YouSaid · the spoken record

Rob Hayes

lines on the record: 28
first: 2016-03-21
most recent: 2016-03-21
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Nick and his team have done one of the most amazing jobs I've ever seen. And I cannot tell you how proud I am to be associated with the company.”
2016-03-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · Uber's First Investor, First Round Capital's Rob Hayes on How The Deal Of The Decade Originated and Why Product Orientated VC Is The Future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And the reason I invested was one, again, I always come from an orientation of is there a real problem that this company is solving? Is it a problem that I either fail myself or I know a lot of people feel and feel deeply? And then, you know, if the problem, if the company has identified the problem, is this a founder that can execute against a solution to that problem? And if you've ever met Nick, he's an amazing guy. He's one of those guys that you meet for the first time and you go, wow, this person is a very special kind of entrepreneur. And Nick has proven to be that. I mean, hardware, there's a reason that hardware has the word hard in it. It's one of the most difficult things to do in technologies to produce an integrated hardware software product.”
2016-03-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · Uber's First Investor, First Round Capital's Rob Hayes on How The Deal Of The Decade Originated and Why Product Orientated VC Is The Future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So the last three that I made are not public. And so the one I'm going to tell you about is a company called Ero. Well, it's a new way to get Wi-Fi in your house. It's a Wi-Fi system, which is very easy to set up, very transparent to the user, self-managing, helps you kill all the dead spots in your house. So it launched a couple of weeks ago. It's got amazing press, but I'll have to tell you, I've been using it for a few months now as an early beta user. And it is, I never thought I would say something like, wow, you know, this Wi-Fi system has been life-changing, but it's been life-changing, right? It's just, it's so much easier to use. When something goes wrong with the Wi-Fi, I know instantly I know where the problem is. I know if it's Comcast or something else, and then doing tech support for my parents has also been a lot easier. So by tech support, I mean, like I handed my data box and said, here you go.”
2016-03-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · Uber's First Investor, First Round Capital's Rob Hayes on How The Deal Of The Decade Originated and Why Product Orientated VC Is The Future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I absolutely adore the first round review. I think when you look at that, you see our orientation of coming from a point of view of being in service of founders and helping. And every one of those articles is meant to be tactical in nature, something that you can use in your company tomorrow and next week or next month because we really believe that especially when you're a super early stage, you spend 95% of your time trying to make things happen on a day-to-day basis and 5% or less of your time on things strategic. And I think there are not enough venture capitalists who help really help with the tactical stuff as opposed to the very large strategic stuff.”
2016-03-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · Uber's First Investor, First Round Capital's Rob Hayes on How The Deal Of The Decade Originated and Why Product Orientated VC Is The Future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, I'm a venture capitalist. I'm a creature of habit, and I also get very caught up in my day very, very quickly. There's a lot of things that I read, okay, so I'll give you two. One is like my industry related, and that is Dan Primax term sheet. Yeah, and that, you know, it shows up, it basically shows up in my inbox every morning about the time I wake up. Always the first thing I read every morning and kind of, you know, if there's anything going on that I didn't know about it, now I know about it, thanks to Dan in my industry. And the other thing that I read incessantly because I'm a political junkie is I read a bunch of political blogs, but probably talking points memo is the one that I read the most just because I'm fascinated by the political process and especially with this presidential election we're going through even more fascinated with how these things work or maybe more bluntly how they don't work. So those are the types of things that keep me interested.”
2016-03-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · Uber's First Investor, First Round Capital's Rob Hayes on How The Deal Of The Decade Originated and Why Product Orientated VC Is The Future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, I'm still upset about Dropbox. It was one of the first companies I met Drew through the guys that started Zobme who were in his class at very early class at YC, loved what Drew was building, thought it was a great product, actually had a term sheet out to him, ended up losing on valuation and a very, very small differential on valuation, which was a massive lesson for me in that there are crazy valuations and there are non-crazy valuations, but when you're talking about 10 to 15% differential for a company that for any company that is a relatively binary outcome, that's a silly mistake to make. And I don't think I've ever made it again.”
2016-03-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · Uber's First Investor, First Round Capital's Rob Hayes on How The Deal Of The Decade Originated and Why Product Orientated VC Is The Future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One of the people that has certainly influenced me in the VC business is Bob Kagel, one of the founders of Benchmark. Very early on in my career, I sat on the board of MIT.com with him. And one of the things I noticed was that in board meetings, he was the kind of guy that sat very quietly, listened very intently, and when he spoke, it was because he had something very important to say. But it also meant that he didn't speak a whole lot. And, you know, being in a bunch of different board meetings over the last decade plus where I'd seen people, you know, kind of grandstanding speaking because it sounded their own voice, you know, and generally kind of coming up the works, that stood out to me as like, that's not the way you have to act. Watching Bob, who's one of the most successful, if not the most successful venture capitalist ever, watching the way that he conducted himself with companies, it was clear to me that you didn't have to be that other way to be successful, which was something that fit much more with my.”
2016-03-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · Uber's First Investor, First Round Capital's Rob Hayes on How The Deal Of The Decade Originated and Why Product Orientated VC Is The Future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, I think my favorite book is a book called Travels with Charlie by John Steinbeck. And Sidebeck is obviously a very well known author, but he grew up in the Central Valley of California, as did I. He's an amazing writer, which I only aspire to be. I fire to be good even, but not quite there. And it's written towards the end of his life. And it's kind of a soul-searching kind of, almost a self-help book written by a guy who is an amazing individual. And so I would say that's certainly one of my favorite books.”
2016-03-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · Uber's First Investor, First Round Capital's Rob Hayes on How The Deal Of The Decade Originated and Why Product Orientated VC Is The Future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think I honestly think that transparency and honesty and trust are the keys to any relationship other than my relationship with my wife and my children, there's no relationship that's more important to me than the relationship with these partners. And so I absolutely believe that and all my partners do. And that's why we carried on that way or the time that we together”
2016-03-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · Uber's First Investor, First Round Capital's Rob Hayes on How The Deal Of The Decade Originated and Why Product Orientated VC Is The Future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A group of people that are my partners at first round are some of the most amazing people on the face of the planet. And when I'm talking with my partners about what I think about what we're doing as a firm and what we can do better and all that and what I think we're doing great and everything else, it's the same exact things that I actually tell my wife. There's not two separate conversations that are going on there, right? one conversation because we are that open with each other And I think that to me gives me a tremendous amount of confidence that when the time comes and we start that process of generational change that we'll get through it and the firm will end up being stronger for it.”
2016-03-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · Uber's First Investor, First Round Capital's Rob Hayes on How The Deal Of The Decade Originated and Why Product Orientated VC Is The Future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Listen, I think that generational transition is one of the things that tears firms apart. And so it's something that you need to start thinking about long before you're ready to make that transition. And so what it means is, and I think that right now there's probably no one that does this better than Benchmark in the space, where they're continually bringing in young people and growing them from relatively green to experience. We're still relatively young as a firm and as people, but it's something that we obviously, you know, I think we've been thinking about generational change and what it looks like since we started the fund. And I think that, you know, the key is to be very deliberate. And the only way to do it successfully is to make sure that you have a partnership that has tremendously good communication and trust between those partners. And that's something that we have at first round.”
2016-03-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · Uber's First Investor, First Round Capital's Rob Hayes on How The Deal Of The Decade Originated and Why Product Orientated VC Is The Future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Never finished. There's always things you can do to make them better, and you can continue to tweak them and grow them and add to them, to continue to build a better product for your customer. And that's just, that is kind of the thinking that has driven us to build the firm that we have today. But that's also the thinking that will build us to continue driving the firm to something that I assume will look very different 10 years from now than it looks today.”
2016-03-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · Uber's First Investor, First Round Capital's Rob Hayes on How The Deal Of The Decade Originated and Why Product Orientated VC Is The Future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I fundamentally believe that. And so you take that product orientation and you build and you build the best product you can for your customers and that product is venture capital. And if for 35, 40 years, the venture capital product had remained relatively stagnant. It was money and a partner, right? That's what you got. And everybody had, you know, and you could debate the relative merits of this partner versus that partner, but that was what you got, right? And so what we said was like, listen, maybe there's something, you know, listen, I think our money's just as green as everybody else's. And I think the partners at first round are great, but there's more that you can do. You can build a better BC product. And so that's what we've done. And so when you look at the evolution of first round and the product that we've offered over the last decade, you've seen a lot of changes, but that is more because you look at, because we look at venture capital as a product. And if you've ever built a product, one thing you know about products is they're never good enough.”
2016-03-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · Uber's First Investor, First Round Capital's Rob Hayes on How The Deal Of The Decade Originated and Why Product Orientated VC Is The Future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's been constant change. It wasn't like there was an aha moment necessarily, but I think that what you have with us, you know, we all come from a kind of a product orientation. We love to build products that customers really, really like. And so if you come with a product orientation and you look at venture capital, you do a couple of things. First, you look at, you figure out who your customer is. And the customer here is the founders that you work with. I think a lot of venture capital, especially in kind of the post internet bubble, early 2000s, were so worried about being able to raise that next fund that they begin to shift their orientation to and think about their customers as their LPs. Now, listen, we think, you know, our LPs are, you know, our investors are very important to us, obviously. But I think of them as our shareholders. And if I make my customers very happy and have the best product out there, then my shareholders are going to benefit from that. Absolutely.”
2016-03-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · Uber's First Investor, First Round Capital's Rob Hayes on How The Deal Of The Decade Originated and Why Product Orientated VC Is The Future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I always start with an orientation of helping, right? And so I'm going to help. I'm going to try to figure out how I can help everybody that I need. And there are people who, you know, five minutes into my first meeting with them, I know that I'm not going to be an investor, but I still want to figure out how I can help them. I think it's probably helpful in terms of understanding what it's like to work with me when companies see not I am.”
2016-03-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · Uber's First Investor, First Round Capital's Rob Hayes on How The Deal Of The Decade Originated and Why Product Orientated VC Is The Future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I was able to add some value and help them along their journey to build a successful company. And so that never stops. I still get those moments every week and every month. And those are the things that I've always been excited to get out of bed in the morning and do, and they continue to be. It's not about the win-loss sheet. It's about doing the day-to-day work and really enjoying it.”
2016-03-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · Uber's First Investor, First Round Capital's Rob Hayes on How The Deal Of The Decade Originated and Why Product Orientated VC Is The Future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But the other thing is, I think that there's a lot of people that get into venture because they think they can make a lot of money doing it. I think that's the wrong reason to get into venture and certainly not the reason I got into venture. And there are way easier ways to make a lot of money than going and being a venture capitalist. And I do it because every day I get to get up and I get to meet a bunch of new people that are thinking of new ideas and building new companies and doing things that I would never would have never considered before. And then for the companies that are kind enough to take our investment dollars, I get to work with these companies and help them along the way. And I think that at first round, our mission is to serve the entrepreneurs that we work with. For me, the biggest joy I get is walking out of a meeting with a founder that I'm working with or CEO that I'm working with and feel like”
2016-03-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · Uber's First Investor, First Round Capital's Rob Hayes on How The Deal Of The Decade Originated and Why Product Orientated VC Is The Future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, you know, I think that, first of all, I mean, let me set a little context for you. I mean, my ultimate goal is to, you know, take money from my investors and invest it in companies and return multiples on that money. I haven't done that, right? And so until that happens, I don't even call it a success, right? No, come on. It's a massive company. It's obviously very well known. I think its prospects for success are obviously huge. But I don't look at that and go, you know, kind of rub my hands together and say, okay, we're done. That's, you know, this is the best thing that's ever happened until that happens, I actually, in my mental checkbook don't mark this off as the big win that a lot of people think that it is.”
2016-03-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · Uber's First Investor, First Round Capital's Rob Hayes on How The Deal Of The Decade Originated and Why Product Orientated VC Is The Future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It wasn't a terribly competitive round. I don't think. I mean, it was a real negotiation around it. And there were a few other people around the table. I don't think that, you know, it wasn't one of these crazy. I mean, this was 2010. Remember, this wasn't 2015 when any company that, you know, looked like it might be interesting at all was getting 35 term sheets locked at it, right? This was a different time. Definitely a very strong negotiation, but I wouldn't call it like, you know, certainly wasn't the most competitive situation I've ever been in around seed investment.”
2016-03-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · Uber's First Investor, First Round Capital's Rob Hayes on How The Deal Of The Decade Originated and Why Product Orientated VC Is The Future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I would look at it as more active than aggressive in terms of they're going into markets where people are downloading the app, opening the app, and it's clear that they want the service there. There's actually a lot of customer demand and driver demand for this product in places that they go. And so their focus on providing the best possible experience they can for both their customers and their drivers. And that's a very singular focus for the company. They're going to try to make that happen and make those constituencies as happy as they can.”
2016-03-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · Uber's First Investor, First Round Capital's Rob Hayes on How The Deal Of The Decade Originated and Why Product Orientated VC Is The Future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Work with these regulatory bodies to make sure that Uber could coexist peacefully with the existing status quo players. The other thing was when they made their initial move into Europe, there was a question as to whether this was a, is this a US-only type of company or is this a global company? And once they made the initial move to Europe and it had the same sort of impact and uptake that it did in the big cities here, it was clear that this was truly a global company and could be something very special.”
2016-03-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · Uber's First Investor, First Round Capital's Rob Hayes on How The Deal Of The Decade Originated and Why Product Orientated VC Is The Future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There were a couple of things. One was early on they received, there was perceived to be a lot of regulatory risk for the company. And I think that that's borne out, but I think that the first one of those was a letter they got from the city of San Francisco that was well known. It was published in TechCrunch when it happened and that sort of thing saying that they were doing something wrong. And the company, instead of backing down like I think a lot of companies would when they get a very legal sounding letter, said this isn't right. and this is not good for customers and this is not what individuals want, right? This is not a product that should be shut down because of a single small constituency in the city. And so they figured out a way to work with the powers that be to make sure that the product Ubers could continue to run in San Francisco. And that was the beginning of a long line of trying to figure out how to”
2016-03-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · Uber's First Investor, First Round Capital's Rob Hayes on How The Deal Of The Decade Originated and Why Product Orientated VC Is The Future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The impact that he's had on Uber and the culture there and how they kind of started going from city to city and building that playbook and was kind of the core of the operations of Uber being”
2016-03-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · Uber's First Investor, First Round Capital's Rob Hayes on How The Deal Of The Decade Originated and Why Product Orientated VC Is The Future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No. I mean, anybody that says that they did, other than Travis and Ryan, who actually did kind of have that vision early on. Would be lying to you. I think that I kind of see things that people can't see. And I think that, you know, a lot of people had a chance to, you know, a lot of people had looked at Uber at the same time. I was our Uber cab at the time at the same time that I was looking at the company. And I think that as a venture capitalist, you can look for reasons to invest or you can look for reasons not to invest. And I think it's sometimes harder to look for the reasons to invest. But I think a lot of the reasons that people didn't invest were, one, at the time, it was this unknown guy, Ryan Graves, running the company. And two, it was seen as not a very big market. And the way I looked at it was like, listen, I mean, I'm a seed investor. My job is to find those people that people haven't met before or heard of or worked with before, you know, make decisions as to whether I think that person can be someone that can have a real impact. In Ryan's case, it turned out to be true. I mean, he's an amazing guy and if you look at”
2016-03-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · Uber's First Investor, First Round Capital's Rob Hayes on How The Deal Of The Decade Originated and Why Product Orientated VC Is The Future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So we were early investors in Garrick Camp's previous company, Stumble Upon. And so I'd gotten to know Garrett through that. So in 2010, he was tweeting out about this thing called UberCab. And I sent him an email. It said it had four words in it. It said, I'll buy what's UberCab. As you can imagine, I still have that. That email is somewhat well known now in the firm. And so he introduced me to Ryan Grace, who was at the time the general manager running the company. Met Ryan, learned about the company, used the product and thought that it was astonishingly good, and especially in San Francisco where taxis for so long, where I think people had just given up on taxis. And so we decided that we want. To invest, I negotiated a term sheet over the 4th of July holiday in 2010, and we ended up closing the investment in August of 2010.”
2016-03-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · Uber's First Investor, First Round Capital's Rob Hayes on How The Deal Of The Decade Originated and Why Product Orientated VC Is The Future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Top of the VC market. And I'll give the one example, I started the corporate venture fund at Palm in April of 2000, which is well known to be kind of the peak of the internet bubble market”
2016-03-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · Uber's First Investor, First Round Capital's Rob Hayes on How The Deal Of The Decade Originated and Why Product Orientated VC Is The Future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I think that the way corporate funds tend to get started are bigger companies see smaller startup companies achieve a lot of success and they achieve a lot of success sometimes through partnerships with these larger companies. So leveraging these larger companies as a channel. And so the larger companies say, well, gosh, you know, if these companies are going to achieve success on our backs, we should have a piece of that success. They go out and try to get an equity share of each of these companies so that if the company blows up, they see some of the benefit of that. Now, the challenge is these are called sometimes strategic funds and strategies change. CEOs change. You know, companies start doing more poorly than they did before when they started the venture fund, that sort of thing. And so I find a strong correlation with one corporate funds get started and with the”
2016-03-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · Uber's First Investor, First Round Capital's Rob Hayes on How The Deal Of The Decade Originated and Why Product Orientated VC Is The Future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I was like some of the other VCs and operator in the first part of my career, mostly working as product manager, building products for mobile operating system companies. In fact, I was product manager on mobile operating, ended up at a company Palm back in the late 90s when Palm was all the rage. The company had an IPO and as part of that IPO in that kind of late 90s and early 2000s, they did what so many other companies do and decided to start a corporate venture fund. And so I moved over from the product side to start and run that corporate venture fund. And in doing so, I learned the ropes of VC. I learned what is wrong with all corporate funds. And that kind of got me started down the path of really enjoying working with entrepreneurs as they build their companies.”
2016-03-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · Uber's First Investor, First Round Capital's Rob Hayes on How The Deal Of The Decade Originated and Why Product Orientated VC Is The Future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source