YouSaid · the spoken record

Rob Go

lines on the record
67
first
2023-06-23
most recent
2023-06-23
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

  1. “I think both are viable strategies. We tried the first and ended up doing the second. So typically an anchor is usually an institution, usually somebody who has some strong relationship with you, who is willing to be the first yes, write a meaningful check, and you can build the rest of the fund around them. That usually requires a pretty long process usually to get the anchor over the finish line. But then because that process was so robust, other institutions and folks who want to be a part of this, it makes it very easy for them to say yes. The other approach, which is what we ended up doing, was sort of a bottom-up strategy, right? It's a little bit more of a lean startup of venture funds. You basically find the people who are willing to say yes and just trust you. You try to tally up as much as possible, preferably enough to do a minimum viable first close, close that capital, get into business, and allow yourself time to be able to cultivate the slower moving institutional LPs to come alongside you, hopefully by the end of the first fund. We ended up taking the second strategy.”

    2023-06-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How to Raise a Venture Fund from Deck to First Meetings to Final Close, Why Venture is a Young Person's Game and Why Multi-Stage Funds Have Not Ruined Seed with Rob Go, Co-Founder @ Nextview · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “For us, it has been really, really valuable and important. We're very aligned in our life goals and our career. And so it was kind of easy to be able to say like, hey, we're in this together long term. And we felt like if it wasn't equal, there'd be too much of an incentive to renegotiate depending on how things are going in the fund. And thankfully, my partners have this long-term view around the downfalls of not having equal partnership and we're willing to structure it this way. And I was very happy to do that.”

    2023-06-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How to Raise a Venture Fund from Deck to First Meetings to Final Close, Why Venture is a Young Person's Game and Why Multi-Stage Funds Have Not Ruined Seed with Rob Go, Co-Founder @ Nextview · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “Yeah, so what I've found is most LPs care about deck track record are the main two things that they care about. Everything else is just fodder for them to use as ammunition to sell into their investment committees. You think about like what are the assets you have at your disposal, right? If you have a great media company that is powering the fund, you put tons of stuff about the media company, right? And tons of stats about that. If you have other assets that are disposed to put other things there that matter for that purpose. But really, I think most LPs, they spend like 90% of the time on the deck and the track record. And that's all there is.”

    2023-06-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How to Raise a Venture Fund from Deck to First Meetings to Final Close, Why Venture is a Young Person's Game and Why Multi-Stage Funds Have Not Ruined Seed with Rob Go, Co-Founder @ Nextview · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “Pick a really good law firm, they will help you set up basically the agreements with your partners, which I think is really, really important. This has sort of nothing to do with LPs. This is everything to do with how you run the fund and how the management company operates. But then go into the actual fundraising documents. We basically had a deck, a few spreadsheets that had our track record. I think we had a bunch of slides around case studies and that sort of thing. But for the most part, we didn't have that much documentation. It was mostly focused around our deck.”

    2023-06-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How to Raise a Venture Fund from Deck to First Meetings to Final Close, Why Venture is a Young Person's Game and Why Multi-Stage Funds Have Not Ruined Seed with Rob Go, Co-Founder @ Nextview · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “I mean, ownership relative to fund size was quite nice. And out of a $21 billion fund, you didn't need that much to move the needle.”

    2023-06-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How to Raise a Venture Fund from Deck to First Meetings to Final Close, Why Venture is a Young Person's Game and Why Multi-Stage Funds Have Not Ruined Seed with Rob Go, Co-Founder @ Nextview · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “Fun one was a $21 million fund. Weirdly, it was not that different, right? So still roughly 30 companies in the portfolio. Initial check sizes were lower, but seed rounds at that time, like a million dollars was a pretty big seed round. And so we were writing 300 to 400K checks and doing roughly 30 investments per fund and reserving some capital for follow-ons. So it kind of was the same.”

    2023-06-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How to Raise a Venture Fund from Deck to First Meetings to Final Close, Why Venture is a Young Person's Game and Why Multi-Stage Funds Have Not Ruined Seed with Rob Go, Co-Founder @ Nextview · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “You know, when we raised opportunity funds look pretty darn good, brief moment in time where the numbers were quite strong. So there was a lot less pushback. I think that LPs also like the idea that most of their dollars were going into the seed fund, not the Opportunity Fund. I think there are other firms where the balance was different, right? It was like two to one the other way. LPs didn't love that. The third is there's an alternative, which is we could just raise a bigger fund overall. But I think everybody kind of loses in that case, right? Because it's harder to deploy that much money. The fees effectively are higher because our opportunity fund has somewhat discounted fees. And so I see this as kind of a win-win for everybody who's doing this.”

    2023-06-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How to Raise a Venture Fund from Deck to First Meetings to Final Close, Why Venture is a Young Person's Game and Why Multi-Stage Funds Have Not Ruined Seed with Rob Go, Co-Founder @ Nextview · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “It's a little bit of a stage mismatch. The seed fund goes pretty heavy in the seed, usually does our pro radar a little bit less than our parada than a series A, and then kind of stops from there. The opportunity fund comes in at the B or C stage. So there's almost this period where NextView is actually investing a little bit less than our capacity just to create a little bit of separation between the two funds. So it's not truly a bar bill, but it's a little bit more like a barbell than if we raised one fund and just followed on at every stage.”

    2023-06-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How to Raise a Venture Fund from Deck to First Meetings to Final Close, Why Venture is a Young Person's Game and Why Multi-Stage Funds Have Not Ruined Seed with Rob Go, Co-Founder @ Nextview · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “Quarter ago, this was not necessarily a company that we were as bullish on. Like, you got to make some really convincing argument why that makes sense. So that's one of the mechanisms we have to be able to do that.”

    2023-06-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How to Raise a Venture Fund from Deck to First Meetings to Final Close, Why Venture is a Young Person's Game and Why Multi-Stage Funds Have Not Ruined Seed with Rob Go, Co-Founder @ Nextview · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “I have a couple answers to this. One, I think we have a similar perspective because we think that our most important investment is actually the first investment. That's when we need to buy most of our ownership. And when I think about reserves, you know, we're doing precede and seed. And in this market, right, sometimes you're taking a couple bites of the apple. And so we want to make sure that we can support founders and we invest in really early with some additional capital to get them to series A. So there's a piece of it that's that. But for the most part, we're trying to buy our ownership up front. This isn't really a strategy of let's sprinkle some dollars in the beginning and like pile in at the end. That's kind of one thought. We have a process internally in handling follow-on financings. We basically do a ranking of the portfolio every quarter from a perspective of word we want to deploy or follow on capital. We do that because we want to make the decision apart from a financing opportunity, right? Because what ends up happening is when some fancy firm comes in, wants to lead a series B, you convince yourself that this is the best opportunity in the world, but then if you look back and say, like, well,”

    2023-06-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How to Raise a Venture Fund from Deck to First Meetings to Final Close, Why Venture is a Young Person's Game and Why Multi-Stage Funds Have Not Ruined Seed with Rob Go, Co-Founder @ Nextview · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “That was a little bit less precise. We have a sense of how many investments we think we ought to have in that fund. And that was actually with some guidance from our LPs in terms of the level of concentration that was appropriate. And then we thought through realistically what our allocation levels might be for the things that were coming down the pike, did some fuzzy math and landed at a number. We didn't want something that was too big. And the other thing that we thought about was the ratio between the sea fund and the opportunity fund because we stabled the two in our last fundraise. So all of our LPs were basically investing two to one from the seed fund to the opportunity fund. And we thought that that was fair because folks got to know us primarily as a seed fund. And so most of their money is in the seed fund, but we think we have access to these great opportunities downstream. And so having a third of their capital into those investments made sense to us.”

    2023-06-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How to Raise a Venture Fund from Deck to First Meetings to Final Close, Why Venture is a Young Person's Game and Why Multi-Stage Funds Have Not Ruined Seed with Rob Go, Co-Founder @ Nextview · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “Our portfolio construction has been pretty consistent since we started the firm. We make roughly 30 core investments per year. We reserve roughly half the fund for follow-ons. And we have a sense for what the ideal average check size is for the stage that we invest in. And so today we try to write checks between a million to $3 million into precedent seed rounds. You kind of do that math and multiply that out. That leaves you to about $130, $100 to $40 million fund.”

    2023-06-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How to Raise a Venture Fund from Deck to First Meetings to Final Close, Why Venture is a Young Person's Game and Why Multi-Stage Funds Have Not Ruined Seed with Rob Go, Co-Founder @ Nextview · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “Yeah, so we're currently investing out of our fifth fund. In fact, we have two. We have a seed fund and we have an opportunity fund. The seed fund is $135 million, the opportunity fund to $65 million.”

    2023-06-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How to Raise a Venture Fund from Deck to First Meetings to Final Close, Why Venture is a Young Person's Game and Why Multi-Stage Funds Have Not Ruined Seed with Rob Go, Co-Founder @ Nextview · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “Venture is a young person sport. Going in, we were very sensitive to the fact that we were inexperienced and we were young. We have this funny joke, actually, at NextView, where every time we raise a new fund, we get backpacks for each other. And the reason was the first time we went into an LP pitch meeting, Lee and I showed up with backpacks because that's what we used to travel. And our partner, David, was like, dude, you can't show up with backpacks. People already think we're young. And now we're going to show up like school kids. Are you kidding me? And so we always remember that. And so after we closed our first fund, Lee got a gift for the two of us, which were next view logo backpacks. And since then, that's been the tradition. But I really believe venture is a young person's game. The amount of like energy and hustle that you're able to deploy as a young person is truly a competitive advantage. Like there's a lot to learn from people who've been in the industry for a long time, but you can actually get that kind of knowledge if you're resourceful. And what you can't really replicate is the energy of youth.”

    2023-06-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How to Raise a Venture Fund from Deck to First Meetings to Final Close, Why Venture is a Young Person's Game and Why Multi-Stage Funds Have Not Ruined Seed with Rob Go, Co-Founder @ Nextview · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  15. “It was a lot of naivete. I saw the rise of seed funds that were starting to happen, baseline Harrison Medal, first run capital were starting to have these models where they're investing specifically in CSH companies. Most of the successful early stage funds were getting bigger and bigger, and you saw the writing on the wall for some of those firms. And I figured there's going to be a seed stage specialized fund that's not based in the Bay Area. Why not give it a shot? And so at the same time, my partner is David and Lee, they were all thinking about the same thing. We decided somebody's going to take advantage of this opportunity may as well be us.”

    2023-06-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How to Raise a Venture Fund from Deck to First Meetings to Final Close, Why Venture is a Young Person's Game and Why Multi-Stage Funds Have Not Ruined Seed with Rob Go, Co-Founder @ Nextview · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  16. “This is going to sound ridiculous. I got an adventure because I got a cold call from a VC firm when I was in business school. And I got an email from a partner at Sparkle because they were looking the team with the digital media background. And at the time, everyone had a very narrow definition of what they were looking for. It was like top business school, worked at eBay, Google, or Yahoo, and lived in the local market. So went in for an interview and then proceeded to get tortured for six months before I finally got my offer. But that's how I got into the business.”

    2023-06-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How to Raise a Venture Fund from Deck to First Meetings to Final Close, Why Venture is a Young Person's Game and Why Multi-Stage Funds Have Not Ruined Seed with Rob Go, Co-Founder @ Nextview · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  17. “The number one factor in whether an LP says yes or no is just timing. Are they expanding their program? Are they looking for whatever box or category they put you in? Do they have the bandwidth to be able to do it within the timeframe they're trying to raise a fund?”

    2023-06-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How to Raise a Venture Fund from Deck to First Meetings to Final Close, Why Venture is a Young Person's Game and Why Multi-Stage Funds Have Not Ruined Seed with Rob Go, Co-Founder @ Nextview · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source