YouSaid · the spoken record

Rob Moffat

lines on the record
30
first
2015-06-22
most recent
2015-06-22
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. “That may take a long time, actually. I knew Nick Hungerford, the founder for years before we invested. And it took a little while to get it. And then I took a little while to be convinced on how fast it could grow. Sometimes it happens much quicker. Sometimes there's a bulk of inspiration, but normally it's investing in lines, not dots.”

    2015-06-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 047: 4 Ways Investors Find Great Startups with Rob Moffat, Principal @ Balderton Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “It's kind of frustrating this too that I can't talk about yet, which I'm really excited by. So the most recent one I can talk about is nutmeg, which is wealth management for the masses. And I think it's a great way to get people to invest in the first place and B, to invest in the right things and not to either sit in a cash ice of doing nothing or blow away their money on day trading.”

    2015-06-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 047: 4 Ways Investors Find Great Startups with Rob Moffat, Principal @ Balderton Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “Phil Gates. It's been amazingly successful, but he also seems fairly happy with it, and he's doing some really interesting kind of next step of evolving into being the leading philanthropist worldwide.”

    2015-06-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 047: 4 Ways Investors Find Great Startups with Rob Moffat, Principal @ Balderton Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “Good question. Actually, one I love is the circle by Dave Vegas just because it's a great sort of dystopian view of the future of tech.”

    2015-06-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 047: 4 Ways Investors Find Great Startups with Rob Moffat, Principal @ Balderton Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “And yeah, there's more jobs in VC now, but it's also more competitive. I think there's more interesting profiles out there. So, yeah.”

    2015-06-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 047: 4 Ways Investors Find Great Startups with Rob Moffat, Principal @ Balderton Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “So I wrote a blog post on this, which you can find on Medium. The first advice is don't because most people who get recruited into BC get headhunted. So sort of chasing it is unlikely to work. And I think the best thing to get yourself noticed is to have some form of analytical sort of business experience, whether it's strategy consulting or investment banking, M&A or private equity. Plus something that shows You've got entrepreneurial understanding and a real passion for tech. So ideally, it would be founding your own startup. But if not that, they're working for a startup or failing that so they're working for a larger tech company, but in a kind of biz dev partnership strategy type role. I think that's the ideal profile.”

    2015-06-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 047: 4 Ways Investors Find Great Startups with Rob Moffat, Principal @ Balderton Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “Yeah, and I think there's a real danger in VC and in general of your attention span shrinking. And medium is a good antidote to that, but it's carving out the time. And in terms of purely... What's the word tactically in terms of finding interesting startups, which is, I guess, the clear ROI for me, Tech EU is a great sort of roundup across Europe. And then Venture Village. I spent a bit of time in Germany. And Venture Village is sort of the best in Germany. It's not amazing, but it's the best German outlet.”

    2015-06-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 047: 4 Ways Investors Find Great Startups with Rob Moffat, Principal @ Balderton Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “Is a good question. I don't think I do this optimally. I spend too much time on Twitter. I don't think it's sufficiently valuable. I don't spend enough time on medium. Medium is brilliant.”

    2015-06-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 047: 4 Ways Investors Find Great Startups with Rob Moffat, Principal @ Balderton Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “Yeah, exactly. So, yeah, the guys in the States can do VC Series A's with their syndicates. And that is more of a direct threat. So, yeah, Kleiner announced a kind of dedicated seed fund this week. And what I found amazing about it was it didn't use Angel list. I think that's surprising to me. I think a lot of this will be VCs probably having some sort of separate seed funding arm, which probably uses Angelists alongside to help to do that early stage investing.”

    2015-06-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 047: 4 Ways Investors Find Great Startups with Rob Moffat, Principal @ Balderton Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “I think they can. I think you look at Angel List. I'm going to be not too, what's the word polished on this, but I think Angelists are more directly competing with VC. You look at the Angelist syndicates that have come together in the US and some of the ones people like Gil Dibner and Doug Scott in the UK. Excellent, there you go. So they've got real money there and they are not in love with VCs, right? They are taking the lead and they can do sort of a million, I don't know what checks they can do, but yeah.”

    2015-06-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 047: 4 Ways Investors Find Great Startups with Rob Moffat, Principal @ Balderton Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “Might start to get expensive. So there's often a lead to the round, and I think Yeah, we were talking about doing it with other R companies where we'll lead around and then do another sort of one or two million on CrowdCube. I think it's a good thing to do.”

    2015-06-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 047: 4 Ways Investors Find Great Startups with Rob Moffat, Principal @ Balderton Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “Yes, I was definitely in the realm as a lot of companies raising our sugar just raised a great random crowdcube, Adzuna are raising a good round on CrowdCube. And those are sort of VC type rounds that are getting done. Normally what you see on CrowdCube and on most of the platforms is there is a leader. There is a leader of the round. Someone who has really got in and done some DD and met the team and has made a decision to lead the round. As we did on CrowdQ, we invested $4 million or so pounds and then they closed another one and a half million on CrowdCube and they closed it in 15 minutes. I know.”

    2015-06-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 047: 4 Ways Investors Find Great Startups with Rob Moffat, Principal @ Balderton Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “Yeah, and you're always going to have to get a bit of external lawyers as well. We'd have this guy here, Jerome Missou, who's been doing this for 13 years and knows every possible sort of legal, structural, cap table situation. He's been through it, venture debt, and knows what is feasible, what's not feasible, what rules you can break, what rules you can't break. I think it's a good asset to have.”

    2015-06-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 047: 4 Ways Investors Find Great Startups with Rob Moffat, Principal @ Balderton Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “Closer to benchmark than Andreessen, but supplemented with, I think it was a couple areas where we could have real value to our companies. One is on talent. I think that's the biggest. There's one around the finance and legal side, which is not very exciting, but I think where we can be incredibly valuable, and I think we've got a, I think the best team in Europe in terms of being able to help portfolio companies navigate the financial and legal sides.”

    2015-06-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 047: 4 Ways Investors Find Great Startups with Rob Moffat, Principal @ Balderton Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  15. “He will run a whole chunk of your business for you, right? They'll do the sales for you, they'll do recruiting for you, and they just find interesting smart entrepreneurs with good product minds and sort of take away all the complexity for them. And then you have Rocket Internet in Berlin taking the kind of approach of, yeah, we're just going to try every idea we possibly can and bring in smart business types to run that. And I think all three of those models are valid. And I think every VC has to look at those and work out what makes sense for them. But they do need to make a clear decision on what their approach is going to be. And I think our approach has been...”

    2015-06-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 047: 4 Ways Investors Find Great Startups with Rob Moffat, Principal @ Balderton Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  16. “I think it's different models. I think you have the one in the spectrum you have benchmark. It was our sort of parent company going back many years. And they have taken a resolutely uncompromising approach. We are a partnership of five incredibly impressive partners. We don't have a website of any real meaningful content. And you need to get introduced to us. That's what we believe VC should be, and the rest is window dressing. And you have Andreessen, who have raised a huge amount of money, which has enabled them to create a 100, 200-person team.”

    2015-06-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 047: 4 Ways Investors Find Great Startups with Rob Moffat, Principal @ Balderton Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  17. “Generally, they are taking the lead. They're probably two steps ahead of us and five steps ahead of anything in the way of training that's out there. So allowing them to keep learning from each other, I think it's a great format to have. So I think that's a big kind of piece of the value add for us is the fact we have a portfolio of fantastic companies be able to join that portfolio is a great asset. And then we're also sort of building up our own internal support for the company so we hide in a new talent director last week who came from Amazon, a senior talent role at Amazon has helped our portfolio companies really kind of get smarter in how they recruit but also how they develop and retain talent across their organization.”

    2015-06-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 047: 4 Ways Investors Find Great Startups with Rob Moffat, Principal @ Balderton Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  18. “We have 50 or 60 companies in our portfolio. And there's a real critical mass in London. And we moved to a new office where we have an event space where we can very easily put on a sort of portfolio event. And so really using that to do events across all sort of disciplines. So marketing, finance, talent, technology, product management, CEO, mentoring. So doing a bunch of those kind of portfolio events where we can bring in a kind of guest speaker or it's just between our CEOs or kind of management of our portfolio companies and labeling them bounce ideas off each other.”

    2015-06-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 047: 4 Ways Investors Find Great Startups with Rob Moffat, Principal @ Balderton Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  19. “I think the VC market in general is becoming much more competitive and I think that's true in Europe to a lesser extent in the US but it is true and so you need to evolve the role I think Three years ago, five years ago, the majority of the role was about taking deal flow and deciding which ones we wanted to invest in. And accompanied would come to you, you'd spoken to a few times before, and they'd say, yeah, well now we're doing our fundraise. We're going to talk to you and three other people. And probably one of those firms would say, make a serious offer, maybe two. And what you're now seeing is good companies are getting chased by VCs. They're getting funded before they were thinking about doing a funding round. They're getting funded on less sort of traction, less data than would have been the case a few years ago. It's much more of a kind of a need to track down the really interesting companies and be willing to invest earlier than you would have done three, five years ago.”

    2015-06-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 047: 4 Ways Investors Find Great Startups with Rob Moffat, Principal @ Balderton Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  20. “Yeah, a bit of everything. I think the article, the page's article talks about you need to do all four to be a good VC. I don't think I'm a very good trader. That doesn't come naturally to me, this kind of idea of forced trading deals and maintaining a kind of balance of payments with other VCs. But I think Hunter Farmer Trapper certainly across those three”

    2015-06-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 047: 4 Ways Investors Find Great Startups with Rob Moffat, Principal @ Balderton Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  21. “Yeah, I think everyone starts as answer. Well, maybe a bit of a farmer as well, because I think a VC border soon always gets a bunch of inbound and say sort of filtering through the inbound of kind of entrepreneurs reaching out to us cold. And I think over time trying to become more of a trapper, trying to get more, build my kind of blogging. So that's sort of a blog on medium and spend a bunch of time writing, particularly around marketing, marketing and tech company. So sort of getting people engaged through that and through Twitter. And yeah, getting people to think, okay, Rob actually does sort of think carefully about some of the issues in growing a business and he's something who would be worth talking to if I am looking for BC down the line.”

    2015-06-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 047: 4 Ways Investors Find Great Startups with Rob Moffat, Principal @ Balderton Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  22. “Yeah, getting out to events and just doing a bit of death research saying that I don't know, machine learning as a service is an interesting sector. I'm going to get smart on that and talk to five companies in the sector and work out who I think is the best and then charm them and try to get them to take investment.”

    2015-06-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 047: 4 Ways Investors Find Great Startups with Rob Moffat, Principal @ Balderton Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  23. “So I think as I remember it, there were four ways. It was hunter, trader, farmer and trapper. So, I think when you start in VC, you have to be a hunter because.”

    2015-06-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 047: 4 Ways Investors Find Great Startups with Rob Moffat, Principal @ Balderton Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  24. “It varies week by week, but... Yeah, so the longer you spend in VC, I've been doing it for six years now and started off with probably 10% of my time on portfolio companies. And now it's probably more like 50%. And there's other things as well, right? There's always a bit of helping with our PR as a firm, there's a bit of internal work. And then there's always a bit of fundraising involved.”

    2015-06-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 047: 4 Ways Investors Find Great Startups with Rob Moffat, Principal @ Balderton Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  25. “Flexibility of mind, I think that's what it comes back to. A mind that's not fixed at all and that keeps sort of Challenging itself and evolving itself. That's a really big part, and that I think, and the ability to sort of really go on a case by case basis with portfolio companies after you invest and really sort of go deep and understand their issues, I think is really important direction of rather than just reacting to the day to day.”

    2015-06-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 047: 4 Ways Investors Find Great Startups with Rob Moffat, Principal @ Balderton Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  26. “So it's a lovely quote. I'm not sure it's true. It's a good one. Is it that makes the good VC? I think. The ability to That a lot of things. So in terms of finding interesting deals, I think the ability to keep challenging your assumptions is easy to get in VC to talk about pattern recognition and you have a bunch of sort of simple shortcuts in your brain on what a good entrepreneur should look like and what a good business should look like. And that's the easy way to do VC. I think what marks out a really good VC as someone who keeps challenging themselves and keeps saying actually yes five years ago it used to be the case that enterprise products had to be something you could sell for at least a thousand dollars a month otherwise you couldn't sell them economically and then Zendesk comes along and completely rips that apart. Someone who can understand that and sort of speak to Zendesk and get that I think is a unusual characteristic.”

    2015-06-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 047: 4 Ways Investors Find Great Startups with Rob Moffat, Principal @ Balderton Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  27. “Yeah, so I was lucky enough that in 2009 I sort of started looking elsewhere and for some reason that combination of Baines, the consulting plus a big internet company was a profile that a few VCs were looking for. So I talked to some startups, talked to some VCs, and all of a sudden seemed by far the best option there. So somehow convinced the partners I knew something about entrepreneurship and being a VC, which definitely was not the case.”

    2015-06-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 047: 4 Ways Investors Find Great Startups with Rob Moffat, Principal @ Balderton Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  28. “Yeah, it's just a lot of fun, right? You work some really great people and this sort of crazy environment where you're pumping out a bunch of fascinating products and trying to, as we were on the business side, trying to vaguely keep up with everything the engineering team are sort of pushing out. But at the end of the day, it's still a big company. It's a pretty well-run big company, but it's a big company and that got frustrating for me after a while. And I think for a lot of other people.”

    2015-06-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 047: 4 Ways Investors Find Great Startups with Rob Moffat, Principal @ Balderton Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  29. “2007 I joined Google. So when I interviewed in 2006 they had 250 people in London and when I joined three months later it was more like 500. Just incredible pace of hiring and then hit sort of global financial crisis and they actually made job cuts and it was sort of very Google share price was down at what would now be $150. Everyone was kind of suddenly very worried and then coming out at the end of that it was kind of interesting time to be there.”

    2015-06-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 047: 4 Ways Investors Find Great Startups with Rob Moffat, Principal @ Balderton Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  30. “Yes, I guess some of an accidental venture capitalist, as most of us are. So I started my career, I did a statistics degree, looked briefly at going into that area, decided against it, went to work for Bain Consulting and spent five years there doing a lot of work with financial services, as you tend to do in London, MBA from NSEAD. And then went to Google. So I always wanted to sort of work in the internet area thought was fascinating. And Google was a nice sort of safe step out of Bane to do that. And a really fascinating role. And strategy and operations for Europe, so working out how you scale up this kind of size company.”

    2015-06-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 047: 4 Ways Investors Find Great Startups with Rob Moffat, Principal @ Balderton Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source