YouSaid · the spoken record

Rob Lacher

lines on the record: 50
first: 2023-04-07
most recent: 2023-04-07
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Want to think that way because then it's a linear goal, so I don't want to retire yet. I'm hungry and I want to build visionaries to endure the next 30 or 40 years. The ingredient is the network that we built of those great entrepreneurs because the likelihood that something great will come out of those people that have already built something great in their life is always very high no matter if it's a seed fund or an early growth fund or another pre-IPO fund. We'll see that story will be written by our co-entrepreneurs that we heard in our team that have this degrees of freedom to build it and we always say calling a dream crazy is not an insult, it's a compliment and we hope we have many crazy dreams but they will be coming out of this setup in the next five years and I can't tell you yet what this will be.”
2023-04-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Signalling Risk is Real, What Founders Need to Know About Taking Multi-Stage Money vs Seed Fund Money, Lessons Scaling to $600M AUM, The Secret to Hiring in VC; Hire People with No VC Experience & How Venture Will Be Disrupted with Rob Lacher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“150% hungry. He was working incredibly hard like any of us would work in our age, keeping that hungryness, keeping that discipline of working 150% hard still at that age is something that I think is very inspiring. We discussed about being an entrepreneur and an investor at the same time and how he's balanced it, building Secora as a company with Michael Moritz, but also being an investor. I think in VC, and it's again discussing about our future of when do you want to retire or not? I think it's either all-in or not business because the moment you start hanging out maybe in southern France at your holiday home and only working three days a week, I think that moment you're not a good VC anymore because every funder will say that prison is not hungry anymore and it's not the spraying partner I want to have on the board going all in with me. Many VCs I've seen that have done it until that age.”
2023-04-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Signalling Risk is Real, What Founders Need to Know About Taking Multi-Stage Money vs Seed Fund Money, Lessons Scaling to $600M AUM, The Secret to Hiring in VC; Hire People with No VC Experience & How Venture Will Be Disrupted with Rob Lacher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I have great respect for Dagliono for the fact that met him so many times last year or the year before he was back then a 65 year old or 64 year old person that was still”
2023-04-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Signalling Risk is Real, What Founders Need to Know About Taking Multi-Stage Money vs Seed Fund Money, Lessons Scaling to $600M AUM, The Secret to Hiring in VC; Hire People with No VC Experience & How Venture Will Be Disrupted with Rob Lacher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It will be something in the direction for Kate Love of My Life because family for me as much as I love venture capital and tennis, even though I'm not talented enough, is the most important thing in life. And if I had to put one thing on my top store, it would be related to that.”
2023-04-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Signalling Risk is Real, What Founders Need to Know About Taking Multi-Stage Money vs Seed Fund Money, Lessons Scaling to $600M AUM, The Secret to Hiring in VC; Hire People with No VC Experience & How Venture Will Be Disrupted with Rob Lacher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think growth is not the right North Star, like economic growth for our Western economy anymore. Because, I mean, venture capital, we are investing in growth, and that's my biggest passion about it. If you look at the Western world, and we're always striving for growth, it has to be economic growth, it has to be the North Star for each country. Each company then and for each employee. And I think our Western economy, I'm not talking about all the world, but it's so overdeveloped in so many areas of the society that we're so far above the peak of what is really healthy in terms of growth. You see whether it's energy, whether it's climate change, all those topics, you can't solve anymore with just our stupid north of we have to economically grow. And you see this society partying. It's not the right Northa anymore. We need a different value system, a reinvented, adjusted value system for our society.”
2023-04-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Signalling Risk is Real, What Founders Need to Know About Taking Multi-Stage Money vs Seed Fund Money, Lessons Scaling to $600M AUM, The Secret to Hiring in VC; Hire People with No VC Experience & How Venture Will Be Disrupted with Rob Lacher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Difficult because I think they're by nature more global, but if I had to pick one, I steal your favorite one 83 North. They're super humble, very domain specific.”
2023-04-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Signalling Risk is Real, What Founders Need to Know About Taking Multi-Stage Money vs Seed Fund Money, Lessons Scaling to $600M AUM, The Secret to Hiring in VC; Hire People with No VC Experience & How Venture Will Be Disrupted with Rob Lacher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Capital is a great company because that's an entrepreneurial run venture capital fund with a great focus value proposition. They are doing incredibly well on getting new partners on board like Julia recently who has been an angel investor in Pigment, Central. I like him a lot. I think he's an amazing partner. And Felix is an entrepreneur in VC.”
2023-04-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Signalling Risk is Real, What Founders Need to Know About Taking Multi-Stage Money vs Seed Fund Money, Lessons Scaling to $600M AUM, The Secret to Hiring in VC; Hire People with No VC Experience & How Venture Will Be Disrupted with Rob Lacher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'll pick two beyond Capital and Kokoa because they are both micro funds. I believe in those young managers that are hungry, IPR smart, talented, and still have this ambition to win.”
2023-04-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Signalling Risk is Real, What Founders Need to Know About Taking Multi-Stage Money vs Seed Fund Money, Lessons Scaling to $600M AUM, The Secret to Hiring in VC; Hire People with No VC Experience & How Venture Will Be Disrupted with Rob Lacher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In my dream, venture capital itself got disrupted for the first time in history because VC are investing in disruption but have been the least disruptive industry themselves in the last 50 years. If you ask me what it needs to unlock the European ecosystem, it's the domain smartness taking risks in verticals and it's the capital. And I think we have a first generation of billionaire B2B founders like the founders of Adian, of checkout, Guillaume, all those people that reinvest in the ecosystem. And we have the Google, the family entrepreneurs. If things go right, do we really need the traditional VC funds anymore or can we build a smarter approach unlocking the domain knowledge of those people and the capital that this people has to back the next generation of E2B entrepreneurs?”
2023-04-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Signalling Risk is Real, What Founders Need to Know About Taking Multi-Stage Money vs Seed Fund Money, Lessons Scaling to $600M AUM, The Secret to Hiring in VC; Hire People with No VC Experience & How Venture Will Be Disrupted with Rob Lacher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Those companies and those people need to be entrepreneurs and go back to their roots. If you look at those family businesses that are 100 to 100, some 50 years old, they used to be risk takers. They used to be contrarian. That's what made them successful. But some of them are now in their high ages and they're not taking risks anymore. They're just stagnating. They need to get ahead of the wave again, unlock capital, take risks again, investing into really new topics. What is their business model otherwise in 10 years? That's the first thing. So who can catalyze it?”
2023-04-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Signalling Risk is Real, What Founders Need to Know About Taking Multi-Stage Money vs Seed Fund Money, Lessons Scaling to $600M AUM, The Secret to Hiring in VC; Hire People with No VC Experience & How Venture Will Be Disrupted with Rob Lacher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We always complain that we don't have a Google, Facebook, Amazon, or Tencent, who are the most profitable companies in their clusters, and they're the biggest tech drivers next to VCs. But what we have in Europe is 90% of our companies are family businesses. They are highly profitable. They are run by entrepreneurs that can make fast decisions, take more risks, think long-term, that have an incredible alpha knowledge in their domain, and that own global supply chains. If you take those family businesses together, I think this is our Google. If we unlock the alpha domain knowledge in those verticals, if we unlock the profitability, if we get that into the VC ecosystem, this is how we can build our Google together combining the domain knowledge and the capital available. I think we have to serve our ecosystem the way our ecosystem is built and not copy silica mally.”
2023-04-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Signalling Risk is Real, What Founders Need to Know About Taking Multi-Stage Money vs Seed Fund Money, Lessons Scaling to $600M AUM, The Secret to Hiring in VC; Hire People with No VC Experience & How Venture Will Be Disrupted with Rob Lacher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's not about the exact answer, but it's about the truth looking at a company. We take a 10, 15 year perspective and exclamate any cycle thinking or whatever. Just think about what is healthy and what makes sense to build a great company. That's something I hate about VC. There are a thousand ways to be a great entrepreneur. In the VC space, there is too much hype about what's right, what's not right. As a founder, just think totally independently how much money do I need, which people do I want to hire, and what are my milestones in the next one or two years, and then raise the money that you need and over raise a little bit to have a little more runway. always put you in an incredible good position to raise the next round if you do well and i think you can optimize so much for ownership in the later rounds if you really kill it and the company goes through the roof and you have great metrics that's when business models start to be predictable and that's where you can really optimize valuation and kind of protect ownership but it's not at the seed or a stage too ballsy”
2023-04-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Signalling Risk is Real, What Founders Need to Know About Taking Multi-Stage Money vs Seed Fund Money, Lessons Scaling to $600M AUM, The Secret to Hiring in VC; Hire People with No VC Experience & How Venture Will Be Disrupted with Rob Lacher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A half years and two years, and that's happening with 80% of the companies. If you're not there yet, you either have to bloody raise a down route, which you don't want to do, or you're in a momentum market like the last two years, but then it just takes maybe one or two years later until you figure out that you're then at a 500 volume valuation and still can't raise anymore”
2023-04-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Signalling Risk is Real, What Founders Need to Know About Taking Multi-Stage Money vs Seed Fund Money, Lessons Scaling to $600M AUM, The Secret to Hiring in VC; Hire People with No VC Experience & How Venture Will Be Disrupted with Rob Lacher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it's as a founder exactly I would 100% agree, and we've now 50 SaaS companies in our portfolio, and we've seen different pathways, but any company that is doing great has had great times and terrible times. And I think at the seat, the first decision on pricing on the optionality that you have for the A. So if you do a 3 million seed round with a healthy setup and things don't go that well, it's fine. You can still raise a grade A round because you're sitting on a valuation where you can grow in it. If you're doing a ballsy seat round of 5 to 10 million,”
2023-04-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Signalling Risk is Real, What Founders Need to Know About Taking Multi-Stage Money vs Seed Fund Money, Lessons Scaling to $600M AUM, The Secret to Hiring in VC; Hire People with No VC Experience & How Venture Will Be Disrupted with Rob Lacher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They don't have any optionality for the A round, so we're trying to figure out what's the right strategy to move forward, and we're very passive. We are not doing pricey deals. We've passed on many companies that were doing those US rounds because US funds for them, it's easy. You can pay $6,000, $8 million on the C round, fine on good teams. We'd like to go a little deeper and understand.”
2023-04-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Signalling Risk is Real, What Founders Need to Know About Taking Multi-Stage Money vs Seed Fund Money, Lessons Scaling to $600M AUM, The Secret to Hiring in VC; Hire People with No VC Experience & How Venture Will Be Disrupted with Rob Lacher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's a great question because I could always have this argument oh great founders, you need to back no matter what price point and they go up. I think that's not the right way to approach it. The right way is we've never had a negotiation at the seed stage with a founder about price point because we wanted to have 1% more or 2% less. Our dialogue is always do we have the same understanding on what we think are the next steps to build a great company. If you have that alignment with the founder, you want to go for a healthy journey that feels right for the company. To do is he drawn to have enough runway, to have a great position optionality for a series A round. If it's an incredible serial entrepreneur that has built the product already 10 times, maybe a five layer on round is fine, even though it's expensive because you know they will have a product live in next month and maybe they can raise the next round with 2 million ARR and on the other side if you have a team that is building a productivity tool for the first time raising 5 million on 25 and they say look in one and a half years we want to raise 30 million on 150 million that's not for us because we think it's not a healthy setup for them to build a great company.”
2023-04-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Signalling Risk is Real, What Founders Need to Know About Taking Multi-Stage Money vs Seed Fund Money, Lessons Scaling to $600M AUM, The Secret to Hiring in VC; Hire People with No VC Experience & How Venture Will Be Disrupted with Rob Lacher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So many. I think the biggest mistakes, if you're referring to market that some of the really great winners in our portfolio, maybe we should have backed at later stages even more aggressively, but we thought they were pricey. A mistake on company building may be starting to hire a great team a little too late.”
2023-04-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Signalling Risk is Real, What Founders Need to Know About Taking Multi-Stage Money vs Seed Fund Money, Lessons Scaling to $600M AUM, The Secret to Hiring in VC; Hire People with No VC Experience & How Venture Will Be Disrupted with Rob Lacher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“As odd as it sounds, I don't want to say that I'm absolutely not interested in money, but I think my North Star is if I do what I love doing every day. And typically that's also the intersection of what you love doing what you're typically good at, because otherwise you don't love doing it. I'm taking a very long-term perspective of what we were building. We didn't do many secondaries, for example, in our portfolio, which would have been maybe attractive because we still believe those companies have such a great journey ahead of them.”
2023-04-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Signalling Risk is Real, What Founders Need to Know About Taking Multi-Stage Money vs Seed Fund Money, Lessons Scaling to $600M AUM, The Secret to Hiring in VC; Hire People with No VC Experience & How Venture Will Be Disrupted with Rob Lacher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it's opportunism as a VC, you can invest in 25 to 30 companies per fund and you really see who's a VC keeping the word when things go negative and if they still spend time with the founders. It doesn't mean they should spend all of their time. They should focus on the winners also in the portfolio, but they should also be there when things go negative. But I think VCs can always opt out or be opportunistic to just focus on what's going well and where they see value in their portfolio where founders have this one shot at that moment in time that they need to get right. That's a bit of a misalignment”
2023-04-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Signalling Risk is Real, What Founders Need to Know About Taking Multi-Stage Money vs Seed Fund Money, Lessons Scaling to $600M AUM, The Secret to Hiring in VC; Hire People with No VC Experience & How Venture Will Be Disrupted with Rob Lacher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It depends on how they operate. I think small boards are great because it forces everyone to work hard because if you just have two board members and you don't work, then it's obvious. Second thing is the best port role that you can take as a VC for a founder is not trying to influence any decisions or to think that you have better ideas than the founder, but to be the best devil's advocate that you can with opening up the option space for the founder. And that's mostly not yourself having an opinion. It's mostly bringing in people from your network. In our case, it's founders who've gone through that journey who have solved that problem to really provide the best possible devil's advocates opinion so that the founder can choose what's the right decision to do. I think those kind of boards are exceptional in giving the founder stability, but I think big boards can be very difficult if you have 10 board members with 10 opinions, which are all high level, and then the founder doesn't really know which direction to choose, and then maybe the most dominant board member is forcing more the direction which the company needs to go. Then a board is a negative.”
2023-04-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Signalling Risk is Real, What Founders Need to Know About Taking Multi-Stage Money vs Seed Fund Money, Lessons Scaling to $600M AUM, The Secret to Hiring in VC; Hire People with No VC Experience & How Venture Will Be Disrupted with Rob Lacher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I choose Johan Butting, who's global SVP sales at Slack, and he has built Slack in Europe, Dropbox in Europe, and he's a board member in our portfolio company Central, where I'm in the board with Luciana from Sekoia and Mark from Freigist. And he's spending so much time with the founders to really build a commercial team, build a go-to-market team. He has done it for the last 12 years, but not on a VC high level. This is the kind of sparring partner you want to have as a founder if you build a SaaS company, not just high level bulleting on some generic advice by really going deep.”
2023-04-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Signalling Risk is Real, What Founders Need to Know About Taking Multi-Stage Money vs Seed Fund Money, Lessons Scaling to $600M AUM, The Secret to Hiring in VC; Hire People with No VC Experience & How Venture Will Be Disrupted with Rob Lacher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Exactly. But look, there are many pros also going with a multistage fund. Some have 40, 50 years experience of supporting companies, some partners are incredible to have on your board. But just make sure as a founder to challenge that and to ask the partners, will you be on my board or will you just send your associate on my board?”
2023-04-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Signalling Risk is Real, What Founders Need to Know About Taking Multi-Stage Money vs Seed Fund Money, Lessons Scaling to $600M AUM, The Secret to Hiring in VC; Hire People with No VC Experience & How Venture Will Be Disrupted with Rob Lacher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It is terrible for you as a founder if things don't work out. There are three scenarios either you kill it and everything is amazing, then it doesn't matter. Then everyone wants to do your A round, it doesn't matter. If things go pretty good but not like incredibly great, likely the multi-stage file wouldn't preempt the next round and just see how things go because they got their ownership, they make a new decision with a new investment committee at the series A stage whether it is a great investment or not and they likely stand on the sidelines. And if things go bad, then they wouldn't pick it up. And believe me, behind the scenes, every fund.”
2023-04-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Signalling Risk is Real, What Founders Need to Know About Taking Multi-Stage Money vs Seed Fund Money, Lessons Scaling to $600M AUM, The Secret to Hiring in VC; Hire People with No VC Experience & How Venture Will Be Disrupted with Rob Lacher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I've seen it many times in our portfolio. We team up a lot with multi stage funds at sea. I'd say 20% of our deals are like this.”
2023-04-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Signalling Risk is Real, What Founders Need to Know About Taking Multi-Stage Money vs Seed Fund Money, Lessons Scaling to $600M AUM, The Secret to Hiring in VC; Hire People with No VC Experience & How Venture Will Be Disrupted with Rob Lacher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's no right or wrong. I just want to advise them to make a very active choice about the so what of the setup and the cons of doing a multistage fund setup at Seal. You're a very small check of a huge fund. The moment you sign the term sheet, you need to ask yourself, did they just buy an option to lead the next round or does the partner really, really go all in going my board and spend the time with me? Because such multistage funds can't do 150 seed rounds a year and keep that quality. Second thing is they need to be aware that the signaling risk if that fund doesn't lead the next round.”
2023-04-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Signalling Risk is Real, What Founders Need to Know About Taking Multi-Stage Money vs Seed Fund Money, Lessons Scaling to $600M AUM, The Secret to Hiring in VC; Hire People with No VC Experience & How Venture Will Be Disrupted with Rob Lacher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Two thirds of the found reserves at seat stage that have those term sheets rather going for a European seed fund setup because they want to keep the A round open to choose from those funds.”
2023-04-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Signalling Risk is Real, What Founders Need to Know About Taking Multi-Stage Money vs Seed Fund Money, Lessons Scaling to $600M AUM, The Secret to Hiring in VC; Hire People with No VC Experience & How Venture Will Be Disrupted with Rob Lacher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think those founders that we want to back are those guys that really do deep referencing on the funds that they want to work with and have a super clear impression why they want to work with which fund. It is like a wedding. You can't get divorced and I think those founders that are just hyped by US brand putting in 3 million in a zero hundred or five million without thinking about this so what are not the founders we want to back because that's not the long-term thinking. Those founders that really go deep into referencing we see actually many conversations where they might go rather 4.9 or visionaries or 20 BC or whoever for the seed stage because they're closer to those partners working with them their meaningful check in our funds because we're a smaller funds we work hard we want to make everything and they are independent in this serious area round to really choose from a great fund with a significant check a board position from a partner not an associate long story short itself selection those founders that go with us funds either they want to go into the us market or they have a certain alpha in whether it's gaming industry or something i see”
2023-04-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Signalling Risk is Real, What Founders Need to Know About Taking Multi-Stage Money vs Seed Fund Money, Lessons Scaling to $600M AUM, The Secret to Hiring in VC; Hire People with No VC Experience & How Venture Will Be Disrupted with Rob Lacher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Into that, and that's something where typically opportunity funds or the late stage fund could then come into place to take care of it. So long story short with our existing fund, we haven't made any change to the reserve management, but we've done the new fund. We've increased the fund size to 150 million because the initial check sizes are just getting bigger.”
2023-04-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Signalling Risk is Real, What Founders Need to Know About Taking Multi-Stage Money vs Seed Fund Money, Lessons Scaling to $600M AUM, The Secret to Hiring in VC; Hire People with No VC Experience & How Venture Will Be Disrupted with Rob Lacher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We tried to build a focus portfolio there. And then, you know, typically you can follow on in Sirius A and in Sirius B, you can do either full or half producta. It depends a little on the price points of the company's round sizes. And why we haven't made a change in the current fund, I mean, what drivers do you have that would change your strategy? Either you have a momentum market, which we had the last two years. But we try to avoid investing into momentum companies. I think we have done none of them. And we try to be incredibly disciplined with our founder to raise what they really need to raise and what is necessary and not go into momentum fundraisers where you basically just put in more money without knowing what it is. Second reason could be that you have not good companies in your portfolio and you still send them to family offices to raise money. You're writing off those companies and with the founders deciding not to continue if the model doesn't work. Why should we encourage them to raise more money to just postpone the decision? The third reason could be that you're such an amazing picker that you have so many companies in the fund that are outperforming that you don't have enough money to put.”
2023-04-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Signalling Risk is Real, What Founders Need to Know About Taking Multi-Stage Money vs Seed Fund Money, Lessons Scaling to $600M AUM, The Secret to Hiring in VC; Hire People with No VC Experience & How Venture Will Be Disrupted with Rob Lacher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Actually, not in the current fund. We have 60% reserve in a seed fund to follow on. 40% is initial reserve. The latest one is 150 million.”
2023-04-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Signalling Risk is Real, What Founders Need to Know About Taking Multi-Stage Money vs Seed Fund Money, Lessons Scaling to $600M AUM, The Secret to Hiring in VC; Hire People with No VC Experience & How Venture Will Be Disrupted with Rob Lacher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“With the Andrego founded Mairo and not just with average advice. So that's where we think we can bring in a lot of value at Sirius B stage. On the other side, we thought the best product we can offer to founders is not another one billion fund that competes with those funds out there, but complementing great multistage US funds and those funds with a five to ten million investment.”
2023-04-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Signalling Risk is Real, What Founders Need to Know About Taking Multi-Stage Money vs Seed Fund Money, Lessons Scaling to $600M AUM, The Secret to Hiring in VC; Hire People with No VC Experience & How Venture Will Be Disrupted with Rob Lacher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, we think, but if you look at Europe, when we saw visionaries, we thought Sirius A was pretty crowded. You have an incredible amount of funds with 100 to 700 million in fund size that typically enter Series A, but that has been bloody red ocean. And I think valuations have been quite aggressive compared to the traction that the companies had. And at the same time, it's not yet a space where we can add so much value with our network. So we said we're good at pre-seed seed. We've all been entrepreneurs before and we will love working with founders really at those dirty early stages. And then we leave out series A, so there's no signaling risk for the founders and they can choose from those amazing funds out there, whether it's an Excel, a Sikh coherent index, or you name them or amazing lead investors. And then again, for us, it's really interesting at Sirius B when B2B companies start hyper-scaling. They need to build a customer base across Europe. That's my whole family business entrepreneurs can be interesting. That's also where founders, if they want to get go-to-market advice, they better want to speak to like Ahana Rena from Presonio, who has just the company across Europe, or if they want to have more products.”
2023-04-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Signalling Risk is Real, What Founders Need to Know About Taking Multi-Stage Money vs Seed Fund Money, Lessons Scaling to $600M AUM, The Secret to Hiring in VC; Hire People with No VC Experience & How Venture Will Be Disrupted with Rob Lacher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, so we were pretty clear about that strategy. And I think as long as you get that message across to the founders and also get that referencing on how you work with them, I think it's a fair value proposition where founders then need to decide, look, either it's a good partner to take visionaries on board with 10 or 15% or not. With this 2 or 3% deals, we're doing it with maybe 2 or 3 deals of fund and we were pretty clear about the strategy and we don't make a difference than how we work with the founders.”
2023-04-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Signalling Risk is Real, What Founders Need to Know About Taking Multi-Stage Money vs Seed Fund Money, Lessons Scaling to $600M AUM, The Secret to Hiring in VC; Hire People with No VC Experience & How Venture Will Be Disrupted with Rob Lacher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We say 80% of our seed portfolio is 10 to 15% ownership and 20% will leave room if they're exceptional teams where there's maybe another setup is more interesting for them teaming up with a multistage fund or just a different round setup or maybe we're not 100% confident about the space what we want to learn then we keep 20 for”
2023-04-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Signalling Risk is Real, What Founders Need to Know About Taking Multi-Stage Money vs Seed Fund Money, Lessons Scaling to $600M AUM, The Secret to Hiring in VC; Hire People with No VC Experience & How Venture Will Be Disrupted with Rob Lacher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's hard, but look, I think, and then the other model is that you try to build a more concentrated portfolio of 25 companies where picking is more important. So you can get it wrong and the fund is zero or one. But if you get it right, then you get a very right. If you have two or three companies where you have your 10, 15% ownership, let's say you have 100 million fund, companies 10 billion, you have your 10%, right? It returns your fund a few times. If you have two or three of those companies.”
2023-04-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Signalling Risk is Real, What Founders Need to Know About Taking Multi-Stage Money vs Seed Fund Money, Lessons Scaling to $600M AUM, The Secret to Hiring in VC; Hire People with No VC Experience & How Venture Will Be Disrupted with Rob Lacher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, I think on the extreme, either you run the Y combinator SeedCam kind of model where you're just basically building a broad portfolio and the likelihood to have one or two of those amazing software, the iPath kind of outliers is almost given. So you're basically building a seed index on the really best of the best founders. But then you can't get your ownership that if something is really a crazy home run, you get to 20x euro fund or 25x. So you'll have an incredibly good performance and those funds are doing super well. That's the one game and the other one is building a more concentrated portfolio where”
2023-04-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Signalling Risk is Real, What Founders Need to Know About Taking Multi-Stage Money vs Seed Fund Money, Lessons Scaling to $600M AUM, The Secret to Hiring in VC; Hire People with No VC Experience & How Venture Will Be Disrupted with Rob Lacher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's fair, maybe build a blend, right? If you show that you can get allocations in some of those great hype deals, it's fine if it's 20% of your portfolio. But I think it's so much more impressive if you have chosen companies that others haven't seen in an after five years, it turns out to be one of the most successful companies in the market.”
2023-04-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Signalling Risk is Real, What Founders Need to Know About Taking Multi-Stage Money vs Seed Fund Money, Lessons Scaling to $600M AUM, The Secret to Hiring in VC; Hire People with No VC Experience & How Venture Will Be Disrupted with Rob Lacher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Maybe the first thing is that not having a clear differentiation about your proposition, why the market needs you. If you want to be a new fund for a cap table of a foundry, you need to be a painkiller, not a nice vitamin. If you don't have this value proposition that is new for the market, that's something difficult. Second thing is, I think many new managers start investing into hype deals because it's nice to sneak into things that are validated by other funds. But again, you just build an index of what's already there.”
2023-04-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Signalling Risk is Real, What Founders Need to Know About Taking Multi-Stage Money vs Seed Fund Money, Lessons Scaling to $600M AUM, The Secret to Hiring in VC; Hire People with No VC Experience & How Venture Will Be Disrupted with Rob Lacher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You just get an average index of all the other funds. If you do this, I think if you want to build a contrarian only an A, you need to go through people that are unbiased, that want to grow exponentially themselves, and that have the trust that over time this will pay out and not the people that say, look, I know finished Harvard and now I want to have a 750K annual salary, otherwise I go to Golden Spies. They should go to Goldman because then it's the better, safer environment.”
2023-04-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Signalling Risk is Real, What Founders Need to Know About Taking Multi-Stage Money vs Seed Fund Money, Lessons Scaling to $600M AUM, The Secret to Hiring in VC; Hire People with No VC Experience & How Venture Will Be Disrupted with Rob Lacher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it's an adverse selection. Those are not the people that we want to get with visionaries, it's the other way around. So if someone is asking for a high salary, that person is not willing to take risks. It's not believing enough in the entrepreneurial spirit to build something. We don't pay high salaries at visionaries. I think if you go to some of the multistage funds in London, maybe you get twice the salary. But we're pretty generous with Carrie, and people know that they can build a career faster than at other funds if they perform extraordinary well. And if they're a great core entrepreneurs building visionaries. These are the kind of people that we want to take on board. And if you look at Martin, he became partner just after three years of joining visionaries. But he's a co-entrepreneur already leading the seed funds or is doing the same for the growth fund. Isa is doing the same for the platform. These are incredibly young, hungry, hyperintelligent people that haven't been in VC before. I think that's the beauty, you know, you can do it super easy and say, look, I just poached from other funds. I hire people who have been three years in VC. They have the networks. They know how to look at deals.”
2023-04-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Signalling Risk is Real, What Founders Need to Know About Taking Multi-Stage Money vs Seed Fund Money, Lessons Scaling to $600M AUM, The Secret to Hiring in VC; Hire People with No VC Experience & How Venture Will Be Disrupted with Rob Lacher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Look, in the beginning, you're doing everything, right? So it was just Sebastian and I studying the fund, and your CFO, you achieve media officer, your chief investment officer, and you just cover everything. I think it's also important to give the DNA of what you think you want to do different into that company. But then it's also important to not micromanage the whole time, but really in the best case, find people who are so much better than you are in each of those dimensions to really take things to an exponential development. And that's the balance after a year. In the beginning, it's easy you don't have a portfolio to cover. you have enough time to look how you design your office or website but you start doing investment and then you have 30 companies in their portfolio and then you don't have time to do this anymore you can't be everywhere so that's why the best mechanism that we put in place is that we hire people that we give 50 a job description of why we need someone and 50 we give them the degrees of freedom to use their time to really unlock what they love doing what they're good at and what really in turn brings our company to the next level”
2023-04-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Signalling Risk is Real, What Founders Need to Know About Taking Multi-Stage Money vs Seed Fund Money, Lessons Scaling to $600M AUM, The Secret to Hiring in VC; Hire People with No VC Experience & How Venture Will Be Disrupted with Rob Lacher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it is this balance of being an entrepreneur and being a VC with all the things that you have to do at the same time. It's all about the team then that you build that really unlocks the power of the company and what you can get out of it. Venture capital is incredibly difficult to hire people because they need to be hyper smart, humble, visionary at the same time, nonlinear thinkers. So it's hard to find them, but the way we decided to do it is basically not hiring experienced people who have been in VC and who just apply the logic that they've learned in another fund, but go for incredibly young, hungry, hyperintelligent people that really want to go exponential in their development.”
2023-04-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Signalling Risk is Real, What Founders Need to Know About Taking Multi-Stage Money vs Seed Fund Money, Lessons Scaling to $600M AUM, The Secret to Hiring in VC; Hire People with No VC Experience & How Venture Will Be Disrupted with Rob Lacher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's the daily balance. What gets me up in the morning is basically on the one hand side we're an entrepreneur is we need to build the company that we're investing with, right? And that's like just building any other company. There's no team, there's no strategy, there's no office, there's no website. It's basically just like any other company. You can spend 150% of your time doing it. And on the other side, we're doing investments and our job is to find the best companies. That's why we never decided to become partner of another fund, but having those degrees of freedom to build it the way you think it's right, it's what excites me. It's what gives me energy. And I think it's what makes me a good investor for founders because I have an entrepreneurial passion of building something and not just an abstract investor.”
2023-04-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Signalling Risk is Real, What Founders Need to Know About Taking Multi-Stage Money vs Seed Fund Money, Lessons Scaling to $600M AUM, The Secret to Hiring in VC; Hire People with No VC Experience & How Venture Will Be Disrupted with Rob Lacher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think you should really spend time together about the truth of what's your purpose and what you really want to do and why you're doing it together and be super honest about your strength, your weaknesses, what excites you and the reason why you're doing it. The more complementary ingredients that you can find in a person, the better it is. But you need to be aligned on the core on how to do everything. The best thing how I did it with, for example, Sebastian was we really went to the deepest level of what we love doing and we were super aligned that being an entrepreneur in VC having all degrees of freedom to build this and doing this for a period, hopefully of 20 30 years was really what excited both of us.”
2023-04-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Signalling Risk is Real, What Founders Need to Know About Taking Multi-Stage Money vs Seed Fund Money, Lessons Scaling to $600M AUM, The Secret to Hiring in VC; Hire People with No VC Experience & How Venture Will Be Disrupted with Rob Lacher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is the best thing you can do when you partner in a funding team is take risks with someone that is totally different ingredient than you have. And that's what we did. And Fund is now at 10 times the money that we invested in. It's doing well. But if you want to be in the setup for 20, 30 years, you need to have a certain overlap of how you work together. I think my synthesis is take risks when you go into those setups, but also be 100% brutally honest to yourself if it's sustaining and if it's the right setup for everyone. I think what great decisions that we took that way because now the first fund we're still managing it together, it's a success. We built visionaries within three years.”
2023-04-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Signalling Risk is Real, What Founders Need to Know About Taking Multi-Stage Money vs Seed Fund Money, Lessons Scaling to $600M AUM, The Secret to Hiring in VC; Hire People with No VC Experience & How Venture Will Be Disrupted with Rob Lacher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What did you learn about yourself? I'm still managing the first FME I found and I'm incredibly proud of what we've built with the teams. And believe me, it hasn't been an easy decision then saying if you've put all your energy in something, building it, if you invented it, if you put risk in it, contrary in thoughts to say you want to continue in a different setup. But I was at the beginning of my 30s. I realized that it's my biggest passion to be an entrepreneur in VC and I wanted to do this for the next 20, 30 years. So the one thing you shouldn't do is compromise on the partnership setup because it's a very long-term game. With Sebastian, who I founded visionaries with, he has been a long friend. So we've worked on many deals together. He was my first LP in the first La Familia fund when he became available after selling Amovali after six years. It was basically a great setup to team up. And on the other side, you know, with Janet, I really love working with her. And we started the Hola Familia idea, but we're also incredibly different on how we're looking to deals, how we would run a company, how we would take things to the next level.”
2023-04-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Signalling Risk is Real, What Founders Need to Know About Taking Multi-Stage Money vs Seed Fund Money, Lessons Scaling to $600M AUM, The Secret to Hiring in VC; Hire People with No VC Experience & How Venture Will Be Disrupted with Rob Lacher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The first time I heard of venture capital was when I was 22 at university, and I thought after the lecture, fact, this must be the most amazing job on earth because you're looking into new companies every day, speaking to young smart people, which are building the biggest thing in their life, and you have the privilege to choose who you want to work with and work with an array of people and not just focus on one idea. So I thought maybe when I'm 50, 60 and in case I succeed, I could become a VC, but I never thought that I would become an entrepreneur in VC in the middle of my 20s without any experience. So I stumbled into it over Angel Investing, but I figured out it was my biggest passion.”
2023-04-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Signalling Risk is Real, What Founders Need to Know About Taking Multi-Stage Money vs Seed Fund Money, Lessons Scaling to $600M AUM, The Secret to Hiring in VC; Hire People with No VC Experience & How Venture Will Be Disrupted with Rob Lacher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And then ended up doing Angel Investments. And from those Angel investments, we said, why don't we pool our money in a small seed fund? So that's how I started La Famili with a group of friends, which was a small 40 million Angel Fund back then that we invested into 30 B2B companies.”
2023-04-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Signalling Risk is Real, What Founders Need to Know About Taking Multi-Stage Money vs Seed Fund Money, Lessons Scaling to $600M AUM, The Secret to Hiring in VC; Hire People with No VC Experience & How Venture Will Be Disrupted with Rob Lacher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I wish I was more talented in tennis than everything would have been much easier. Look, if I have to put it into one sentence, it's always being honest to myself to do what I love doing and really not compromising on it. So when I finished university, I was actually about to start a company and then got talked into Boston consulting group by a certain Joachen Enget. And maybe you know Joachen, he ended up being the founder of Flixbus, which is now the biggest basket mobility company globally. So he's a very close friend. He was my mentor back then, is also part of Visionaries. I was again the mentor of Max Fissman, who's on the total other side of entrepreneurship. So Max inherited a 100-year-old family business with 14,000 employees, 4 billion in revenues, and had to take it to the next level. And the thing that we found out back then was that there's absolutely no connect between older new economy entrepreneurs, even though 90% of European companies are family businesses, right? So we always thought bringing those networks closer together because we think it unlocks a lot of power in B2B took a little until we did this. So I started my own small company in the mobile space, which I sold to.”
2023-04-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Signalling Risk is Real, What Founders Need to Know About Taking Multi-Stage Money vs Seed Fund Money, Lessons Scaling to $600M AUM, The Secret to Hiring in VC; Hire People with No VC Experience & How Venture Will Be Disrupted with Rob Lacher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I hate about VC. There are a thousand ways to be a great entrepreneur. In the VC space, there is too much hype about what's right, what's not right. As a founder, just think totally independently how much money do I need, which people do I want to hire, and what are my milestones in the next one or two years, and then raise the money that you need and not over raise.”
2023-04-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Signalling Risk is Real, What Founders Need to Know About Taking Multi-Stage Money vs Seed Fund Money, Lessons Scaling to $600M AUM, The Secret to Hiring in VC; Hire People with No VC Experience & How Venture Will Be Disrupted with Rob Lacher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source