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Samir Vasavada

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74
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2024-06-28
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2024-06-28
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  1. “a company to reaccount for it, and I ended up being right because when before the market really took a turn, we were one of the first companies to do a major reset. And it was more painful because other companies weren't doing it, but it ended up positioning ourselves so significantly better given that we had done it.”

    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 seeing all the other founders, this wasn't like a unique to me thing. I hung out with a bunch of other founders that were also youngish that built deca corns or billion dollar businesses, so to speak, overnight. I saw the way they acted and, you know, the way they behaved. And I was just like, okay, like this just doesn't really make a ton of sense to me. Like there's something off. Like if something doesn't necessarily feel quite right, then you kind of re-underwrite your thinking, you re-underwrite your decision making. Like it didn't make sense in 2021 for there to be a new unicorn every couple of days, you know, reading in TechCrunch. Everything felt off. And I think because it felt off, I was like, okay, I think one this is going to come down and there's going to be a deep major correction. And I think two, I don't like this feeling of feeling off. Like maybe I have to change my actions the way I'm thinking, the way we're spending our time as a...”

    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. “So I stayed relatively grounded in a sense like I don't drink, I don't do drugs, I was able to stay like I had a set of core principles that I fairly well adhered to and stuck to throughout my entire life that I think was important, you know, was maintained. I think the challenge was I really deeply valued money, like in being very frugal. You can't really take the Indian out of me not to be too politically incorrect. But I think that was a little lost and I had to relearn that. But it was definitely an experience. It was definitely a wild experience.”

    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. “Hundred percent. I was like the youngest person in history to have a billion dollar business, like at 20 years old. I think I just turned 20 when our company was valued at a billion dollars. Like every day would be a different billionaire or celebrity or someone hitting me up saying like I want to invest in your company. Like it was just a change. It was a change in power dynamic. It was definitely, it's not healthy. It's like a child star phenomenon. It's like not healthy for anyone to go through 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

  5. “the boats, they're focused on a stable career and growing within an organization and like assessing you alongside Google when you're really like the seed series A stage company, you're not Google and there's going to be a lot of ups and downs and things that need to be figured out that a true billion dollar company wouldn't have to figure out.”

    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. “Growth though is unrealistic. VCs have built this ethos that if it doesn't get big fast, it's never going to get big. And the problem with that was, and we weren't getting big pretty fast, but to grow into a billion dollar valuation in 18 months from being our founders funded around it like four million, it's just like not possible. It is unrealistic, especially in a market like ours where it is just a slow to change market. But billion dollar businesses aren't built overnight, right? And the bigger problem is that if a billion dollar business is built overnight, it means someone else can go build that same billion dollar business overnight and you don't actually have a moat. So the expectations accreated for us were a bad thing. I think the type of people you recruit when they see that you're a billion dollar business aren't focused on, we have a value advised called burn the boats. They're not focused on burns.”

    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. “Yeah, I mean, I guess to a certain extent you can blame the investors, but at the end of the day, like I'm the one as the founder who made the decision. So I have to take ownership and accountability for it. I think I learned a lot in the process.”

    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. “On how to build, you have to deal with a whole myriad of different things with more people versus having a strong density of really, really smart people that are all problem solving and helping you get to that next incremental milestone as opposed to dramatically scaling your organization for the sale of scapes, the sake of scaling your organization.”

    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 mean, specifically around spending, like we hired a lot of people. I remember, again, this is Tedellian's credit, but I called Dellian one day. We had lost like AWS, we'd overpaid AWS by $4,000. And I'm like, Dellian, do you know anyone at AWS? You can get us a refund for this $4,000. And he's like, dude, we gave you a seed round. So you don't have to worry about these things. Just lose the $4,000. Focus on growing really fast. And we're like, okay, like I guess money doesn't really matter. We're going to just focus on growing really fast. I think we learn the wrong lesson in that. And I think money does really matter. And being financially disciplined really, really matters. And I think even more importantly than that, when you hire, when you lose that discipline and you hire all of these people, like we had gone from six people to 100 people overnight, basically, and 100 people don't actually make your business move faster. It actually slows you down. You have to deal with HR problems. You have to deal with all kinds of different perspectives.”

    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. “And I also regret raising it all from the same firm to some of the points. I love Sequoia. I think they're great, but you want multiple voices in the boardroom. And I think the challenge is when you have one investor that owns 30% of the company has piled in close to 50 million bucks, then you're going to have that investor's perspective as the predominant perspective versus having some healthy debate, which I think is really important. And I think too, the challenges. So we raised something like $120, $130 million in an 18-month period. I think we went from a seed stage company to unicorn. It was probably like one of the fastest examples at the time in history of that having happened. And that was a bad thing. And the reason why that was a bad thing is because one, when you have a lot of capital, you lose discipline, right? You don't have this existential threat of dying in six months. You lose a little bit more discipline. I think we grew up.”

    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. “This is all 2020. So this is after, this is venture deals are not getting done right now. The world shuts down. We were the last investment at Sequoia before everything shut down for the pandemic, like day before the global shutdown happened. I think for both Sequoia and I and Runic, we saw that this thesis was starting to pan out. We were getting early customer feedback. It was coming in extremely positive. We were getting a lot of positive reception. It just started to seem like all of these dynamics that we thought were going to be true started to play out and start to be true, which gave them more conviction. And then for us, we also realized, okay, if we're actually going to build this and scale this, we need a lot of capital. At least we at the time we thought we needed a lot of capital.”

    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. “I think as we started to build, they tripled down a short period of time, so the seed extension was done in October of 2019. Our A was done in March and our B was done in May.”

    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. “Tripled down. Tripled down. Which I don't know if it happened before in Sequoia. Maybe it had, I think in Stripe and a few other instances.”

    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. “Future advisor, which is one of the early robo advisors at the time, which got acquired for a couple hundred million bucks by BlackRock, and the founder of Future Advisor was an investor of ours. And he called the Sequoia Partnership separately and was like, hey, if I were to have kept building future advisor, Vises taking the direction that we could have never gotten to, and having that kind of piece of credibility was really helpful going into the investment process. So they decided to kind of preempt us on a seat extension round. And we're like, oh, I guess we'll take it. Why not? Doesn't hurt.”

    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. “Sequoia, because we have Founders Fund, and we're just going to keep building our business. So we're sitting at the pretzel station at the Sequoia office. Everyone's like rushing up to Rulaff and Mike Moritz and, you know, all these famous partners there, and we're just sitting at the pretzel station shopping on pretzels. And this guy who looks really young walks up to us and he's like, what are you two schmucks doing? Like, how old are you guys? Like, who are you? And we start talking about VIS and what we're building. And he's like, look, it's fascinating because I was at this retreat with the Collison brothers a couple weeks ago and they were talking about like a truth that the mass doesn't necessarily believe to be true, but they believe to be true. And it was that financial advisors will continue to exist and that the relationship is really important. So like this actually makes a lot of sense. I get the story you guys are going after. So then we pitch at disrupt and he's like, you guys should come in and like meet the partnership and talk about what you're doing. And they'd actually made an investment in a company called”

    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. “This was actually kind of funny. So we'd already gotten founders fund and we're like, well, we're just going to build this business. We don't need to raise more money. This is not really that important to us. We don't need more VCs. We stopped talking to VCs. We're just like, we're going to build this business. But I had seen the show Silicon Valley as a kid. And I was like, I want to do startup battlefield. And like Founder's Fun was like, this is like a way to time. What are you guys doing? Like, focus on your business. And I'm like, no, I really want to do the startup battlefield thing. I think it'll be fun. So I apply for startup battlefield. I get into startup battlefield and to, you know, do the pitch at TechCrunch Disrupt. And the night before the pitch, they're having a happy hour at Sequoi Capitol's office. And I'm like, I don't really know if I'm going to go or not, but my co-founder and I were paying ourselves like 20 grand a year and we were looking for free food anywhere we could find it and there was free food at this happy hour and it was like a 10 minute walk from our house so we're like okay we'll go to this happy hour we'll eat some free food we don't really need to talk 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

  17. “It's interesting because all the investors that ended up investing in VIS were all the great investors. Like, I don't think we have any crappy investors on our cap table. And all the crappy investors, for some reason past. Maybe they saw something that the crappy investors didn't see, but for the most part, they asked better questions. They understood things faster. But I think they were able to pattern match more effectively from successes they had seen and successes they had been a part of to what we were doing in a way where a crappy investor might not have been able to as effectively pattern match.”

    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. “Yeah, it was super important having them introduce us to people. I didn't know the power of a warm introduction until after that. It helped us get Founders Fund who ended up leading that seed round and Keith being one of his first investments at Founders Fund, partially through a warm introduction. I don't think Keith would have responded to a cold message. And I think that that like, aha, click of someone in Silicon Valley actually believes in this was a really helpful motivator for us.”

    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. “For me, because I had actually dropped out of high school to build this business and moved to the Bay Area. I was living in the tenderloin, trying to bootstrap it to then raise capital. My co-founder decides to go to UPenn. And at UPenn, I'm like, well, if he doesn't drop out of UPenn, then I don't know how I'm going to grow this business. I don't know how we're going to make this thing work. He's like, well, in order for us to do it, we need to raise some capital. And we'd call it all these investors and cold emailed a ton of people and no one wanted to give us money. They're like, what business do you kids have building wealth management software? And the first investors that actually said yes were these guys Nat Turner and Zach Weinberg who started a company called Flatiron Health and sold it for a bunch of money to Roche and they actually went to Penn and they're like look we had a similar story to you guys they actually did complete Penn but that 100k investment which you know looking back at the small investment but like that was the reason why we were able to keep going”

    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. “That's actually funny. So I think there's two stories here. I think the first is our team early on, we didn't have that much money. We were consulting with these financial institutions, which is how we discovered the need, the problem to deliver personalized portfolio solutions in an automated way to a financial advisor. We're actually consulting with these big financial institutions on AI, but we didn't have like a ton of money to actually pay people to build us the product. So outside of us doing it ourselves, we found a team of engineers, mostly just through scraping angelist and cold emailing people and reaching out to people on LinkedIn. Like if you go through my LinkedIn in 2014, 2015, 2016, it's just like hundreds of cold messages. We got the first two engineers to say, oh, yeah, I'll work on this on equity nights and weekends. That was the first big yes. And then our second big yes was actually, so my co-founder decided to go to college, which was a real challenge.”

    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. “100%. I think it's just having that motivation, like that passion motivation that's developed early. So I think in our case it was building apps, but even before that, I was like obsessed with garage sales. Like I would go to my grandma's house and find all of her junk and like try and sell it at garage sales. And like that was the thing I did when I was like single digit age.”

    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. “By the time we were 14, which felt like a ton of money. And my co-founder got a research opportunity with a prestigious university in AI research because he was a longtime math researcher. He was doing math research in, I think it was graph theory, and it translated quite well over to AI research. And we realized, well, what if we could use AI to build apps? What if any small business could type in their app idea in our system and we could use AI to build an app? And that was our first real startup idea. The challenge was the team we got to work with us was the wrong team, was people we met on the internet. We blew all the money we built making apps for small businesses on trying to fund the startup. And the technical challenge was way harder than we could have ever imagined it to be. Unfortunately, that was our first failure, but it opened us up to this idea of AI quite early on and got us all hyped on the idea of building a startup.”

    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 I think it's less the beginning of VIS and more the beginning of our entrepreneurial journey. I started my first startup at twelve. I was at the summer program at Northwestern and my parents are like, you cannot go to traditional summer camp. You must do college courses. So like sixth grade onwards, they sent me to this college summer program in Northwestern. And one year, I think it was summer of eighth grade, I met this kid, runic. And he was the kid across the hall for me and were like, I'm from Cleveland. He's from Detroit. We're so bored in the Midwest. Schools like pretty easy. And like the iOS programming language Schwift had kind of came out recently and it just started taking off. And we're like, let's build apps for small businesses. Let's learn how to code. Let's use Swift and let's build apps for any small business that wants an app. And that was kind of how we got our start to our entrepreneurial journey. We started with a game and then we built an app for a chain of car washes. We built an app for a medical conference, all kinds of different apps. We made like 30 grids.”

    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. “Yes, a hundred percent. 99% of the advice is bad advice, and then the rest of the advice is contradictory to each other. To be frank, I don't think startups should be run remotely.”

    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