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Samir Vasavada

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2024-06-28
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2024-06-28
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  1. “I don't know the time horizon, but my vision is to build the asset manager of the future, build a platform that enables all investors regardless of their age, their net worth, to be able to deliver deeply personalized portfolios across all asset classes, publics and privates, all in one beautiful, elegant software experience. And I think that the path to getting there requires a shift in the industry to move away from people, you know, human portfolio managers and investments like the mutual fund, like the ETF, like the separately managed account, into platform-driven investing. That's going to take some time and some shaping as an industry. And I think we're going to help that shaping happen. But it's going to take time in 10 years. Hopefully we'll be well on our way to making this new market a reality.”

    2024-06-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Raising $126M Across 3 Rounds in Just 6 Months, Being the Youngest Founder of a Unicorn Company | But Everything Was Not as it Seemed: The Real Story of Vise: The Regrets, Mistakes and Mis-Hires with Vise's Samir Vasavada · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “I think it was too optimistic early on, and I think now I see a deep sense of reality. And part of why I was very optimistic is just because I didn't know any other way to be. I was naive and as a result of being naive, I was very optimistic. And I also knew that in every interaction, that investor was re-underwriting me. Now I realized none of it matters. The only thing that matters is building a great business and making sure that your customers love your product and you have a long-term, sensible strategy and go to market that will support your growth aspirations into your vision. For a long time, I was like, how are investors going to perceive this and how are they going to perceive that? And like, you know, how do I make them feel? And like, I don't care. Like, I'm going to tell them what's going on in the business if it's going well. I'll tell them it's going well. If it's not going well, I'll tell them what we're working on making to improve it. And we're all on the journey together for the long haul. We all know this is going to be a business that is going to compound year after year after year. It's not going to be a business that just works one day and becomes a trillion.”

    2024-06-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Raising $126M Across 3 Rounds in Just 6 Months, Being the Youngest Founder of a Unicorn Company | But Everything Was Not as it Seemed: The Real Story of Vise: The Regrets, Mistakes and Mis-Hires with Vise's Samir Vasavada · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “It's something I started to learn as we had a bigger team and, you know, I had to manage people and managers, but like, you know, this feeling of like deep empathy and the ability to elevate everyone around me more than just on the vision of the business. Again, it comes with time, it comes with experience. But I think so much of my time, I'm just so focused on the business, on figuring out the solving the problems of the business, and I'm not thinking about elevating everyone around me. I think there's some value in doing that. I think it's important not to overcorrect. I think it's not important not to get too close to Elon. I think there is some balance where you're really helping support and boost those around you in a meaningful way.”

    2024-06-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Raising $126M Across 3 Rounds in Just 6 Months, Being the Youngest Founder of a Unicorn Company | But Everything Was Not as it Seemed: The Real Story of Vise: The Regrets, Mistakes and Mis-Hires with Vise's Samir Vasavada · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “Vah, I do. I know. I think I rationally know it. But I think, you know, when you work on something for, oh, it's been like seven, eight years now since you were 15, 16, like it becomes your baby. It becomes your identity. It becomes a part of you. One kind of lesson I'll give to founders is separate yourself and your identity, your personal identity from that of yourself.”

    2024-06-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Raising $126M Across 3 Rounds in Just 6 Months, Being the Youngest Founder of a Unicorn Company | But Everything Was Not as it Seemed: The Real Story of Vise: The Regrets, Mistakes and Mis-Hires with Vise's Samir Vasavada · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “Yeah, I think trapped is maybe not trapped because I love what I do, but like I think there's some worry, there's some concern that it doesn't work.”

    2024-06-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Raising $126M Across 3 Rounds in Just 6 Months, Being the Youngest Founder of a Unicorn Company | But Everything Was Not as it Seemed: The Real Story of Vise: The Regrets, Mistakes and Mis-Hires with Vise's Samir Vasavada · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “I would have loved to have someone with deep domain expertise early on when we raised our series A round in our space, who had built a company similar in shape to ours. And I think having a perspective like that in the room would have been really valuable.”

    2024-06-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Raising $126M Across 3 Rounds in Just 6 Months, Being the Youngest Founder of a Unicorn Company | But Everything Was Not as it Seemed: The Real Story of Vise: The Regrets, Mistakes and Mis-Hires with Vise's Samir Vasavada · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “Their lesson. And I think a lot of that applied to me as well, which is I can't just listen to successful founders and all of their advice and blindly adopt it. Like I have to kind of learn for myself to some extent. And I think so much of my ethos early on was I'm going to go to the smartest people on earth, the most powerful, connected, successful people on Earth, and I'm going to ask them what they did. And I'm going to just do that because it clearly worked for them. It's going to work for me. And it just didn't work for me. Their businesses were different than my business. Their market was different at that time than it was from me. I didn't learn the lessons for myself when in reality over time I just the only way to learn was if I learned it myself.”

    2024-06-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Raising $126M Across 3 Rounds in Just 6 Months, Being the Youngest Founder of a Unicorn Company | But Everything Was Not as it Seemed: The Real Story of Vise: The Regrets, Mistakes and Mis-Hires with Vise's Samir Vasavada · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “It's a great, great question. I don't regret a lot. Like, I think I just kind of had to learn. There was a great piece of advice Ravi gave me that I should have internalized. I think there's a difference in terms of advice that, like, I think there's a world of difference in terms of what you know versus what you've internalized. So I think a lot of people compare things of like, you should do this particular thing. And it sounds like you should have integrity, right? And like, yeah, it's like something you should have. You should have integrity. But oftentimes people know that, but they don't have integrity, right? So I think there's a difference in terms of what people know and what they do. And I think one piece of advice that I was given is you can't necessarily learn other people's lessons for them. And I would spend so much time on trying to get someone, you know, whether it's a team member, whether it's someone to do something, to learn something, and they wouldn't learn it. Then they would go and they would make that set of mistakes on their own and they would learn.”

    2024-06-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Raising $126M Across 3 Rounds in Just 6 Months, Being the Youngest Founder of a Unicorn Company | But Everything Was Not as it Seemed: The Real Story of Vise: The Regrets, Mistakes and Mis-Hires with Vise's Samir Vasavada · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “I remember people that gave up on me. I remember like I think it's not necessarily the people that gave me no's. It's not the people that didn't believe on me in the beginning. I think it's the people that gave up on me. I think it's the people that were like this kid just doesn't get it. He's not listening to me or, you know, I think this about him. I'm going to move on to the next thing, whether that's an investor, whether that's executive, whether it's another founder, right, or a peer. I think I deeply remember those people that I was friends with at one point in time that I thought believed in me, that I thought that told me they were along for the journey. They told me that I could call them at any night and at any hour of any day of the year, and they're going to be there for me. And those people in the time of need were not there for me. And they turned on me. VCs are going to be VCs.”

    2024-06-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Raising $126M Across 3 Rounds in Just 6 Months, Being the Youngest Founder of a Unicorn Company | But Everything Was Not as it Seemed: The Real Story of Vise: The Regrets, Mistakes and Mis-Hires with Vise's Samir Vasavada · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “Yeah, there's pressure on all these kids. That's why all these kids are super anxious and depressed. And they have a bunch of expectations. They don't know if they can live up to. It's just the United States at this point in time. And I just never, like, I just always assumed I was playing a different game than everyone else was. And I'm going to win at my game, and they can all play their game and do fine on it. And I just always saw the bigger picture. I'm like, this isn't, none of this fits into my world. None of this fits into my picture. And I think the reason why I didn't cause a lot of damage long term with my relationship with my parents or my family in general is because I think I had the introspection to believe if I was them, right? If I'm a parent in the 2010s US and given the information I know at the time, what would I, like, I don't know anything about this startups in Silicon Valley and kids going out and starting company? Like, this is like unprecedented. Like, how am I going to react as a parent? So I think I just had some empathy for them looking back that at the time I didn't have that they did the best they could.”

    2024-06-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Raising $126M Across 3 Rounds in Just 6 Months, Being the Youngest Founder of a Unicorn Company | But Everything Was Not as it Seemed: The Real Story of Vise: The Regrets, Mistakes and Mis-Hires with Vise's Samir Vasavada · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “I think if you're a parent, I think a couple things happen. I think what the other parents and the other parents' kids say about you and that kind of breedsome, like they see the kid who got into Stanford, who won the debate, the debate champion, who does a tennis star, like they see that kid and they're like, why can't you be him? Why can't you be that person? They're at the parent cocktail parties.”

    2024-06-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Raising $126M Across 3 Rounds in Just 6 Months, Being the Youngest Founder of a Unicorn Company | But Everything Was Not as it Seemed: The Real Story of Vise: The Regrets, Mistakes and Mis-Hires with Vise's Samir Vasavada · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “Be a $10, $20 billion business. And we're like, this feels weird, like for our whole lives, we were trying to prove everyone wrong. And now we're in like, now everyone believes in us, and it's like I'm approving them right. And there was something that felt wrong about that. There was something that felt like deeply wrong about that. And then when it like flipped again, then we just kind of felt like we were back at home. We felt like we had our motivating factor that...”

    2024-06-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Raising $126M Across 3 Rounds in Just 6 Months, Being the Youngest Founder of a Unicorn Company | But Everything Was Not as it Seemed: The Real Story of Vise: The Regrets, Mistakes and Mis-Hires with Vise's Samir Vasavada · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “I don't think I try to prove to myself at this point in time. In the beginning it was a lot of the motivator was like my teachers at school were like, what's this kid doing talking about all of us business stuff he should be focused on school? My parents are like, you know, the rest of the class is thinking about college applications and getting good grades and extracurricular activities and you're just so fixated on this. There's a point in time where they had hired a therapist to talk me out of running the business and just be a normal kid. And I think for a long time that had been, and this was like years of my life had been like a motivating factor of like, I'm going to prove all of these people wrong and I'm going to be so successful. I think I did prove those people wrong. I felt like for a while, you know, especially as we started to gain a lot of traction. Another thing it flipped. And I think it flipped, which is everyone's like, these guys are foregone conclusion. They're the next Collison brothers. They're the next big thing. It's just going to work. Fizz is going to...”

    2024-06-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Raising $126M Across 3 Rounds in Just 6 Months, Being the Youngest Founder of a Unicorn Company | But Everything Was Not as it Seemed: The Real Story of Vise: The Regrets, Mistakes and Mis-Hires with Vise's Samir Vasavada · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “Yes, but nothing dwarfs There was a point in time I was sixteen years old I was living in San Francisco I was living in the tenderline and then I moved to this house called the Crypto Castle I was living with twelve people we shared one bathroom My parents didn't really like me because I dropped out of school My co-founder was still in high school moving on to college The business was kind of working wasn't really working we were bootstrapping it I was like pretty much broke and I'm like there's no plan B like if this doesn't work like I'm fucked That was the like lowest I'd ever been and there's no way like no matter all the ups and downs I went through post you know raising capital and being the hot thing there's no low that's ever going to be as low as a low that I felt at that point in time”

    2024-06-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Raising $126M Across 3 Rounds in Just 6 Months, Being the Youngest Founder of a Unicorn Company | But Everything Was Not as it Seemed: The Real Story of Vise: The Regrets, Mistakes and Mis-Hires with Vise's Samir Vasavada · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  15. “The mistake I made was underwriting people's emotions, not their incentives. I was like, oh, this person is saying this particular thing to me. They feel this particular way. I don't want them to feel this particular way. I'm going to say this particular thing so they feel happy. And that's just like the wrong way to think. The right way to think is, what are my incentives? What are their incentives? How do we get to a shared outcome to the common good, which is make or increase our enterprise value of the business? If it doesn't, if their incentives don't line with mine, I'm cognizant of it, I can replay back why their incentives don't necessarily align with mine, but like I'm going to do the right thing for the company. I'm not going to like try and change myself or my emotional state or change something about the business to make that person feel happy.”

    2024-06-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Raising $126M Across 3 Rounds in Just 6 Months, Being the Youngest Founder of a Unicorn Company | But Everything Was Not as it Seemed: The Real Story of Vise: The Regrets, Mistakes and Mis-Hires with Vise's Samir Vasavada · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  16. “For some people, some investors, I think pretended to be our friends, when incentives were flipped or we weren't as hot, they weren't our friends anymore. And I think that hurt because I thought those people were truly our friends. I think there were some set of people where I was like, oh, yeah, it's just like none of this matters. It's just noise. At the end of the day, we're going to compound. We're going to build a big business. Them not liking us or them losing some favor with us doesn't necessarily matter to us. People pretending to be your friends, pretending to deeply care about you, and then stabbing you in the back in some way, shape or form, or talking about that, I think really hurts.”

    2024-06-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Raising $126M Across 3 Rounds in Just 6 Months, Being the Youngest Founder of a Unicorn Company | But Everything Was Not as it Seemed: The Real Story of Vise: The Regrets, Mistakes and Mis-Hires with Vise's Samir Vasavada · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  17. “I would say it's like investor engagement. I would say it's like, generally speaking, like I heard a lot about people. And like I further affirm my belief of like it's really important to have a core group of like close friends or like your friends regardless or your friends from when you were a child onwards. Is your true group of friends? Because like a lot of people are going to come into your life and they're going to come into your life for the wrong reasons. And I think a lot of people aren't aware of that. And when something starts to change, those people move out of your life. You know, you're like, well, like, did I do something wrong? Like, was I a bad person? But it's just like you're not, you're not the cool, hot thing. They're going to move on to like crypto's hot. They're going to move on to the cool crypto guy. Now AI's hot, they're all going to move on to the big AI founders and they're going to just keep moving from cycle to cycle to cycle. They're going to chase the hot thing. They're going to chase the...”

    2024-06-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Raising $126M Across 3 Rounds in Just 6 Months, Being the Youngest Founder of a Unicorn Company | But Everything Was Not as it Seemed: The Real Story of Vise: The Regrets, Mistakes and Mis-Hires with Vise's Samir Vasavada · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  18. “Um, no, because why does it matter, right? It would matter if I had a massive preference stack above me. But because we have so much money in the bank and we don't burn very much, I don't necessarily have to. What matters more than your valuation is your preference stack, right? If you've got a billion dollar preference stack, not a billion dollar valuation, and you go sell the company for $500 million, then you're still underwater if you don't have all that in cash. But if you have one hundred and twenty million dollars preference stack and you sell the company for $100 million and you still have $80 million of cash, that's $60 million of value that goes to the waterfalls to the whole cap table.”

    2024-06-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Raising $126M Across 3 Rounds in Just 6 Months, Being the Youngest Founder of a Unicorn Company | But Everything Was Not as it Seemed: The Real Story of Vise: The Regrets, Mistakes and Mis-Hires with Vise's Samir Vasavada · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  19. “I think happiness and comfort are two different things. Comfort can bleed breed complacency. I think having like no money in the bank, being like borderline broke was our financial situation before we took a little bit off the table is not good for you. I think having a little bit of money is healthy. It's good. You know you can sleep at night. I think having too much money is dangerous. At least too much money early on is dangerous. So I think it's about the general reasonableness. But I had enough money to the point where I had the chip on my shoulder. I needed to prove that it could work. I needed to prove that I could build a big thing. But I didn't have so much money that I was like, okay, if this doesn't work, I'm comfortable. I'll buy a mansion and I'll screw off.”

    2024-06-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Raising $126M Across 3 Rounds in Just 6 Months, Being the Youngest Founder of a Unicorn Company | But Everything Was Not as it Seemed: The Real Story of Vise: The Regrets, Mistakes and Mis-Hires with Vise's Samir Vasavada · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  20. “No, I think the reason why is I met Jensen from Navidia and he's like, look, in order to build true resilience and to like continue compounding, you kind of need to be comfortable being miserable. And I think if you have 10 million bucks in the bank, like it's hard to be miserable. And I think there are points in time where I was miserable and that was like a deeply motivating factor. And I think that if I was just too comfortable, if I had all this money, if I had all the things that come with all of that money, maybe I just would have been too comfortable and I would have just not been willing to make the set of hard decisions.”

    2024-06-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Raising $126M Across 3 Rounds in Just 6 Months, Being the Youngest Founder of a Unicorn Company | But Everything Was Not as it Seemed: The Real Story of Vise: The Regrets, Mistakes and Mis-Hires with Vise's Samir Vasavada · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  21. “It's crazy because I had offers to buy a lot more secondary. I just didn't make sense to me. One, we thought it was a bad look to our investors. Like founders cash out all of this money in secondary. I think it would have been a smart personal financial decision. And it's clear that a lot of other founders took sometimes $100 million of secondary. So maybe from a personal financial decision, it would have been the risk-adjusted, correct decision to make to have sold more sections.”

    2024-06-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Raising $126M Across 3 Rounds in Just 6 Months, Being the Youngest Founder of a Unicorn Company | But Everything Was Not as it Seemed: The Real Story of Vise: The Regrets, Mistakes and Mis-Hires with Vise's Samir Vasavada · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  22. “Of course, a small amount, I think for a founder to get a little bit of liquidity is really, really important in terms of long-term decision making. Because from an incentives perspective, if you're a founder and you've got a hundred percent of your net worth in this company and you're going through hard times and like you're not sure if you can like afford rent or you're not sure if you can make it through some tough time, thus you want to sell or you want to make kind of a personally wrongly incentivized decision, that can be dangerous. Like it can oftentimes force you to not want to take risk you're holding on to so much risk in the company. But I think there's a zone of reasonableness. And I think like selling a million dollars of secondary I think is reasonable for a founder to have a financial cushion.”

    2024-06-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Raising $126M Across 3 Rounds in Just 6 Months, Being the Youngest Founder of a Unicorn Company | But Everything Was Not as it Seemed: The Real Story of Vise: The Regrets, Mistakes and Mis-Hires with Vise's Samir Vasavada · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  23. “So it's a double edged sword, and the reason why it's a double edged sword is because on one hand you've got all this great credibility by association. You have all this social capital. And that social capital allows you to hire people. It allows you to get great customers. It allows you to get in the press. It allows you to raise money from other investors. Everyone pattern matches to what is Sequoia, what is Founder's Fund, what are these prominent investors doing. The reason why it's a double-edged sword is a lot of people see it as their”

    2024-06-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Raising $126M Across 3 Rounds in Just 6 Months, Being the Youngest Founder of a Unicorn Company | But Everything Was Not as it Seemed: The Real Story of Vise: The Regrets, Mistakes and Mis-Hires with Vise's Samir Vasavada · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  24. “Well, if an investor wants to sell you should let them sell, but you need to know who's buying the stock. Because the worst case scenario is you let the investor sell to some rando and that rando ends up being a pain on your cap table. And they're someone you don't want on the cap table. I wouldn't necessarily want an investor selling to an investor I didn't know and wasn't comfortable having on the cap table. That's why you have the transfer restrictions in place.”

    2024-06-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Raising $126M Across 3 Rounds in Just 6 Months, Being the Youngest Founder of a Unicorn Company | But Everything Was Not as it Seemed: The Real Story of Vise: The Regrets, Mistakes and Mis-Hires with Vise's Samir Vasavada · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  25. “We had transfer restrictions. So investors, unless they had special permission from the company, they couldn't sell secondary. But in the cases where we did have either employees or investors sell secondaries, if it was like, it was for the right reason I get it, but like if it's like, oh, we don't believe in these guys anymore, then I just kind of thought it was like, okay, fuck you, I'm gonna like work extra hard to make this company 10 times more valuable. I don't want anyone on the cap table who doesn't want to be on the cap table.”

    2024-06-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Raising $126M Across 3 Rounds in Just 6 Months, Being the Youngest Founder of a Unicorn Company | But Everything Was Not as it Seemed: The Real Story of Vise: The Regrets, Mistakes and Mis-Hires with Vise's Samir Vasavada · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  26. “the short term value it's about steaking at something for the long term and compounding value year after year after year and i just i had that principle and the only reason why i had that principle is because we were working on it five six seven years prior and i knew that year after year after year it got better and better and better and i would regret for the rest of my life not building this into what i believe it could be”

    2024-06-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Raising $126M Across 3 Rounds in Just 6 Months, Being the Youngest Founder of a Unicorn Company | But Everything Was Not as it Seemed: The Real Story of Vise: The Regrets, Mistakes and Mis-Hires with Vise's Samir Vasavada · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  27. “Tempted, did I think about it? Yeah, of course. But the reason why I didn't is because my broad thesis on the space. Platform is going to be the biggest thing when it comes to asset management. Like all asset managers will have to become platform companies. Investment advice will no longer be delivered through people and investment products, it will be delivered through platform in a personalized way at scale for every single investor. And the DNA of these incumbent asset managers is not to build technology. It's not to build great product. And I know that because I spent times with the senior leadership teams at every single large asset management company, and I knew they didn't have the capability to build what we built. And the rate at which we were building what we were building and the rate at which it was improving was going to make it inevitably more valuable year after year after year. I just looked at it from the standpoint of like, I was at the time 21 years old. If I just stick at this for another 5, 10, 15, 20 years, whatever period of time, I'm going to inevitably create a lot of value. It's not about creating...”

    2024-06-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Raising $126M Across 3 Rounds in Just 6 Months, Being the Youngest Founder of a Unicorn Company | But Everything Was Not as it Seemed: The Real Story of Vise: The Regrets, Mistakes and Mis-Hires with Vise's Samir Vasavada · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  28. “The little prefs, they would get their money back. They would get their money back, right? And again, it creates an incentive mismatch.”

    2024-06-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Raising $126M Across 3 Rounds in Just 6 Months, Being the Youngest Founder of a Unicorn Company | But Everything Was Not as it Seemed: The Real Story of Vise: The Regrets, Mistakes and Mis-Hires with Vise's Samir Vasavada · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  29. “Not necessarily return money, but there was definitely pressure in the sense that so in 2021 all of our competitors got acquired and they got acquired for a lot of money. And there was definitely like you guys could exit this business and you guys could both make a lot of money, number one. And number two, the investors that invested at those high prices, it's going to take them some time to for us to regrow into that valuation. But if we were to sell the company,”

    2024-06-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Raising $126M Across 3 Rounds in Just 6 Months, Being the Youngest Founder of a Unicorn Company | But Everything Was Not as it Seemed: The Real Story of Vise: The Regrets, Mistakes and Mis-Hires with Vise's Samir Vasavada · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  30. “Right, but you shouldn't get to that point. You should have made the right decision years prior. A lot of founders are gambling, right? They're like, okay, I believe I can avoid making a tough decision because my business is just going to magically work, you know, a year from now and this go-to-market's finally going to work and I'm not going to have to cut anyone. And then it doesn't happen and they have six months of cash left and they have to make a set of hard decisions and they're forced to make those decisions.”

    2024-06-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Raising $126M Across 3 Rounds in Just 6 Months, Being the Youngest Founder of a Unicorn Company | But Everything Was Not as it Seemed: The Real Story of Vise: The Regrets, Mistakes and Mis-Hires with Vise's Samir Vasavada · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  31. “Oh, we now have a ton of cash. We never have to raise again. But if we had kept burning and kept scaling at the rate we were, then we would be out of money. Like a lot of other growth stage companies that are in 2021 that didn't make hard decisions. We just made it hard decisions basically at the end of 2021, early 2022, before the markets had really reset. And actually, it's funny, I wrote this a year later, I wrote this blog post called Refounding Vise. And the reason why I wrote that blog post, everyone thought we made the changes in early 2023 and like that was like a pivot moment, but it was actually a reflective blog post of the decisions, the changes we made in early 2022 to convince all of my founder friends who are running companies who hadn't made hard decisions that you can make a set of hard decisions and you're going to be just fine. Everything about VIS after we made those hard decisions was better. It was hard for a month, but then a month later, the team came together. Our burn was way down.”

    2024-06-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Raising $126M Across 3 Rounds in Just 6 Months, Being the Youngest Founder of a Unicorn Company | But Everything Was Not as it Seemed: The Real Story of Vise: The Regrets, Mistakes and Mis-Hires with Vise's Samir Vasavada · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  32. “We did, which is why we did for a little while. Which is why, like, so in 2021, when we knew we had this bad executive team, when we knew our culture was wrong, when we knew we probably should have everyone just in the office and this remote work thing isn't working out, when we knew we had too many people, we were like, well, if we make a set of hard decisions, then like everyone's going to think we're like a broken, failing, you know, company. And we're not going to be able to raise more money and we're not going to be able to recruit great people and customers aren't going to like us. And we're just scared. It's part of the reason why we didn't make the decision sooner. And at a certain point, I just like, this is too much. I'm just going to do it. If it doesn't work, it doesn't work.”

    2024-06-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Raising $126M Across 3 Rounds in Just 6 Months, Being the Youngest Founder of a Unicorn Company | But Everything Was Not as it Seemed: The Real Story of Vise: The Regrets, Mistakes and Mis-Hires with Vise's Samir Vasavada · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  33. “Much too soon. Do we pay people too much too soon? Yeah. Yes, we weren't looking for the right things in the interview process. We were looking for biggest company, biggest role, most status. Will people follow this person because of how successful they've been? And all of these people have a reputation. And the problem with people who have a reputation is that they're all trying to constantly defend their reputation. And if something is going to make them look bad, if there's going to be some kind of something that will potentially damage their reputation, they're going to fully, right? They're going to get off the boat before you burn it. That's dangerous for startups. Did you?”

    2024-06-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Raising $126M Across 3 Rounds in Just 6 Months, Being the Youngest Founder of a Unicorn Company | But Everything Was Not as it Seemed: The Real Story of Vise: The Regrets, Mistakes and Mis-Hires with Vise's Samir Vasavada · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  34. “Lessons go are I think I want people to do when they come to Vise I want them to feel like they're doing their life's work. And when I think about the people that are the best performers and it's not like the most senior people, it's like all kinds of different types of backgrounds, right? We had this kid who was like a trader for a year at Guggenheim, who's now running, now he's 26 and he's running our entire enterprise product strategy, right? We had another guy who was just an investment strategy guy at his previous.”

    2024-06-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Raising $126M Across 3 Rounds in Just 6 Months, Being the Youngest Founder of a Unicorn Company | But Everything Was Not as it Seemed: The Real Story of Vise: The Regrets, Mistakes and Mis-Hires with Vise's Samir Vasavada · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  35. “Companies as factories, and if a part is broken for a little bit, they can fix the part or at some point bring in a new part. But that's not how you should think about the startup. And I think thinking that way is really, really dangerous. And oftentimes a lot of managers, especially ones that come from bigger tech companies where there are these kind of legacy HR policies, they're just not as ruthless with headcount and personnel decisions as they should be. Yes, I'm a bit ruthless. Does it come off a little bit cold sometimes? Yes, but like you have to kind of be like that because we are fighting for survival and fighting to succeed every single day. And you just can't let anything get in the way of that.”

    2024-06-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Raising $126M Across 3 Rounds in Just 6 Months, Being the Youngest Founder of a Unicorn Company | But Everything Was Not as it Seemed: The Real Story of Vise: The Regrets, Mistakes and Mis-Hires with Vise's Samir Vasavada · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  36. “If you feel like you should let someone go, you should just do it and do it as fast as possible. 99.9% of the time never regretted letting someone go. It was almost always the right decision. And I think too many people, too many founders, too many managers dragged their feet. And it's oftentimes the incentive of the manager. So when you're the founder and you've got a manager and that manager is managing other people and someone on their team isn't performing, they're not living up to their expectations, the manager is oftentimes not going to say, hey, let me fire them. Rather, it's let me take some time, let me really nurture them, let me figure it out, let me put them on a pip, something like that. And like you just don't have time as a startup. You need to keep your bar super high. You're not a machine. You're a basketball team. You can only have five players on the court. And all of those five, those five players have to be really good. They have to work together. They have to uphold the bar for all, for each of the other players. And I think a lot of people think about their”

    2024-06-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Raising $126M Across 3 Rounds in Just 6 Months, Being the Youngest Founder of a Unicorn Company | But Everything Was Not as it Seemed: The Real Story of Vise: The Regrets, Mistakes and Mis-Hires with Vise's Samir Vasavada · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  37. “Yeah, I'm sure. Like, it was my, again, it's my fault for hiring all of these people. Founders don't realize this because for a long time, you don't get enough advice and then you start getting capital and you have stakeholders and you get too much advice. And the problem is all a lot of this advice is either bad advice. 99% of the advice is bad advice. And then the rest of the advice is contradictory to each other. So you don't necessarily know, and like someone who's built some super successful company or at some world-renowned venture fund, you're going to just assume their advice is good advice, right? If you're a first-time founder. And I think that for us, we just assumed all this advice was good advice. And until we stop listening to everyone's advice and just start figuring it out for ourselves, the business just wasn't working. And then once we figure it out for ourselves, everything turned around. It was great.”

    2024-06-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Raising $126M Across 3 Rounds in Just 6 Months, Being the Youngest Founder of a Unicorn Company | But Everything Was Not as it Seemed: The Real Story of Vise: The Regrets, Mistakes and Mis-Hires with Vise's Samir Vasavada · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  38. “100%. I think anytime someone doesn't find success in a role, I think they need, like a lot of people can't take the accountability that it was their fault. They need to point the finger at someone because something wasn't working in one particular part of the org or another, they were pointing at us to have solve that problem and then that would then elevate up to the board. But I think the reason why we brought them in, which again was the wrong reason, was to solve some of those key problems when in reality we should have just been solving it on our own.”

    2024-06-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Raising $126M Across 3 Rounds in Just 6 Months, Being the Youngest Founder of a Unicorn Company | But Everything Was Not as it Seemed: The Real Story of Vise: The Regrets, Mistakes and Mis-Hires with Vise's Samir Vasavada · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  39. “Yeah, but just on the wrong things. Sean rolled up his sleeves, worked super hard. That guy is a total, like, just grinds. Like, I think he was like a shadow third co-founder. But we were just working on all the wrong things. He'd spent all of his time executive recruiting. He would join all the search calls. He would spend time making people feel heard. He would spend time defending us to these various executives or team members and saying, no, they're great guys. You just gotta trust them.”

    2024-06-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Raising $126M Across 3 Rounds in Just 6 Months, Being the Youngest Founder of a Unicorn Company | But Everything Was Not as it Seemed: The Real Story of Vise: The Regrets, Mistakes and Mis-Hires with Vise's Samir Vasavada · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  40. “Their incentives look, I have empathy for VCs in some respect because you're such a long feedback cycle. You don't know if your investment is going to work for a decade or longer sometimes. So you're trying to find signals that will show to your partners, your LPs that this investment is doing well. So when people are oftentimes it's like what other people say about a particular company like oh Harry says VIS is great my investment's doing well if I'm pick your VC. And oh Harry's blah blah blah executive is saying the founders are really causing problems and they're not listening to me right then the focus on the board meeting is how do you make that executive feel heard? You're not talking about if you had some kind of industry expert or someone who prominent customer or someone who doesn't have the incentives of a VC that is on your board that is voicing the customer that is voicing the problem you're out to solve”

    2024-06-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Raising $126M Across 3 Rounds in Just 6 Months, Being the Youngest Founder of a Unicorn Company | But Everything Was Not as it Seemed: The Real Story of Vise: The Regrets, Mistakes and Mis-Hires with Vise's Samir Vasavada · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  41. “Yeah, I was friends with all of our board members, so I feel like we could talk to all of them. I think the challenge is if you have a board member full of VCs, you know, VCs are going to just act like VCs, right?”

    2024-06-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Raising $126M Across 3 Rounds in Just 6 Months, Being the Youngest Founder of a Unicorn Company | But Everything Was Not as it Seemed: The Real Story of Vise: The Regrets, Mistakes and Mis-Hires with Vise's Samir Vasavada · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  42. “I think the board was kind of like you got to figure out how to make these people happy and like you. That changed. I think the board as the market started to change. I think the board started to realize, okay, we actually need to make some changes as a business.”

    2024-06-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Raising $126M Across 3 Rounds in Just 6 Months, Being the Youngest Founder of a Unicorn Company | But Everything Was Not as it Seemed: The Real Story of Vise: The Regrets, Mistakes and Mis-Hires with Vise's Samir Vasavada · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  43. “I was probably three to six months in. We thought we were too optimistic at the time. So three months in, we're like, this is a problem. Six months in, we're like, okay, this is broken. And like, I think we were optimistic.”

    2024-06-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Raising $126M Across 3 Rounds in Just 6 Months, Being the Youngest Founder of a Unicorn Company | But Everything Was Not as it Seemed: The Real Story of Vise: The Regrets, Mistakes and Mis-Hires with Vise's Samir Vasavada · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  44. “It felt like that was the case, and we got so much pressure on us at the time that it was like, we have to keep these people happy. They're going to solve our problems. That's why you bring executives in. And it was pretty apparent that that wasn't the case.”

    2024-06-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Raising $126M Across 3 Rounds in Just 6 Months, Being the Youngest Founder of a Unicorn Company | But Everything Was Not as it Seemed: The Real Story of Vise: The Regrets, Mistakes and Mis-Hires with Vise's Samir Vasavada · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  45. “When you raise so much capital so quickly and you have all of these great investors on your cap table and everyone says this company is the shit, like you just think that it works and like you've been at companies where you didn't actually have, none of these people had to go out and find product market fit. They came into companies where there was already product market fit and they just had to operate their little part of that company or big part of that company where they were kind of keeping it status quo. Most of these companies that they came from were just like they haven't grown very much. They're just there and they're operating and they're running their part. But like none of them had to find product market fit. So they just assume, okay, when I come, this company's already got to figure it out. I'm just going to do the same thing I did at X company. I'm going to run my playbook that I did at X company and I'm going to bring it over to Vise. And you've got all these people with playbooks versus first principal thinkers that are trying to actually understand the problem and problem solve with you to actually drive product market fit.”

    2024-06-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Raising $126M Across 3 Rounds in Just 6 Months, Being the Youngest Founder of a Unicorn Company | But Everything Was Not as it Seemed: The Real Story of Vise: The Regrets, Mistakes and Mis-Hires with Vise's Samir Vasavada · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  46. “It felt like one we weren't working on the right things, we were talking so much about how to make people feel heard, how to make people feel valued, how to be inclusive, things that like, quite frankly, don't matter. What matters are can we build the best possible product such that our customers buy it and keep buying it and refer all of their friends to buy it? And we weren't talking about like when we went to our leadership meetings, we weren't talking about that. We were talking about making infrastructure decisions that will matter in 2026 and rewriting our code to better position ourselves four or five years down the line. We were talking about making different executives or different managers or sub-managers in the company feel better and feel more included. We were talking about DEI. We weren't talking about our customers and their problems and how to build our product to better suit our customers and their problems.”

    2024-06-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Raising $126M Across 3 Rounds in Just 6 Months, Being the Youngest Founder of a Unicorn Company | But Everything Was Not as it Seemed: The Real Story of Vise: The Regrets, Mistakes and Mis-Hires with Vise's Samir Vasavada · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  47. “Yes, but it felt like the thing to do. Everyone was telling us that was the thing to do. Our mindset at the time was all of these people are so much smarter than we are, they have so much experience. We are going to do what they say to do because it feels like that's the right thing to do.”

    2024-06-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Raising $126M Across 3 Rounds in Just 6 Months, Being the Youngest Founder of a Unicorn Company | But Everything Was Not as it Seemed: The Real Story of Vise: The Regrets, Mistakes and Mis-Hires with Vise's Samir Vasavada · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  48. “Other venture capitalists and founders, people in the Silicon Valley ecosystem. It felt like the thing to do. So you bring on an executive recruiter, the executive recruiter puts 20 candidates in front of you. They say, hey, all of these 20 candidates have 25 offers. They've got more offers than they know what to do with. You need to sell, you can't even be thinking about interviewing. You need to be selling. And then if you get this person, you'll be super lucky and great. We did this like five, six, seven times over with the executive team that fully turned over in like 12 months. And it was all people from big tech, all people that ran big orgs at companies like Dropbox, at companies like Trip Actions, at companies that were Twitter, Meta, places like that. And they run hundred, two hundred, three hundred person orgs. We didn't even interview them. We were just in cell mode the whole time. We got our investors in cell mode. We were just trying to convince them to join. It was such a hot market.”

    2024-06-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Raising $126M Across 3 Rounds in Just 6 Months, Being the Youngest Founder of a Unicorn Company | But Everything Was Not as it Seemed: The Real Story of Vise: The Regrets, Mistakes and Mis-Hires with Vise's Samir Vasavada · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  49. “What did you get One, every founder early on, especially as you raise all this money and you start to scale, it's like, I need to scale. Okay, like who do I need to take who do I need to involve when I scale? And I think all the investors are like, okay, well, you guys are young. You guys need senior executives. And senior executives will give you the leverage to be able to grow your team, to be able to manage more effectively. Those senior executives have usually run a big team before and they've come from a big company. We recruited a lot of senior executives at one. They didn't understand the financial advisor.”

    2024-06-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Raising $126M Across 3 Rounds in Just 6 Months, Being the Youngest Founder of a Unicorn Company | But Everything Was Not as it Seemed: The Real Story of Vise: The Regrets, Mistakes and Mis-Hires with Vise's Samir Vasavada · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  50. “It was first re-underwriting our culture, and I think building a company in the pandemic adds a complete new level of challenges because you are building a company in an all-remote environment. To be frank, I don't think startups should be run remotely. You can't build culture when people are all on Zoom all day. Like you build culture at those water cooler moments and in the team and it felt like our entire culture was off. The second was we just recruited a lot of people that were mercenaries. They weren't missionaries.”

    2024-06-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Raising $126M Across 3 Rounds in Just 6 Months, Being the Youngest Founder of a Unicorn Company | But Everything Was Not as it Seemed: The Real Story of Vise: The Regrets, Mistakes and Mis-Hires with Vise's Samir Vasavada · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source