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Rick Marini

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2016-11-14
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2016-11-14
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  1. “So, my most recent investment was about a month ago in this company called TrueFacet. And TrueFacet is basically poshmark for used jewelry. So it's a marketplace where people who have jewelry, that's”

    2016-11-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Rick Marini on Lessons Leant From Naval Ravikant, Why You Need To Make 30 Investments Before You Know What You Are Doing & Why You Have To Earn The Right To Good Dealflow · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “He is awesome. He's sometimes hard to go out to dinner with because he is so disciplined in his diet. But my two buddies, Tim. Tim Ferris and Tim Chang are two of the fittest guys in Silicon Valley. And I try to be as well, but those guys are on a whole different level than the rest of us.”

    2016-11-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Rick Marini on Lessons Leant From Naval Ravikant, Why You Need To Make 30 Investments Before You Know What You Are Doing & Why You Have To Earn The Right To Good Dealflow · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “So I've got Sarah. I love Mark Suster from up front, Ventures, both sides of the table, I think, is excellent for both entrepreneurs and investors. Love it. I think Fred Wilson writes some awesome stuff. Sam Altman from YC is awesome. And of course, I'm always reading, you know, TechCrunch every day, and Mattermark has a great newsletter. That's a great summary of what's going on in the investment world, as well as my friend, Tim Ferris, who has a weekly newsletter that I read every Friday.”

    2016-11-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Rick Marini on Lessons Leant From Naval Ravikant, Why You Need To Make 30 Investments Before You Know What You Are Doing & Why You Have To Earn The Right To Good Dealflow · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “Learned a ton from Stan. Stan's now running product for Messenger over at Facebook and Stan's an incredibly smart guy as well. And even though I consider them my two best friends, I just am always in learning mode from those guys and really respect them.”

    2016-11-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Rick Marini on Lessons Leant From Naval Ravikant, Why You Need To Make 30 Investments Before You Know What You Are Doing & Why You Have To Earn The Right To Good Dealflow · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “Well, you know, my biggest mentor is one of my best friends, and that's James Courier. So, James and I were Harvard Business School classmates, a class of 99, and James and I found it tickled together at graduation. James at that time, I was 26, and James was 31. James had worked at Battery Ventures before that and had some other, you know, had a great background. James has been a great mentor and a great friend, you know, whether it was through Tickle in the Seven Years that we spent together, there, shoulder, shoulder, and beyond that. He was an investor in branch out. We were advisors to each other's companies. And James is someone that is, you know, one of my closest confidants. He is critical of me to make me better. And I've just learned a ton from him. And also connected with James is Stanchinowski. So Stan's my other best friend, the two of those guys. And Stan was our CTO at Tickle.”

    2016-11-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Rick Marini on Lessons Leant From Naval Ravikant, Why You Need To Make 30 Investments Before You Know What You Are Doing & Why You Have To Earn The Right To Good Dealflow · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “A big red flag is when an entrepreneur doesn't listen. And for me, I believe that including myself, everyone can benefit from the help of others who have a lot of experience or expertise in a market. And I've been pitched many times by entrepreneurs who are just deaf to feedback. My feedback or the feedback of others because don't forget, angels and VCs, we all talk to each other, right? We all want to get feedback from others. And if I hear this entrepreneur was kind of deaf to my feedback as well as to others, then I'm going to pass on them. I have no regrets on passing on people like that. And in some cases, I've had them come back to me and say, you know what, I realized I was arrogant six months ago and I really want your feedback now. Would you please reconsider investing? That to me is a big red flag because you should always be in learning mode. You should always surround yourself with great people that you can learn.”

    2016-11-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Rick Marini on Lessons Leant From Naval Ravikant, Why You Need To Make 30 Investments Before You Know What You Are Doing & Why You Have To Earn The Right To Good Dealflow · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “Favorite book is Hero with a Thousand Faces by Joseph Campbell. And I'm a Star Wars fan. I have been for probably 30 years. I love the idea of the hero's journey. And maybe that's why I became an entrepreneur is that I love that storytelling.”

    2016-11-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Rick Marini on Lessons Leant From Naval Ravikant, Why You Need To Make 30 Investments Before You Know What You Are Doing & Why You Have To Earn The Right To Good Dealflow · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “Be very low CAC because a lot of this, especially when it comes to consumer content mobile, social, is going to have a low CAC because you've got virality that can drive a lot of that. When you've got a good feel for that and then you have a good feel for LTV and hey, a lot of these social don't have big LTVs up front because they're just trying to build a business, but obviously there has to be some way to generate revenue later. But when you can really start to understand all of those metrics, retention, LTV and so on, when all those come together, that's when I get excited. And, you know, hey, from the early stage, often you don't have a lot of visibility into this. But for entrepreneurs today, I tell them, go out and just try to get some product market fit. Just show me something, even if it's a niche market that we believe has a larger TAM. Go out there and experiment and go build something and then go raise around after that.”

    2016-11-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Rick Marini on Lessons Leant From Naval Ravikant, Why You Need To Make 30 Investments Before You Know What You Are Doing & Why You Have To Earn The Right To Good Dealflow · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “Well, you know, consumers often hard because it's hits driven. So there's a lot of these that are hits driven businesses. Gaming is a great example of that that are hits driven. Now, some of these, you know, some of these companies can have one or two big hits and be worth billions of dollars. But hit-driven businesses are really tough. So what I get more excited about is when you find a hit that's sustainable, it's scalable. You're solving either a pain point for people or you're providing lasting value. And entertainment can be lasting value. People can find something interesting like luminosity, I guess we used as a prior example where they can come back every day. And that's going to be based on retention. When you can use real data to show people are coming back every day with the retention is there that kind of D1, D7, D30 retention. When you can show an investor, here's my CAC, you know, my”

    2016-11-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Rick Marini on Lessons Leant From Naval Ravikant, Why You Need To Make 30 Investments Before You Know What You Are Doing & Why You Have To Earn The Right To Good Dealflow · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “Yeah, they raised like a $40 million Series A in Silicon Valley turned on them before they even launched. People are like, that's ridiculous. Ridiculous valuation, ridiculous amount raise. That's not a series A. That's a series C. It just happens to be your first round. And I feel like people really turned on them before they even got out the door. It just didn't feel right. And I'm someone who, you know, I want everything to feel right for the entrepreneur and for the investors. Like, let's everyone do the right thing, be motivated together, incentive aligned, and go build a big company together.”

    2016-11-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Rick Marini on Lessons Leant From Naval Ravikant, Why You Need To Make 30 Investments Before You Know What You Are Doing & Why You Have To Earn The Right To Good Dealflow · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “That's absolutely true. There are so many examples of companies that have gone and raised a big Series A, big valuation. And then remember color, this is years ago. Yeah.”

    2016-11-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Rick Marini on Lessons Leant From Naval Ravikant, Why You Need To Make 30 Investments Before You Know What You Are Doing & Why You Have To Earn The Right To Good Dealflow · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “And cheap, and everybody understands it. But there are definitely times that I have passed on deals where I didn't believe the risk was commensurate with the valuation request from the angel, from the entrepreneur. And I think that that stained discipline is important, especially when, like I said, 85% of these fail. So you can't just always kind of chase the next deal. And yes, you will miss out on some of the successes. But trying to stay disciplined is really important and being willing to pass on a deal. And for me, my advice to entrepreneurs who are raising is to really focus on giving a valuation to the investors that you believe is reasonable, but they do too. It's far more important for an entrepreneur to get great people around the table, people that can help them raise a series A, people who have a certain domain experience and expertise that they can bring.”

    2016-11-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Rick Marini on Lessons Leant From Naval Ravikant, Why You Need To Make 30 Investments Before You Know What You Are Doing & Why You Have To Earn The Right To Good Dealflow · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “Know, it's really hard in the seed round, and that's where I play. In the seed round, it is tough. Some of it is going to be driven by market conditions, right? In 2013 to 2015, the market was frothy and entrepreneurs had a lot of leverage and they were getting higher valuations. Part of that was due to this huge influx of capital into the market, whether it was a lot of angels jumping in, angels backed by syndicates on Angelist and having bigger checks to write, or all these new seed funds that have come online. So a lot of new capital going into kind of the same entrepreneur base. So that was hard to be able to compete on price there, but I've tried to stay disciplined for seed investing. I'm almost always going to be single digit millions for the valuation. Often it's going to be in the form of a convertible note or a safe note. Those are almost always used in the seed round because they're easy.”

    2016-11-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Rick Marini on Lessons Leant From Naval Ravikant, Why You Need To Make 30 Investments Before You Know What You Are Doing & Why You Have To Earn The Right To Good Dealflow · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “You believe he has, then let's carve out a fairly small amount, 50 to 100K in a much bigger round is palatable for them. But the entrepreneur has to go to bat for you, which means you have to add value along the way. You can't just write a small check and go away and expect that the entrepreneur is going to go to bat with you with a new investor. You know, my philosophy is that I want to add 10x the value of my check. So if I write a 50k check, I want the entrepreneur to feel like I added $500,000 of value to this company. And in doing that, I've obviously added value to my investment, but also hopefully the entrepreneur believes that I am someone that they want in future rounds. They tell other people, other VCs, other entrepreneurs that might be raising around that I add a lot of value. And that's a big way that I continue to get great deal flow is by actually earning that reputation.”

    2016-11-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Rick Marini on Lessons Leant From Naval Ravikant, Why You Need To Make 30 Investments Before You Know What You Are Doing & Why You Have To Earn The Right To Good Dealflow · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  15. “Think it really comes from the entrepreneur. I have a great network of VCs and they typically bring me a lot of my deals of VC will bring me into because they believe I can add value. But the reality is once it goes to a Series A or especially a B or a C in later stage investors come in, the entrepreneur needs to fight for any kind of additional investment from an angel that you may want to do. And by the way, the valuation may get so high that the angel says, I can't play at this level. It doesn't make any sense. But I have had in several cases entrepreneurs where I've said, you know, I'd love to keep investing in this company. I love this company. And they've gone back to the VC and said, hey, can we carve out 50 or 100,000 for Rick? He's added a lot of value here. We want to keep him motivated. We want to reward him for that value in the past, as well as what he can do in the future. I think almost every time, if not every time, the VC has said, yeah, we know Rick's going to add value.”

    2016-11-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Rick Marini on Lessons Leant From Naval Ravikant, Why You Need To Make 30 Investments Before You Know What You Are Doing & Why You Have To Earn The Right To Good Dealflow · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  16. “The bigger valuations. So you're going to take a lot of dilution. And this happened to me with one of my companies, which is a high flying company. They've raised a lot of money and that's super exciting. And they could have a big exit. But the reality is my percentage of this company is becoming smaller and smaller every time they raise a big round. So angels have to understand, you know, when you're coming in, expect a ton of dilution right off on the Series A and then going forward. And what you believe your return is going to be, unfortunately when you get that check later, it's often smaller than you thought because you didn't account for all that dilution.”

    2016-11-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Rick Marini on Lessons Leant From Naval Ravikant, Why You Need To Make 30 Investments Before You Know What You Are Doing & Why You Have To Earn The Right To Good Dealflow · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  17. “see coming in and the other nuance here that's still important is that typically the VC is going to require a 10 to 15 percent option pool for the employees which makes sense but usually the angel investor is getting squeezed by that as well usually the vc is going to say everybody in the entrepreneur the employees and the the existing investors you're all getting squeezed by that so you didn't actually just double your money on paper you probably increased it by you know 50 or 60 percent so that's important on the series a but then as you go to a series b and c and d as these companies start to raise a lot of money two things happen one you don't have pro rataites because you didn't put enough money in to be considered a major investor and number two without those pro rata you continue to get diluted every time and even if you had the pro rata you probably don't have enough personal capital to write the bigger checks”

    2016-11-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Rick Marini on Lessons Leant From Naval Ravikant, Why You Need To Make 30 Investments Before You Know What You Are Doing & Why You Have To Earn The Right To Good Dealflow · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  18. “What's a great question and actually one that I wanted to cover today because I don't think a lot of angels understand that. And, you know, it's really important when you're looking at your total return. It's dilution for angels is actually a big thing. You could invest in an angel round at a low valuation. Maybe it's a $5 million valuation. And you're writing a small check. You're typically writing a 25K check. Maybe for some it's bigger, but that's a typical size for an angel investment. Let's call it an eight cap, $8 million cap. And let's say that the VC, you know, things go well and the VC comes in, put $4 million in on a 12 priest, all right? The post money is $16 million and you say, well, I doubled my money, right? I had an $8 million convertible note, $8 million cap, and I double my money. No, you didn't. Here's what really happened is you just took on 25% dilution, right?”

    2016-11-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Rick Marini on Lessons Leant From Naval Ravikant, Why You Need To Make 30 Investments Before You Know What You Are Doing & Why You Have To Earn The Right To Good Dealflow · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  19. “Okay, interesting, but not for me. I have a billion dollar fund. I can only sit on five or six boards at a time typically. I only get to do one to two investments per year, and I'm going to have to pass because the exit potential on this is only $100 million and it won't even come close to returning my fund. Now as the angel, as the guy who put the money in thinking I'm going to get 10 or 20x my money, all of a sudden everything changes. All the series A guys shut that company out because the exit potential is not big enough. And then you go into this spiral, this negative spiral, unfortunately, where now the company is scrambling to either do a bridge, which is kind of a dirty word in Silicon Valley, but if it's not clear that there's a bridge to a series A, then it goes to an aqua hire. And you got to remember, in an aqua hire, the acquiring company, they don't care about the investors, right? They only care about retaining the employees. Therefore, any kind of cash compensation that's going towards the acquisition”

    2016-11-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Rick Marini on Lessons Leant From Naval Ravikant, Why You Need To Make 30 Investments Before You Know What You Are Doing & Why You Have To Earn The Right To Good Dealflow · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  20. “Well, I'll tell you, it's one of my biggest learnings over the last five years of really being an active angel is the difference between an angel and a VC when it comes to exit. And let me give you a concrete example. So for me, I could look at a company and I could say, wow, easy. I can see a path through a $50 to $100 million exit. Totally get it. I know who the buyer set would be. Great, I'm investing it. Let's call it a convertible note with a $5 million cap. So I could go 10 to 20x my money. Awesome. Then the VC comes in. And the VC typically sees a partner in a series A firm typically sees between 600 and 700 deals a year in a series A partner typically does one to two deals per year. If I'm saying yes 5 to 10% of the time they're saying yes far less than 1% of the time. Here's the issue. They come in and look at that same company and say, yep, I could see this maybe selling up to 100 million dollars.”

    2016-11-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Rick Marini on Lessons Leant From Naval Ravikant, Why You Need To Make 30 Investments Before You Know What You Are Doing & Why You Have To Earn The Right To Good Dealflow · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  21. “And then the next company, especially network effect companies. And then the next company might get 5 or 10%, the number two. And then the long tail shares last five or ten percent. So you really don't want to ever play in the long tail. And you really rarely want to be a number two unless it's a huge tam, unless it's a huge total addressable market. As an example, Uber and Lyft. If you were an angel in Lyft, you're still very happy if they're worthly $5 billion. But you really want to be an Uber who's worth over $60 billion, right? And that math actually kind of works out to that kind of 85, 10, and 5. So it's super important to get excited about companies, but do all the due diligence on the sector and the other companies to understand who do you really believe will be the winner. And the winner is usually going to be the best company who has some unique advantage, you know, kind of with the right timing, with the right investors around them. I mean, there's obviously a lot of pieces to”

    2016-11-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Rick Marini on Lessons Leant From Naval Ravikant, Why You Need To Make 30 Investments Before You Know What You Are Doing & Why You Have To Earn The Right To Good Dealflow · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  22. “I've definitely become more disciplined. As I said, I said yes too often. And one of the things that I've learned is that you can get excited about a sector. And then from there, what's really important is to do the due diligence on the sector. Because of course, as an angel, you have to stay optimistic that these companies can change the world, but you can't jump in on the first company that you meet. So you get excited about a sector. You do your due diligence. And not only on that one company you meet, but it's really important to look at the next four companies that are in the space because I often tell an entrepreneur if you think you have something really unique, there may be four other companies in Silicon Valley around the world already doing the same thing. And what's your unique advantage? How do you beat them? So I need to, as an angel, identify those other four companies. And that's really important because often in markets, you'll see the number one company accrue 85 to 90 percent of the value.”

    2016-11-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Rick Marini on Lessons Leant From Naval Ravikant, Why You Need To Make 30 Investments Before You Know What You Are Doing & Why You Have To Earn The Right To Good Dealflow · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  23. “To me, is that go slow. You need to meet a lot of companies. You will find some great companies, but in doing these meetings, you start to build things like pattern recognition. You start to see a lot of different founders and you start to understand what makes this founder better than another. And also in time, you can see the companies that you did that you actually did the investment and how they did and hopefully took good notes and watched the companies that you did not invest in and see how they did. and start to compare and contrast what you saw in these companies that made you that got you excited or what turned you off especially for the companies that made it and you start to build kind of your own kind of personal thesis around investing but this stuff takes time you don't just you know walk into the next uber there's a lot of time that goes into this and unfortunately a lot of saying no along the way to pick that that best 30”

    2016-11-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Rick Marini on Lessons Leant From Naval Ravikant, Why You Need To Make 30 Investments Before You Know What You Are Doing & Why You Have To Earn The Right To Good Dealflow · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  24. “But the reality is if you're going to do 30 investments, you should probably have a investment rate of, let's say, 5 to 10%, which means you should see 300 to 600 companies. If you're investing at 5 to 10% acceptance rate before you hit 30 companies, well, that's a lot of companies to meet. So A, you really have to carve out the time to be able to meet these companies. And that's a lot of time. And B, you know, it's saying no a lot. It's saying no at least 90% of the time. And that is, that's a bummer. You're an entrepreneur. You're optimistic. You want to change the world. You want to help people do that. But the reality is most 85% of startups fail. And you can't say yes every time or you'll go bankrupt. There's a very good chance you're not going to find the next Uber, Facebook, or Snapchat every time you meet entrepreneurs. So you've got to be disciplined. And that was something Navals.”

    2016-11-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Rick Marini on Lessons Leant From Naval Ravikant, Why You Need To Make 30 Investments Before You Know What You Are Doing & Why You Have To Earn The Right To Good Dealflow · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  25. “So, yeah, Naval Ravicant, the founder of Angel List, and one of the best Angel investors in the world, he's a good friend of mine, and Naval has been a mentor as well as I've become an angel investor. And he had said to me several years ago, if you're serious about becoming an angel investor, you're going to need to do probably 30 investments before you really know what you're doing. And to me, that's the equivalent of an expert having to put in 10,000 hours to become an expert. Now, the problem here is that when you do 30 angel investments, I mean, that could cost you anywhere from half a million to a million dollars. And this is typically for angels, their own personal money that they're investing. So that is a very expensive education. Now, the reality is, you know, was he right on the 30? Yeah, he probably was. And, you know, some of the lessons are, I went too fast. I did a lot of investments quickly, you know, getting excited about companies.”

    2016-11-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Rick Marini on Lessons Leant From Naval Ravikant, Why You Need To Make 30 Investments Before You Know What You Are Doing & Why You Have To Earn The Right To Good Dealflow · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  26. “I see your point that there could be a risk that you give all the value and they say, why should we give you any equity now? My experience in Silicon Valley is the opposite, which is Silicon Valley is a place where people share ideas. I'm originally from the Boston area, and anytime somebody wants to talk about their idea, they want you to sign an NDA, and they're really secretive and closed. And when I came to Silicon Valley back in 2000, it was so different. You know sign NDAs, that's a weird thing to ask someone to do. And people are very open and share their ideas. So for me, I would rather prove out my expertise to an entrepreneur. I would rather Contribute to the ecosystem and hope that they see that value and instead of cutting the out of a deal, they're more motivated to bring me in.”

    2016-11-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Rick Marini on Lessons Leant From Naval Ravikant, Why You Need To Make 30 Investments Before You Know What You Are Doing & Why You Have To Earn The Right To Good Dealflow · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  27. “45 or 50 companies over the last four or five years, companies like Snapchat, Reddit, Lumosity, Angelist, Poshmark, lots of investments, you know, lots of companies I'm excited about. And lastly, I'm also an LP in several funds like Excel and Binary Capital and MAVEN and Velos and some others. So that's kind of my background of how and why I became an angel.”

    2016-11-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Rick Marini on Lessons Leant From Naval Ravikant, Why You Need To Make 30 Investments Before You Know What You Are Doing & Why You Have To Earn The Right To Good Dealflow · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  28. “Yeah, I use it every day. Oh, excellent. Excellent. All right. Good. So lumosity is still going strong. I'm doing well. And I've been investor and advisor there since 2008. So long time on that one and got involved there with a very good friend of mine named Tim Chang, who's now a partner at Mayfield. And because of my experience with Tickle, Tim thought I'd be a great advisor to lumosity. So he brought me in in 08. And that was really the first kind of taste I got of the angel side, so the entrepreneur side, and being able to advise them and then start investing after that. And I've really been an active angel, I'd say, for the last four years, doing a lot of investments and seeing a lot of companies. And my typical space is a consumer. So I'm usually doing consumer startups, focus on marketplaces, network effect businesses, social, content, and media. I'm very busy. I've invested in”

    2016-11-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Rick Marini on Lessons Leant From Naval Ravikant, Why You Need To Make 30 Investments Before You Know What You Are Doing & Why You Have To Earn The Right To Good Dealflow · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  29. “Branch out raised $49 million from Excel and Mayfield and Redpoint and Northwest and Floodgate and some great angels. And that grew quickly. We had over 800 million profiles leveraging the Facebook platform. And we sold that company in 2014 to a publicly traded recruiting company called One Page. And in parallel, I had another company called Talk.co, which was Enterprise Messaging, very similar to Slack. We actually launched the same time as Slack and it was clear a network effect businesses was usually one big winner that they were going to be the winner. So we sold that company talk.co to hearst. And I've been over at Hearst Big Media Company for the last two years running digital innovation. So I've got 17 years of experience to be able to apply as an angel. Started investing as an angel back in 2008. The first was a company called Lumosity, which a lot of people know from their TV ads.”

    2016-11-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Rick Marini on Lessons Leant From Naval Ravikant, Why You Need To Make 30 Investments Before You Know What You Are Doing & Why You Have To Earn The Right To Good Dealflow · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  30. “Sure. Well, really, it's taking my 17 years of experience as an entrepreneur and being able to apply that back into the ecosystem and be able to help earlier stage companies, kind of the next generation of founders with their companies. And maybe stepping back from that, as an entrepreneur, I've started three companies. And the first was back in 1999, and that was called Tickle. Founded that with a classmate of mine from Harvard Business School named James Currier. And Tickle grew to be the largest personality testing site on the planet. We are the 18th largest site in the world at one point and had about 200 million registered users when the internet was only 600 million people. So that company grew quickly and we sold that to Monster. And for about 100 million back in 04, lots of lessons because we went through kind of the dark days, right? The first dot-com crash. Started my second company, Branch Out back in 2010.”

    2016-11-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Rick Marini on Lessons Leant From Naval Ravikant, Why You Need To Make 30 Investments Before You Know What You Are Doing & Why You Have To Earn The Right To Good Dealflow · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  31. “Thank you. It's great to be on with you. I'm a big fan of your show, and I've been excited to have this conversation with you.”

    2016-11-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Rick Marini on Lessons Leant From Naval Ravikant, Why You Need To Make 30 Investments Before You Know What You Are Doing & Why You Have To Earn The Right To Good Dealflow · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source