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Roger Dickey

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23
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2017-09-29
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2017-09-29
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1
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  1. “You will ever do. And that's why the world's best company is youth segment to drive growth and revenue, including the likes of Atlassian New Relic and Crayton Barrel, just to name a few. Simply head over to”

    2017-09-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: If You Do Not Like VCs, You Have Not Worked With a Good One, How Andreesen Have Added The Same Level of Value As A Co-Founder, Why Market Is The First Thing To Consider When Angel Investing & Why Series A Is A Hiring Decision with Roger Dickey, Foun · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “So for me, it's to work on gangster. For gangster, I think we're going to go through a few transformations, most immediately in the next year and a half, we want to hire about 100 people. So we'll be around 200 people as a company. We're hiring a number of executives to form kind of the leadership foundation. We're building a lot of technology. So the gigster platform that powers how we actually deliver software, which is our core IP. That's what we'll be working on the next kind of year and a half. I think past that, so maybe looking at the next three years after that, we're aiming to reach profitability as a company, aiming to go much, much deeper into enterprise. You see the accentures and Deloitte picking up 50 to 100 million dollar development contracts. Well, largest one we've worked on so far is about $2 million. So getting into eight and nine figure deals, being viewed as more of a trusted partner, someone who's a little more mature and established, that's where we'd like to get. We'd like to start picking up.”

    2017-09-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: If You Do Not Like VCs, You Have Not Worked With a Good One, How Andreesen Have Added The Same Level of Value As A Co-Founder, Why Market Is The First Thing To Consider When Angel Investing & Why Series A Is A Hiring Decision with Roger Dickey, Foun · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “What I'd like to see change, at least from the perspective of founders raising money, is a more meritocratic process. I think this is very hard to achieve in practice because you look at a company and you can't plug it into a spreadsheet and tell that it's going to be a good return if that was the case, investing would get a lot easier. But I think there are a lot of aspects to fundraising that are very subjective. They can introduce biases even into the process. You have some founders that are good at raising money, some founders that aren't as good at raising money. I know great people with great businesses that have a lot of trouble. They don't have the investor interest they should. So if there was a way to make the process more meritocratic, and I don't know what that is, I'd love to see that happen.”

    2017-09-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: If You Do Not Like VCs, You Have Not Worked With a Good One, How Andreesen Have Added The Same Level of Value As A Co-Founder, Why Market Is The First Thing To Consider When Angel Investing & Why Series A Is A Hiring Decision with Roger Dickey, Foun · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “I would agree with that. Yeah, I'd absolutely agree with that statement. I think it's more happening on the angel and kind of seed fund level where you have people that are trying to find the next big opportunity and they think that's where it is. Every investor is looking for their Facebook, their Uber, their massive 10,000 X return. I don't think there are opportunities in social or photo sharing apps right now. So especially with the issues Snapchat's had in the IPO. So people are looking elsewhere and Deep Tech is the most interesting thing happening right now. I think artificial intelligence is the wave. That's the trend right now that's forming new companies. So you have a lot of people that are investing in teams that probably aren't the best teams to be going after those opportunities. I think there are going to be a lot of losses, but there will be.”

    2017-09-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: If You Do Not Like VCs, You Have Not Worked With a Good One, How Andreesen Have Added The Same Level of Value As A Co-Founder, Why Market Is The First Thing To Consider When Angel Investing & Why Series A Is A Hiring Decision with Roger Dickey, Foun · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “He's run Oh, yeah, tremendous, tremendous blog and just tremendous human being. Love that guy. I'd have him on the show if you can.”

    2017-09-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: If You Do Not Like VCs, You Have Not Worked With a Good One, How Andreesen Have Added The Same Level of Value As A Co-Founder, Why Market Is The First Thing To Consider When Angel Investing & Why Series A Is A Hiring Decision with Roger Dickey, Foun · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “I don't read as much as I should online these days. I would say I check hacker news every day and there's a couple great people whose blogs show up on there. I've always liked Elod Gill”

    2017-09-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: If You Do Not Like VCs, You Have Not Worked With a Good One, How Andreesen Have Added The Same Level of Value As A Co-Founder, Why Market Is The First Thing To Consider When Angel Investing & Why Series A Is A Hiring Decision with Roger Dickey, Foun · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “I think we're going to need something like that. The counter argument here is even in the industrial revolution, people were saying that factories would kill jobs and look at us now. We have more jobs than ever. I think the rate of technology, the rate of technology expansion is exponential. The rate of what technologies can address and the jobs technologies can replace is exponential. So I think we're going to start to see more of an acute issue as humans and machines, I should say as machines start to outpace humans. I don't think this is happening anytime soon, but it will and when it does will need an economic solution.”

    2017-09-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: If You Do Not Like VCs, You Have Not Worked With a Good One, How Andreesen Have Added The Same Level of Value As A Co-Founder, Why Market Is The First Thing To Consider When Angel Investing & Why Series A Is A Hiring Decision with Roger Dickey, Foun · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “I'm a big bulleted list person, to be honest. Phone, or I actually love Google Docs. So I have a document called Notes that I've been keeping up to date with the latest things that are top of my mind for the last probably five or ten years. So what's cool about that is it can actually rewind through the history and see what was in my head exactly three and a half years ago or something. So I've maintained that pretty actively. And I think Google Docs is a great place to keep a bulleted to-do list. And I use bulleted lists everywhere.”

    2017-09-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: If You Do Not Like VCs, You Have Not Worked With a Good One, How Andreesen Have Added The Same Level of Value As A Co-Founder, Why Market Is The First Thing To Consider When Angel Investing & Why Series A Is A Hiring Decision with Roger Dickey, Foun · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “I like the book on intelligence, which is by Jeff Hawkins, and it talks about how the brain is architected, for lack of a better word. So he gets into basically every neuron, why it is where it is. Sort of almost a computer programmer's perspective on how the brain is designed. It's fascinating. It gave me a better understanding of how our brains work.”

    2017-09-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: If You Do Not Like VCs, You Have Not Worked With a Good One, How Andreesen Have Added The Same Level of Value As A Co-Founder, Why Market Is The First Thing To Consider When Angel Investing & Why Series A Is A Hiring Decision with Roger Dickey, Foun · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “I believe that there will be a higher level language for software that makes software easier to build. You know, we've gone from assembly to C++ to JavaScript now to these web frameworks. I think there's going to be something even higher level than that that makes software dramatically easier to build in the near future.”

    2017-09-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: If You Do Not Like VCs, You Have Not Worked With a Good One, How Andreesen Have Added The Same Level of Value As A Co-Founder, Why Market Is The First Thing To Consider When Angel Investing & Why Series A Is A Hiring Decision with Roger Dickey, Foun · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “On the LP side, there are some funds that are just consistent winners. You have this early stage seed funds where you're really making a bet on that investor if you're investing in their first fund or their second fund. It's hard to really tell what's going to happen. Then you have these more blue chip opportunities. Like if you can LP with Sequoia Greylock, Kleiner, and Reesen, you're probably going to get your money back. That's almost like a mutual fund. So I'm in a couple things like that. I'm in a couple of really early stage funds where I'm betting very much on the investor. And then I have my Angel portfolio. I'm starting to pair that down a little bit though because I need more liquid investments.”

    2017-09-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: If You Do Not Like VCs, You Have Not Worked With a Good One, How Andreesen Have Added The Same Level of Value As A Co-Founder, Why Market Is The First Thing To Consider When Angel Investing & Why Series A Is A Hiring Decision with Roger Dickey, Foun · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “Well, I think the typical advice is to not invest more than 5 to 10 percent of your assets in private technology companies because they're so speculative. Your money's locked up for such a long time, even in the best case scenario. Really any number of things could happen that are hard to predict. Imagine being an Uber investor right now. Like who would have thought that one of the investors would be suing the CEO for fraud? None of these are things you can see in advance, let alone the fact that Uber was a 10,000 X return on the investment up until recently. Who knows if it's going to get marked down? So it's very hard to predict what happens. It's the kind of thing most people shouldn't really be doing expecting a financial return. So in my case, I have 40 or 50 companies that probably probably 50 plus companies that haven't returned yet. And that's a good and a bad thing, right? They haven't returned. It means they haven't failed, but I also haven't seen any money come out of those opportunities. So I've tried to limit my personal allocation as much as I can, certainly for self-directed angel investment.”

    2017-09-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: If You Do Not Like VCs, You Have Not Worked With a Good One, How Andreesen Have Added The Same Level of Value As A Co-Founder, Why Market Is The First Thing To Consider When Angel Investing & Why Series A Is A Hiring Decision with Roger Dickey, Foun · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “I think so. I think it's been very valuable to me to get exposure outside of my company to other founders, how they're running their companies, the challenges that they're running into. I think I'm now in about 70 companies as an angel investor. So I regularly get investor updates from companies that I'm in able to regularly mentor other founders. They say one of the best ways to learn is to teach. So I've found that when I help out other founders, I'm able to learn a lot about how to be a better founder myself. And I love learning from founders as well. And there's always something to learn from the people I've invested in. So it tends to be a great way to just look more broadly at how to be a good founder than just in the echo chamber of my own company.”

    2017-09-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: If You Do Not Like VCs, You Have Not Worked With a Good One, How Andreesen Have Added The Same Level of Value As A Co-Founder, Why Market Is The First Thing To Consider When Angel Investing & Why Series A Is A Hiring Decision with Roger Dickey, Foun · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “Question part of it is Angel invest far less now than I used to. There are a few different ways to invest. My focus these days is more reactive than proactive. If there's a founder who I know who's starting a business, if there's a great idea that I happen to see, I'll reach out to the founders if I'm at a demo day like a Y combinator demo day and I see a great idea, I'll write a check. I'm not proactively going after founders anymore. I'm not taking pitches in industries I don't understand. I tend to cluster around certain themes I've already done a great deal of research on. So if I see a great founder who's going after that theme, I don't have the diligence of the market anymore. I don't have the diligence to the company as much. I really just diligence that founder.”

    2017-09-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: If You Do Not Like VCs, You Have Not Worked With a Good One, How Andreesen Have Added The Same Level of Value As A Co-Founder, Why Market Is The First Thing To Consider When Angel Investing & Why Series A Is A Hiring Decision with Roger Dickey, Foun · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  15. “Certain elemental markets that have been around for centuries or even millennia. And as a founder, those are the markets that I like to go after. I think it depends how you define a market too. You look at Uber. Is that a new market?”

    2017-09-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: If You Do Not Like VCs, You Have Not Worked With a Good One, How Andreesen Have Added The Same Level of Value As A Co-Founder, Why Market Is The First Thing To Consider When Angel Investing & Why Series A Is A Hiring Decision with Roger Dickey, Foun · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  16. “I think it could change the perception of the company, but it doesn't change the market. So the freelance economy, the sort of our artificial intelligence tools that we use, that's not the market that we're in. That's more so how we're implemented under the hood. The market for us is software development. On the demand side, at least, it's I'm a customer. I need to hire software developers. How do I do that? There's a five to one ratio of job openings for engineers to engineers that actually exist. So there's a massive disparity in demand. So if we can make engineers more efficient, if we can make them more engineers, if we can make them more accessible, that's valuable for our customers.”

    2017-09-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: If You Do Not Like VCs, You Have Not Worked With a Good One, How Andreesen Have Added The Same Level of Value As A Co-Founder, Why Market Is The First Thing To Consider When Angel Investing & Why Series A Is A Hiring Decision with Roger Dickey, Foun · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  17. “Feel like there's been a shift here in the last five years ago. There used to be this mantra, you always back the team. I forget who said it first. I think, you know, one of the great investors, Bradfeld, Fred Wilson, you know, maybe it was Ron Conway. I think he said that. And then the whole ecosystem adopted that mantra. What I've heard more recently, maybe five years ago around that time was, I think this might have been Peter Thiel or somebody who said that the market is actually the first thing that they look at. I believe in the stack of things you look at from market to founding team to the actual product to the traction they have, the team they've managed to hire, of all those things, market is the first thing I look at when I'm making an angel investment because I've actually seen, I've now been investing long enough that I've seen great founders pursue terrible markets and the businesses just don't go anywhere.”

    2017-09-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: If You Do Not Like VCs, You Have Not Worked With a Good One, How Andreesen Have Added The Same Level of Value As A Co-Founder, Why Market Is The First Thing To Consider When Angel Investing & Why Series A Is A Hiring Decision with Roger Dickey, Foun · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  18. “Firms look at the Series A from the perspective of hey, is this somebody we want to point at all of our internal resources? Is this somebody who we're okay emailing with, texting with, no matter what time of day or night it is? One anecdote from Andreessen, when we went to the partner meeting, the final approval meeting for our investment with Andreessen, I think they asked us to talk about ourselves for about 10 or 15 minutes before the pitch, which was one of the scariest parts, actually, because at that point I had the whole company pitch memorized. I could give it my sleep, but I didn't have a five-minute pitch on myself. So, you know, we were outside in the car before the meeting frantically taking notes trying to make sure we had a good way to talk about ourselves. And it turns out for firms like Andreessen, and I think Sequoia, it's one of the most important parts of that Series A, they pitch.”

    2017-09-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: If You Do Not Like VCs, You Have Not Worked With a Good One, How Andreesen Have Added The Same Level of Value As A Co-Founder, Why Market Is The First Thing To Consider When Angel Investing & Why Series A Is A Hiring Decision with Roger Dickey, Foun · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  19. “A different meaning to that. I was talking to Sequoi partner, Mike Vernal, about how Sequoia thinks about Series A's. And I think this would apply to Andreessen as well. He said that Sequoia sees a Series A as a hiring decision in the sense that the firm is hiring the founders in a way. They're hiring the founding team. So they're asking you a lot of questions that aren't about your traction or your product necessarily. They're trying to figure out, is this the kind of founder that we want in the Sequoia family? Is this somebody we're willing to support no matter what happens? You see, you know, with a recent news about benchmark and Uber, when investors don't support their founders, there's a very large backlash that you see in Silicon Valley. That's the kind of thing that's expected from investors. So when you choose to work with a company that's that early stage, you choose to work with a founding team as an investor, you have to be ready to back them no matter what. You have to back them through future rounds. You have to stand behind the founder. You become a reference for the founder. So Sequoia, and I think”

    2017-09-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: If You Do Not Like VCs, You Have Not Worked With a Good One, How Andreesen Have Added The Same Level of Value As A Co-Founder, Why Market Is The First Thing To Consider When Angel Investing & Why Series A Is A Hiring Decision with Roger Dickey, Foun · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  20. “And what I think the mindset other firms have is they like to go after these highly technical founders, highly product-oriented founders. When you do that, though, you run into people like me who haven't, for example, built a large sales team before. They haven't hired a top PR firm before. So when the firm is able to come in and provide support structure there, you take these highly technical founders and you're sort of able to augment them, you know, supercharge them and turn them into successful companies. So we've been thrilled to see that our investors of come out of the woodwork and helped in various ways. And I think one of the ways we think about it is Andreessen owns some large percentage of our company, let's say 10 to 20 percent of the company, we think of them like a co-founder and they actually have added the same level of value that a co-founder would.”

    2017-09-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: If You Do Not Like VCs, You Have Not Worked With a Good One, How Andreesen Have Added The Same Level of Value As A Co-Founder, Why Market Is The First Thing To Consider When Angel Investing & Why Series A Is A Hiring Decision with Roger Dickey, Foun · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  21. “Well, we've actually been, and I don't mean to advertise for our investors, but we've been really happy with our investors. I've been the stereotype on investors is that sometimes they just put money into a company and they're either unhelpful or worse. They can meddle with the way a founder wants to run the business. We've seen with our investors, particularly with Andreessen Horowitz, that it's the opposite. Now, their model is a little different. I think they have 150 operating partners at the firm. So on top of the investment partners who they're helpful here and there, you have these operating partners that will come in and say, oh, you're trying to hire a head of sales engineering. Well, that's a role you've never hired for. Here's 20 candidates. Here's how we'd recommend you interview them. Or, okay, you're trying to hire a PR firm. Here are the five agencies our companies have worked with. And here are two that are excited to talk to you. No matter what it is that we need help with, we found that Andreessen is able to help. And I think there's other firms that have these type of facilities as well. As part of the thesis that I've”

    2017-09-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: If You Do Not Like VCs, You Have Not Worked With a Good One, How Andreesen Have Added The Same Level of Value As A Co-Founder, Why Market Is The First Thing To Consider When Angel Investing & Why Series A Is A Hiring Decision with Roger Dickey, Foun · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  22. “Effects. It has these inherent efficiencies of scale that allow us to get even better as we do more complex types of work. That's a marker to me that shows the system's working when we can do $500,000 project for a Fortune 500 client and they rate us 10 out of 10 on every milestone that we deliver.”

    2017-09-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: If You Do Not Like VCs, You Have Not Worked With a Good One, How Andreesen Have Added The Same Level of Value As A Co-Founder, Why Market Is The First Thing To Consider When Angel Investing & Why Series A Is A Hiring Decision with Roger Dickey, Foun · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  23. “Well, it's been a fairly marked trajectory for us. So when we first started, we were doing $5,000 projects, $10,000 projects. We're even doing $600 and $700 projects. I remember two projects we did that were that small. And people were asking us to build simple web pages that pulled from APIs or web scrapers, very simple mobile application prototypes. This is back in 2015. We've since seen the average size of project that we're able to handle go up dramatically. Between our Series A and our Series B, which is roughly 2015 to 2016, we saw our average project size go up from 15 or 20,000 to about 150,000. At the same time, you'd expect if the model wasn't working, you'd expect that our customer satisfaction would go down, that our delivery on time rate would go down, our margin rate would go down. And we actually saw all those metrics go up, which is pretty stunning that as we address more and more complex projects, the model has these networks.”

    2017-09-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: If You Do Not Like VCs, You Have Not Worked With a Good One, How Andreesen Have Added The Same Level of Value As A Co-Founder, Why Market Is The First Thing To Consider When Angel Investing & Why Series A Is A Hiring Decision with Roger Dickey, Foun · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source