YouSaid · the spoken record

Rebecca Kaden

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64
first
2020-01-21
most recent
2020-01-21
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1
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podcast

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  1. “Or traditional schooling or school boards or thinking where can you get mass customer demand that creates behavior that will penetrate the system?”

    2020-01-21 · Invest Like the Best · Rebecca Kaden – Thesis Driven Investing - [Invest Like the Best, EP.155] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “Time again and again, it's not getting people there. Eventually, it will break the system. It's just really hard to break a really old and institutionalized system. So we've been thinking a lot about that and how to do it. And basically what we believe is you want to do it from the outside in. So what interests us in education is the opportunity of products and services that can drive that value, so can be better quality and less money. And in this one, we actually mean better quality in that the delivery mechanism can make the education itself better. So where can what you learn if you learn it online, you actually learn it better? It's not only more convenient. It's not only breaks down geographical barriers. There's something about that modality that makes it easier and better to learn. And it can be offered to much broader population for cheaper. And it does it from the outside in, meaning we're not focused on products and services that are selling through school districts.”

    2020-01-21 · Invest Like the Best · Rebecca Kaden – Thesis Driven Investing - [Invest Like the Best, EP.155] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “The way I think about education is if you think about all of the buckets of spend in our life. Technology has changed fundamentally so much of what we do, how we get around, how we communicate, how we talk to our friends, and yet how we learn structurally in America has basically not been touched for 50 years, maybe more. And that seems nuts because we know that that's such a key driver of our future success. Teacher salaries are flat, the success rates and the appreciation rates of public schools are flat. It just hasn't changed. But innovation is so accessible. We know it can change. And the thing that makes us think the time is now is the gap between your education and your job readiness is so much bigger than it's ever been. And so eventually the system's got to break. If you believe in an education system that's supposed to get you somewhere and over.”

    2020-01-21 · Invest Like the Best · Rebecca Kaden – Thesis Driven Investing - [Invest Like the Best, EP.155] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “Yeah, we really only want to invest in things that we think technology can make better and we define better by better quality and less money. And that is what we think unlocks kind of new opportunity in those categories.”

    2020-01-21 · Invest Like the Best · Rebecca Kaden – Thesis Driven Investing - [Invest Like the Best, EP.155] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “Yeah, Samsung TV's toys, certainly software, all this kind of stuff that has gotten systematically cheaper over time. And then housing has gotten more expensive, but actually not as more expensive as you might expect kind of hovels around the middle. And then education and healthcare are by far the outliers, and they exponentially shoot up. They've gotten way more expensive over time. And we're obsessed with this because venture capital and technology has almost exclusively focused on the bottom half of the graph. And so is it that they haven't focused on the top half of the graph, so those things haven't gotten cheaper? Or what is the correlation and the causation of that? And if we could focus innovation and technology now that we have these platforms and protocols on things like education and healthcare, which we're certainly seeing in the market, is it actually the right time where you're going to change the trajectory?”

    2020-01-21 · Invest Like the Best · Rebecca Kaden – Thesis Driven Investing - [Invest Like the Best, EP.155] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “Well, this is what interests us because these things aren't surprising. They've been repeated throughout history as the core unlocks of economic movement and success, but they haven't really been where technology has focused. We've been very obsessed recently with this graph, which I'm sure you've seen, which is the kind of inflation graph of the last couple decades. The bifurcation. Yeah, it's hard to explain graphs on podcasts, but we will try, which is all of these lines that trend downward. So all of the same TV.”

    2020-01-21 · Invest Like the Best · Rebecca Kaden – Thesis Driven Investing - [Invest Like the Best, EP.155] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “Which we think about education, which is something that we think is systematically broken and needs to be changed, but also how information.”

    2020-01-21 · Invest Like the Best · Rebecca Kaden – Thesis Driven Investing - [Invest Like the Best, EP.155] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “So, thesis 3.0, it's important to go through one and two because 3.0 is definitely one where by the time we published it, which I pendant but is a full representation of what all the partners were talking about and what we were really thinking about, it was already very much in action from an investing point of view. And the idea was now you have all these platforms and protocols, both on the horizontal platform side and these verticals, as well as this infrastructure layer. What does that allow for? What does the internet now able to create that it wasn't before? And what can you build on top? And we think there's this opportunity to broaden access using those platforms and protocols. How can you systematically drive up value and down cost around major buckets of customer spend, either by building consumer applications or by building the SaaS applications that support it? And that's really what we've been focused on now, particularly in three categories. So access to”

    2020-01-21 · Invest Like the Best · Rebecca Kaden – Thesis Driven Investing - [Invest Like the Best, EP.155] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “Stifled innovation. That if you had horizontal platforms that exhibited relative monopolistic tendencies, it was going to be really hard to compete with them. And this is a team that really deeply believes in the need for continuous innovation. And you don't want to put a cap on that. So out comes the decentralization thesis, and the belief is that blockchain is the first technology that really has a shot at decentralizing the internet, crypto being probably the first application of a blockchain technology. So in some ways, blockchain for USV is its own thing. In some ways, it's actually quite integrated into the rest of it.”

    2020-01-21 · Invest Like the Best · Rebecca Kaden – Thesis Driven Investing - [Invest Like the Best, EP.155] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “The consumer and the SaaS side, both horizontally and vertically. So it's broad, but it's specific because it covers a lot of categories, but it's looking for something specific in the mechanic that creates scale. That's kind of how I think about that. Thesis 2.0 has another element to it as well, which is a decentralized thesis. And it's kind of its own beast, and it's kind of not. The decentralized thesis really stemmed out of the idea that centralization was exciting but also dangerous. These mass platforms that network effects created were very dominant, but at the same time, they were dangerous for consumers because it meant that all of your activity online, all of your data were controlled by a very few number of players. At the time, probably they couldn't articulate exactly how that would become dangerous. Now we know more about that, but we knew it could be problematic. The team at the time knew it could be problematic. The other thing was there was a belief that”

    2020-01-21 · Invest Like the Best · Rebecca Kaden – Thesis Driven Investing - [Invest Like the Best, EP.155] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “Sure. Yeah. So horizontal is something like Facebook, where the core network effect is the business. Vertical is something like a financial services platform or an education platform that has a network effect to it. I think about Duolingo as an example there. Duolingo has a core network effect, meaning with every additional user, the platform gets stronger in various ways, but it's an education business. The network isn't the thing. So that's how I think about vertical versus horizontal. So because those centralized platforms were growing so quickly and becoming such a dominant force on the internet, thesis 2.0 emerged, which was could you see those same tendencies in vertical networks, as well as the underlying infrastructure to build and create those networks? And by that, that led to investments in things like Twilio, MongoDB, Stripe, Cloudflare. You're seeing the kind of infrastructure of the internet be built on both.”

    2020-01-21 · Invest Like the Best · Rebecca Kaden – Thesis Driven Investing - [Invest Like the Best, EP.155] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “That's been largely adopted by many investors, entrepreneurs, and the internet at large. But in 2003 and 2004, it was less obvious. And the belief was that equity value would amass towards where there were large networks of engaged users and that platforms would grow off of that. That turned out to be true and led to great investments that USV made at the time long before I was here in businesses like Twitter and indeed and Etsy. But what happened was two things. One, the team realized that there was opportunity to see that same kind of network effect in vertical networks that they were seeing in horizontal networks, but also that the opportunity got less and less with every horizontal network built because these network effects are very strong and they were creating an internet of centralized platforms that were very hard to compete with.”

    2020-01-21 · Invest Like the Best · Rebecca Kaden – Thesis Driven Investing - [Invest Like the Best, EP.155] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “For some time as it is about where we're going, because what happens is the thesis kind of comes together organically or through a series of conversations, we realize it's guiding our thinking and investing, and then we publish it out to the world because we believe that putting ideas out there can only help everyone, including ourselves. So 1.0 was about large networks of engaged users, network effects. Now network effects is a pretty obvious these things.”

    2020-01-21 · Invest Like the Best · Rebecca Kaden – Thesis Driven Investing - [Invest Like the Best, EP.155] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “Awesome. Well, thank you for having me. This is so fun. So USV is a thesis driven firm, which really just means that rather than think of venture as a coverage driven model of how many companies are out there and how many we can see, how can the partnership come together and think about ideas and things we believe in and aggregate that into a thesis that we think can shape our investing strategy? The firm started with that in 2003 and it's worked well both because I think it produces good results, but one thing that I like to point out is it works well, I think, because also it's a group of people that likes it. It's thinkers and they think it's fun and we enjoy coming up with these thesis ideas together. So to talk about thesis 3.0, it actually helps a lot to start with 1.0. So 1.0, which was published towards the beginning of the firm, but just as all the others, when we publish it, it's as much a reflection of the ideas that we've already been investing in.”

    2020-01-21 · Invest Like the Best · Rebecca Kaden – Thesis Driven Investing - [Invest Like the Best, EP.155] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source