”
2020-01-21 · Invest Like the Best · Rebecca Kaden – Thesis Driven Investing - [Invest Like the Best, EP.155] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, I feel like if I knew with certainty the ability to be good at distribution, I would be literally the best investor of all time. So I don't know that I have a perfect answer to this question yet, but I think about it constantly because the moment we like to come in is what I call post-product, pre-product market fit. And so oftentimes they know the market, they know the approach, they're iterating towards the product itself that will fit it, but they're very early on the distribution curve. And so they haven't cracked really how scale is going to happen. I think it's a couple of different things. One is”
2020-01-21 · Invest Like the Best · Rebecca Kaden – Thesis Driven Investing - [Invest Like the Best, EP.155] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Responsibility and interest in your financial health and believing that it's possible to do so is on the minds of customers now more than it's ever been before. They know that their local bank or these big platforms that they don't trust are not the only options anymore. And as a result, you have people with intent and that's always the best time to acquire them.”
2020-01-21 · Invest Like the Best · Rebecca Kaden – Thesis Driven Investing - [Invest Like the Best, EP.155] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“General, I actually feel like the harder problem to solve is the distribution problem and not the product problem. I feel like when you have an entrepreneur who has an insight on a market and approach to it, there are product geniuses out there and you have to have some of that. But product, you have a bunch of shots at distribution is very challenging. Actually in fintech, FinTech distribution is hard because it's very competitive. And it's somewhat in some of these categories getting to be not a winner-take-all game at all because the market is so big. There are hundreds of multi-billion dollar banks, but a customer that uses one bank account is not that likely to use another bank account over time as these bank accounts become a broader part of my financial services platform. But acquisition has not been that hard here. And that's because I think customers are actually looking for this. They're eager to do better here. I think taking”
2020-01-21 · Invest Like the Best · Rebecca Kaden – Thesis Driven Investing - [Invest Like the Best, EP.155] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Totally. Totally. I love that. I think it's super interesting. And they've done fantastically well getting a lot of customers on board.”
2020-01-21 · Invest Like the Best · Rebecca Kaden – Thesis Driven Investing - [Invest Like the Best, EP.155] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, what I like about consumer investing, and I think financial services is such a core part of this, is financial services, all these rational models and math and investing, but it's really consumer behavior. And consumers are irrational and they're emotional. And the sooner you can understand that emotion of not only what they're doing, but why they're doing it, the faster you can build products that make it a lot easier for them.”
2020-01-21 · Invest Like the Best · Rebecca Kaden – Thesis Driven Investing - [Invest Like the Best, EP.155] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of a customer, and they let them come in through a channel they were interested in. And then over time gave them a really full financial services suite. That's what really interested me in that company. But the core idea of investing in what you believe in has stayed really core to the company and they flushed out what that means. So now on their banking product, as you spend on the card, you get fractional shares of stock and what you're spending in. And that starts your portfolio. And the question of how should you flesh out your portfolio, you should probably flesh out the stuff that you're already now invested in because you're spending money there. And they can look at that data and say, because they have all the customer spend data, a customer that now owns shares or fractional shares of Starbucks or Walmart spends meaningfully more money with that brand because they feel like an owner.”
2020-01-21 · Invest Like the Best · Rebecca Kaden – Thesis Driven Investing - [Invest Like the Best, EP.155] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So the wedge originally was to have very low minimum, so start investing with $5 and to do it on an interest-based. So rather than should you invest in XY company, invest in the things you believe in. You're interested in sustainability. You're interested in technology. You're interested in food entertainment. Investing is this very complicated field worth many trillions of dollars and a lot of smart people, but the foundation is pretty simple where usually you should invest in the things you believe in. And so taking that in a consumer productized way was a really good place to start. And so they effectively had bucketed ETFs that they didn't call that that made it really accessible. Over time, they've grown out that suite of products a lot. So now there is investing. There's also banking, there's saving, there's auto saving, there's 401ks, custodial, all this kind of stuff. And they built it over time. So they gain the trust.”
2020-01-21 · Invest Like the Best · Rebecca Kaden – Thesis Driven Investing - [Invest Like the Best, EP.155] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And what it said is usually there are minimums to investing, and investing is really complicated. It has a cold start problem. If you've never invested before, it's a scary thing to do. What do you invest in? How much do you invest in it? What should you expect from it? And no one really answers that question for you unless you have a lot of money to put to it. But that makes no sense because lots of America should be investing. And so how can you productize it and also those answers aren't that complicated? But if you've never heard them before, how would you know? And so Stash built a product that made investing really accessible to a huge part of the population. And so 80-85% of the customers on Stash have never invested before. And now they're putting money to the things they believe in.”
2020-01-21 · Invest Like the Best · Rebecca Kaden – Thesis Driven Investing - [Invest Like the Best, EP.155] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Most of America falls in between that. And we have a system that really excludes them. And so one is structural and two is it hasn't been productized. It's just hard to understand. It's hard to use. It's built kind of with a fear module when you think about the emotion of a bank or a financial services and what interests us here is the ability to turn that upside down and to build products and services that have a business model that favors that middle customer, the middle part of this scope, but also leans on education and product to make it more convenient, cheaper, easier to understand and a much better experience. We've done a bunch of these so far in different kinds of ways. And so one that I like to talk about is Stash, which is a financial services company based here in New York. So the business started with investment.”
2020-01-21 · Invest Like the Best · Rebecca Kaden – Thesis Driven Investing - [Invest Like the Best, EP.155] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, it's interesting to us here is that, and definitely stuff, you know well. So the banking system as a whole was built on an AUM model that really, it just has a structural model that favors fees off of the two ends of the spectrum, people who really can afford it and so get charged fees for kind of being bad customers And then very high net worth people who get charge fees because of AUM.”
2020-01-21 · Invest Like the Best · Rebecca Kaden – Thesis Driven Investing - [Invest Like the Best, EP.155] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, oh my gosh, I'm very long on Zoom. We're not investors, I'm just kind of a fan, but I think lots more will be built on top of it and probably on other synchronous video platforms too.”
2020-01-21 · Invest Like the Best · Rebecca Kaden – Thesis Driven Investing - [Invest Like the Best, EP.155] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“How we learn. In healthcare, it's improved the care itself. We're interested in where can a technology company not only make care more convenient, but make the care itself better. And Zoom can really do that. So this company can deliver behavioral health treatment primarily around addiction right now to patients wherever they are. And that saves them driving to clinics that are really inaccessible, leaving their jobs to be able to go there. All of these things, which creates an accessibility of care that doesn't exist otherwise and improves adherence. And so it's a similar construct in healthcare than how we're thinking in education.”
2020-01-21 · Invest Like the Best · Rebecca Kaden – Thesis Driven Investing - [Invest Like the Best, EP.155] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“School is one of them where out school synchronous learning for children across the country in the world to learn together online, that's not possible without a technology like Zoom. And no Zoom is not the only one. There are other ones that are out there, but Zoom made it very easy to build on top of it. And it's also way more affordable than it was even a couple of years ago to do that. So the cost structure and accessibility of synchronous video really transforms how we learn and is a kind of a why now for this category. I think it's similar in healthcare. We have a healthcare company built on top of Zoom too in addiction recovery and Medicaid assistant treatment. And that is something where sometimes our thesis can sound broad, but our construct of what we're looking for in these categories is really similar, which is where can the mode of operation improve the quality of the product? So in education, that's improved.”
2020-01-21 · Invest Like the Best · Rebecca Kaden – Thesis Driven Investing - [Invest Like the Best, EP.155] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I agree and don't agree with that statement. So, on one hand, yes, there's very Little information that you can't find on the internet. There's very little information you can't find on YouTube if you looked hard enough for it, right? YouTube has fundamentally transformed how we learn. It's absolutely incredible. But similar to how everything else is built on the internet, the internet's never built top-down. It's built bottom up, which is kind of this beautiful thing and also complicated. So it's hard to navigate. The quality is uncertain. It's challenging in a lot of ways. And what it's done is taken an offline mode of education and just put it online. Film stuff, put it on the internet. What I'm interested in is how can the internet work to change what learning means so you're not just taking offline learning and putting it on the internet, but how you learn a language on Duolingo is not like how you learn a language offline. So one of the biggest technologies I think really helps us here is Zoom. I'm really interested education and otherwise. I think Zoom is an unlock for”
2020-01-21 · Invest Like the Best · Rebecca Kaden – Thesis Driven Investing - [Invest Like the Best, EP.155] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, and so that has complexity to it because you could get into a situation where people felt like the school and the student weren't completely aligned in their future. But that's not all that different than what you have today anyway. So all of these things have complexities. I think education is a field with a lot of opportunity and a lot of complexity. But there's just no lack of shortage of stuff to build here. And it's not super in favor with VCs all the time. But especially when you're looking at this gap between education and the workforce, there's a lot of dollars going into that gap. Companies are willing to pay for that gap. Students are willing to pay for that gap. Parents are often willing to pay for that gap. Even universities are willing to pay for that gap because they don't want their students leaving and not being ready for the job. So it's a tremendous business opportunity for companies that can crack it.”
2020-01-21 · Invest Like the Best · Rebecca Kaden – Thesis Driven Investing - [Invest Like the Best, EP.155] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm so interested in this. I went to Harvard and Stanford. I am the benefit of branded education. And I had great experiences, all of them. So I'm hesitant to represent myself as something I'm not Traditional education is built on long term brands. We're obsessed here. Part of our thesis is around building trusted brands, and we spend a lot of time thinking about what a trusted brand is and what that means, which we can talk about. Harvard, Stanford, Princeton are trusted brands. But Google is a trusted brand. We could argue whether it should or shouldn't be because of privacy of data and things like that. But overall, for a lot of consumers, As these things penetrate deeply into our lives, you could see traditional education getting a run for its money by new brands that enter the space.”
2020-01-21 · Invest Like the Best · Rebecca Kaden – Thesis Driven Investing - [Invest Like the Best, EP.155] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Graduation as a requirement. You're seeing other companies follow suit, and I do think they have a bunch of internal training programs to do this, but businesses will be built that do this on very large scale. But one thing that interests us in this is technology jobs is interesting because they're growing and there are a lot of them and they're well paid and we know Google hires lots of engineers a year and Facebook hires lots of engineers a year, but we also think there's a lot of opportunity for this outside of technology jobs, the shortage in nursing in America, a whole bunch of categories that don't look like people who want to be engineers but are also really valuable and where solutions that are targeted to them and made accessible and affordable through technology can really change the trajectory of their income and their lives.”
2020-01-21 · Invest Like the Best · Rebecca Kaden – Thesis Driven Investing - [Invest Like the Best, EP.155] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Prepare people? Yeah. So there have been different attempts at this. So in my previous Mavron, we were investors in General Assembly. And General Assembly sold a year and a half ago to ADECO, but its primary offering was a consumer bootcamp. It has a significant line of business in the enterprise, and one of them is basically that. Can you run programs inside of companies that take applicants that wouldn't be ready and try to get them ready? There are several others too, and there are, I am not a, I will talk out of turn because I'm not an expert on this, but I do think programs like Google's an interesting one because over the last 15 years, I think partly because of Laszlo, who was there running people ops and then left, they relaxed a lot of rules that they once had. So they took out their kind of preferred colleges list. They took out colleges.”
2020-01-21 · Invest Like the Best · Rebecca Kaden – Thesis Driven Investing - [Invest Like the Best, EP.155] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's widening because education has not produced candidates who are necessarily ready for a workforce as it is today. Education, when you go through college, what you learn is effectively what you learned decades ago. And it's good stuff to learn. But the job that people want to go into have changed. And so they're not prepared for those jobs. And so there's this gap between what X company needs to hire and what ex-college is spitting out. A big piece of that also is that student debt has been rising so exponentially. And so the cost of going through that program and its impact on the rest of your life is getting hard to manage. And so these pressures are combining here where you're not ready for a job and you're burdened by a huge amount of debt, it's becoming easier to think about alternatives. Solutions”
2020-01-21 · Invest Like the Best · Rebecca Kaden – Thesis Driven Investing - [Invest Like the Best, EP.155] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Around the country and around the world, and they're learning together. And that unlocks for kids access to talk to people and learn with people that aren't in their town or their district and teachers that they may not have access to. And also modes of learning that they may not be exposed to because as we know, people's styles are really different and what's being taught to one kid one way may not work for another. And so you need to broaden the scope of what they have access to. So those are examples that excite us, but we would like to do many, many more here.”
2020-01-21 · Invest Like the Best · Rebecca Kaden – Thesis Driven Investing - [Invest Like the Best, EP.155] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Have a couple of them. So, one is Duolingo, right? That's kind of one we point to in our portfolio learning languages for free on your phone has made it way easier to learn languages and is actually a great way to do it because it integrates into your life, it's bite-sized, it's fun, it can be a little bit addicting. These are things that are hard when you're learning languages in a classroom setting. That's one example. Another is Quizlet, which is a San Francisco-based company that's been a great portfolio company for us learning tools. They're great learning tools. They're crowdsourced, so you get the information of a mass body of customers that you're able to use yourself. One that I really love that I work closely with is out school, which is live online K-12 learning. So synchronous learning, teachers post classes to marketplace. So they teach Spanish through Taylor Swift's songs and negotiation through Dungeon& Dragons and all these kind of things. Teachers post it. Kids sign up.”
2020-01-21 · Invest Like the Best · Rebecca Kaden – Thesis Driven Investing - [Invest Like the Best, EP.155] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source