YouSaid · the spoken record

Sarah Kunst

lines on the record: 34
first: 2020-05-15
most recent: 2020-05-15
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“She's thinking about building a tech platform around it, consumer facing products, just her grasp of the space was just so incredible that I knew I had to invest. And it was exciting because after I invested, I told her, I was like, look, I don't know what you're doing next, but I'm in. She's like, do you want to know what it is? I was like, nope, I'm in. And so, you know, I was the first check in. And then after me, people like precursor invested, people like Emerson Collective, which is Lorraine Powell Jobs family office. But it's exciting to say, yeah, like I saw that in this person and I knew exactly what she's capable of. And welcome, Lorraine Powell Jobs. I'm glad you see that too.”
2020-05-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Sarah Kunst on Why There Is Plenty Of Investor Money Still Available, The Megan Markle Effect and How It Impacts Hiring and Talent & Whether GP Commits Prevent Diversity and Inclusion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It forward so my entrepreneur in residence, who's also one of my scouts, Julia Collins, is an amazing entrepreneur, and she was a co-founder at Zoom, the Pizza Delivery Company, and the robotics company. But I was mainly excited about the pizza. And, you know, she left there about a year and a half ago because she really, really, really wanted to build something around climate. So Planet Forward is an amazing regenerative agriculture company. They haven't announced a lot of what they're doing, so I won't talk about it too much. But in getting to know her over the years and her vision and her understanding of what it'll take to build a profitable category defining company that also can fundamentally just make it so much easier as an individual human in the world who's not perfect and who's not Mother Teresa to be responsible about our consumption and help the climate, particularly with regenerative agriculture, is just one of the most inspiring things I've ever seen. And the way”
2020-05-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Sarah Kunst on Why There Is Plenty Of Investor Money Still Available, The Megan Markle Effect and How It Impacts Hiring and Talent & Whether GP Commits Prevent Diversity and Inclusion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Quite wrapped their head around it and they just want meeting after meeting after meeting. If the meetings are interesting, if they're inviting you on their yacht and you like yachts, if they are fun and cool and interesting in introducing to other people, great, but if they're just sort of doing your $100 round trip Uber from San Francisco down to Menlo Park every two months and you sit there with them for an hour and they move the meeting five times and then you talk about the same things and then they tell you to come back two months later at some point even though it's a big name person and it seems like a big check, you have to value your time and prioritize them. And so I think the biggest thing, and I think this is true for fund managers and for founders, for anybody raising money is just because somebody has money on the other end of a transaction doesn't mean that your time isn't valuable and that they're the only person in the world you should be focusing on.”
2020-05-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Sarah Kunst on Why There Is Plenty Of Investor Money Still Available, The Megan Markle Effect and How It Impacts Hiring and Talent & Whether GP Commits Prevent Diversity and Inclusion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My God, don't waste time on anyone. It's like angel investing, right? Like, I love coffee checks. I teach sometimes a little seminar called So You Want to Angel Invest, primarily for women, but I'll do it sometimes. And it's to help people understand how to get into angel investing. And the thing I tell people is you want to be an easy check. And easy doesn't mean you're stupid. It doesn't mean that you write checks for everybody, but it means that you're not trying to take 10 meetings to write a $25,000 check. And I think there's something similar in the LP world, particularly for microfund managers. There's very little track record to judge. However, the person got on your radar in the first place, you probably immediately did a little bit of digging on them and you should diligence them. You should talk to them. You should make sure that they seem smart and that they seem like they're doing or understand how to do what they say they're going to do. So when it comes to fundraising, if you're raising a microfund, right and someone's giving you a relatively small check and they are not your anchor and they can't”
2020-05-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Sarah Kunst on Why There Is Plenty Of Investor Money Still Available, The Megan Markle Effect and How It Impacts Hiring and Talent & Whether GP Commits Prevent Diversity and Inclusion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so people get that. I just think that if you're a fund manager thinking about starting a fund and you're listening to this, you just have to be authentic and have that conversation. What I think doesn't work is if you try to stonewall investors and tell them my LP commit is to be determined like you're counting your millions like Scrooge McDuck and can't decide exactly how much to allocate. No, just tell him. I have no money. Here's why. And here's what I'm going to do about it in the fund. And any LP who's a good fit for you will say, okay.”
2020-05-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Sarah Kunst on Why There Is Plenty Of Investor Money Still Available, The Megan Markle Effect and How It Impacts Hiring and Talent & Whether GP Commits Prevent Diversity and Inclusion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But that's what people want, though, right? Like they want to understand you, they want authenticity, they want to feel like they can trust you, right? Fund managers like you and I are taking so much more risk. Like we are relatively hireable people, right? We could go and have a job inside of like a Google or a Facebook or whatever, make a quarter million, half a million a year, whatever. That would be a lot less risk, right? And so when I see I have one friend who's an LP and my fund and he's lovely, but he invested in my fund. He pulled money from his trust and put it into my fund. He also runs a fund. So when people talk to me about my GP commit, I'm like, I'm forsaking any sort of normal life to run a fund and run all over the world and try to raise money and to like operate on the shoestring budget. Do you really think that my very lovely friend who just moved money from a trust into his fund for his GP commit, do you think he's more committed than I am? And everybody, including him, is like, well, no, obviously you're the one who's putting a lot more skin in the game. Like, yeah, thanks.”
2020-05-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Sarah Kunst on Why There Is Plenty Of Investor Money Still Available, The Megan Markle Effect and How It Impacts Hiring and Talent & Whether GP Commits Prevent Diversity and Inclusion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Back, you're going to sort of load more into your GP commit to maybe smooth that over. I think if you've taken a decent amount of money off the table and you're still unwilling to put a lot of money into your fund, then it”
2020-05-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Sarah Kunst on Why There Is Plenty Of Investor Money Still Available, The Megan Markle Effect and How It Impacts Hiring and Talent & Whether GP Commits Prevent Diversity and Inclusion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Makes sense. I'm like, okay, great. And no one's ever pushed me on an LP commit, right? I think there's a middle ground, which is a little bit different than the situation I'm in, which is when you have some money, but you want to use it for other things, right? So if you have a few million dollars in the bank, which is a ton of money, but at the same time in the venture and tech world, it's not a ton of money, but you also have elderly parents who need your support because they're going to be in a nursing home and you have kids who have to go to school and you have a house with a mortgage because you live in an expensive area. Like that, I think, is probably where that commit conversation gets a little bit trickier. But there's so many problems in venture. I haven't found for microfund managers that not having a ton of your own capital to put into your fund is a huge problem. I think you do have to assume that as soon as you start making money from your fund, meaning like as soon as there's an exit that there's going to be an assumption that like over your first three funds, whenever you start to get money.”
2020-05-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Sarah Kunst on Why There Is Plenty Of Investor Money Still Available, The Megan Markle Effect and How It Impacts Hiring and Talent & Whether GP Commits Prevent Diversity and Inclusion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I've found that investors who don't understand that are probably not going to invest in your fund. They might be a good fit later down the road, right? Like, because there's only really two buckets of investors who don't understand that. They either understand it, but that's just the way structurally they have to proceed. And that's probably like an endowment or a pension fund that has incredibly strict rules because they are managing real humans retirement accounts, right? And those ones are not going to be a fit for you really, really, really early on. And then the other bucket are just people who don't fundamentally understand that everyone in the world is not rich. And from my experience raising a fund, neither of those buckets are going to be a great use of your time. So what I do, right, when I hear somebody say that is I just know they're not a fit for me. That being said, almost every LP that I've ever talked to, I'm incredibly upfront about that. I'm like, look, yeah, I'm super broke. And they're like, okay.”
2020-05-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Sarah Kunst on Why There Is Plenty Of Investor Money Still Available, The Megan Markle Effect and How It Impacts Hiring and Talent & Whether GP Commits Prevent Diversity and Inclusion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Like to see more diversity in fund managers. And the reason for that is simple it drives better returns, and I'm an incredibly greedy person, and I want to make more money.”
2020-05-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Sarah Kunst on Why There Is Plenty Of Investor Money Still Available, The Megan Markle Effect and How It Impacts Hiring and Talent & Whether GP Commits Prevent Diversity and Inclusion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My favorite book is a book called Attached, which is about attachment styles, and it totally explains everything about every human you have to interact with, like work, personal life, family, friends, everything. You have to read attached.”
2020-05-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Sarah Kunst on Why There Is Plenty Of Investor Money Still Available, The Megan Markle Effect and How It Impacts Hiring and Talent & Whether GP Commits Prevent Diversity and Inclusion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Care and follow them, let them know how they've shaped your thinking, and then say, Look, if you have any free time, I would love to get to know you a bit better because I think that you are somebody that I would love to find a way to work with. And I think especially right now, there's a lot of people who are just like, great, I'll do a 20 minute call. Why not? Great. I hate my job. Great. I just got laid off. Great. I've secretly hated my business partner for 10 years. And I think this is a good sign from the universe that it's time to call it, right? Like, shoot your shot. Why not?”
2020-05-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Sarah Kunst on Why There Is Plenty Of Investor Money Still Available, The Megan Markle Effect and How It Impacts Hiring and Talent & Whether GP Commits Prevent Diversity and Inclusion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They seem amazing. I'm not saying Megan Markle said any of these things about Harry. So, Megan Markle, please don't sue me, but it's one of those things where on paper, it makes sense, but you figure you're never going to get a chance to do that because that's just not how the world works. Well, if there's one thing we've learned over the past month is that clearly none of us have any idea how the world works anymore. And so whatever sort of pie in the sky higher you've always dreamed about, shoot your shot, right? slide into somebody's DMs on Twitter or on LinkedIn or Instagram and send them a really concise hey I'm Sarah I'm the managing director of Clio Capital we're an early stage venture capital fund and I'm just so impressed with you I've followed your career for years I love when you you know and mention some obscure interview they did five years ago not their 20 minute VC that everyone hears right but something super random let them know that you really”
2020-05-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Sarah Kunst on Why There Is Plenty Of Investor Money Still Available, The Megan Markle Effect and How It Impacts Hiring and Talent & Whether GP Commits Prevent Diversity and Inclusion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Exactly, exactly. She meant to date you. There was a mix up. But before that, right? Like, I love suits and suits was great. And she's like, gorgeous and smart and interesting and whatever. But like a relatively small name actress, right? Certainly not like a massive, massive blockbuster, you know, not Beyonce, not J Lo, not whatever, right? But there was a shot, right? So if on paper, if you'd said, guess who Prince Harry is going to marry, you would have had to ask a lot of people to get somebody to say, I bet a TV actress who's based in Toronto, right? That was not anybody's obvious list, but she was able to get in front of him and was able to close it, right? And so the Megan Markaline right now in hiring is who's the person that not even you never thought you could get, but you would say, oh, I would love to work with XYZ, but obviously how would I even get in front of them? They must have so many other options. I can't imagine like I just know that we would connect, you know, I've seen so many things about them. I think.”
2020-05-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Sarah Kunst on Why There Is Plenty Of Investor Money Still Available, The Megan Markle Effect and How It Impacts Hiring and Talent & Whether GP Commits Prevent Diversity and Inclusion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, the way to think about it, and this is sort of the Megan Markle approach. So Megan Markle is wonderful. But before she started marrying a man that from your accent, I think you probably are familiar with.”
2020-05-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Sarah Kunst on Why There Is Plenty Of Investor Money Still Available, The Megan Markle Effect and How It Impacts Hiring and Talent & Whether GP Commits Prevent Diversity and Inclusion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Still get done. And I think if you think of it as looking at your money in the bank and saying, How long do we have? And then assuming that in two years for startups that we will be relatively close to back to normal 24 months from now, if you have 12 months of runway in the bank and that means that if you go out and raise another 12 months of runway, right, or even six months of runway and then stretch that 12 months to 18, you're going to be pretty solid. So all of a sudden the idea of I don't want to raise at a flat valuation or a little bit down.”
2020-05-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Sarah Kunst on Why There Is Plenty Of Investor Money Still Available, The Megan Markle Effect and How It Impacts Hiring and Talent & Whether GP Commits Prevent Diversity and Inclusion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We're a small fund, and so for me, reserve allocation isn't a huge part of the model. That being said, I've been spending a lot of time with family offices, particularly overseas via Zoom, of course. And there is dry powder that's very interested in series B, Series C, SPVs, and even buying secondaries if they're a little bit later. And so if you are a fund manager and you're thinking the people I normally go to for SPVs are executives, you know, at places like Uber and Lyft, and now they're in a world of heard of their own and their stock price is down and they don't know if they're going to have a job long term, it doesn't mean that there's no money anywhere. And if you have a solid company that's call it post series B probably and they're growing and they have some interesting numbers, I think that deals still get done. They might be a little bit slower and they might be a little bit less expensive. But I think that deals.”
2020-05-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Sarah Kunst on Why There Is Plenty Of Investor Money Still Available, The Megan Markle Effect and How It Impacts Hiring and Talent & Whether GP Commits Prevent Diversity and Inclusion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We're flat during this period. Candidly, I'm not going to blame the market. I'm probably going to think that you missed something when it comes to understanding growth.”
2020-05-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Sarah Kunst on Why There Is Plenty Of Investor Money Still Available, The Megan Markle Effect and How It Impacts Hiring and Talent & Whether GP Commits Prevent Diversity and Inclusion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To Zoom and Slack and social media tools, and I call it socializing distance tools, things so you can hang out with people remotely and feel closer to them. Dating apps are seeing surges, gaming companies are seeing surges. So those companies, it's insane. Like this is a literally once in a hundred year situation. So it's very unlikely you will ever be building a startup during a global pandemic again. And so there's a bunch to learn on the fly. But that being said, if you are in a company that isn't in sort of default hibernation mode and there's nothing you can do about it, this is an amazing time to sort of run out there and run at the problem and make some real headway. And investors know, right? Like if Zoom's daily average users went from 10 million to 200 million, right, which is a 20x increase, I don't expect you to be at 200 million daily active users if you are a seed stage startup. But if you are a startup in a similar space and your daily active user”
2020-05-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Sarah Kunst on Why There Is Plenty Of Investor Money Still Available, The Megan Markle Effect and How It Impacts Hiring and Talent & Whether GP Commits Prevent Diversity and Inclusion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Want right now, right? I'm sure you saw the articles about the toilet paper companies and the bidet companies like a month ago and there was a run on toilet paper that all these companies all of a sudden had crazy sales, right? One of the bidet companies was doing a $500,000 a day in sales for a while during that companies, but I'm in companies and like Yumi, right, which is a baby food delivery company. The last thing like you and I can be like, I guess all else fails. I'll live off of wine and Doritos, right? Babies, I've heard, I don't have any, don't want to live off wine and Doritos. So if you have a baby, you have to make sure your baby has food, right? You can't just assume you'll stop by the store and grab something. So companies like that, companies that are selling towels and sheets and obviously face masks and all of these companies that are selling things that we need right now. Like look at Zoom, right? And that's obviously a public company, but there's private market analysts.”
2020-05-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Sarah Kunst on Why There Is Plenty Of Investor Money Still Available, The Megan Markle Effect and How It Impacts Hiring and Talent & Whether GP Commits Prevent Diversity and Inclusion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think there's two different categories right now. There are categories where you're just sort of screwed and that's terrible. And it doesn't mean you're going to go out of business, but you're just sort of screwed. And companies in that category, if you're selling high heels and party dresses right now, I don't know who wants to buy those, right? Because nobody's dressing up right now, right? If you're selling things that are inherently to be used outside of the home, right? If you sell travel neck pillows, no one's traveling, right? So those companies, I think the thing they have to do right now is just live to survive another day. They almost have to hibernate because for a lot of them, if there's not an obvious pivot, then they're just going to have to wait it out and have faith that if they can wait it out, the economy will recover and people will want to buy what they're selling again. Maybe even in an accelerated pace to make up for lost time. But there's a whole other category of companies that they have something people.”
2020-05-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Sarah Kunst on Why There Is Plenty Of Investor Money Still Available, The Megan Markle Effect and How It Impacts Hiring and Talent & Whether GP Commits Prevent Diversity and Inclusion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, much has been made, right, of Sequoia's infamous memos and it's always fun to call the bottom because eventually you'll be right and you'll be re-rumbered for that. Fun's not maybe the right word, but it's always nice to be known as the person who called the bottom. And I certainly think that's true, that when you're sort of in high cotton, it's easy to say life is perfect. And then as Warren Buffett says, the tide goes out and you see who's swimming naked. But I do think that for a lot of founders showing their resilience, their integrity, their grit, that's been something that's always happened. And so the narrative of like, oh, it's been so”
2020-05-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Sarah Kunst on Why There Is Plenty Of Investor Money Still Available, The Megan Markle Effect and How It Impacts Hiring and Talent & Whether GP Commits Prevent Diversity and Inclusion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Tell me, hey, Sarah, I'm raising out a $12 million valuation, and benchmark is in, and my best friend is part of the Facebook family or Google family or whatever, and they're putting money in as well. Okay, great. I may or may not invest. It might feel a little bit rich for my taste, but I believe that you have a path. If you sort of come out of nowhere and you haven't raised any money yet, I think a slightly high valuation is something that someone else should give you, not something you should decide for yourself, if that makes sense. Because if somebody else sets the price, then you know they're willing to pay it and likely others are as well. If you set the price, you have no idea if that price is going to be attractive to a buyer, right? It to an investor, and you might find out too late that everybody loves your deal, but they feel like it's too expensive. So they all pass and which investors pass, they tend not to come back around and do it.”
2020-05-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Sarah Kunst on Why There Is Plenty Of Investor Money Still Available, The Megan Markle Effect and How It Impacts Hiring and Talent & Whether GP Commits Prevent Diversity and Inclusion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Little and your parents are trying to explain compounding interest to you to like convince you to keep your money in the bank. It's the same thing, but in reverse. So that lack of equity up front is not going to bother you on day one because you're just excited you got to check. It's likely to be a reason when you're thinking about, do I want to raise a series B and keep slogging for another six years, three years in, or do I want to take this quick aqua hire? And like we were talking about earlier, right? You sell to Google and you have free salad for life and they probably, you know, pay for your peloton, right? So those questions are what I want to incentivize founders for. And so to me, anything much lower than $5 million in the US for even a very early round, it's a little bit hard for me to understand and get excited about unless it's an accelerator, which is a very different way of giving away equity because I worry that you're not going to have enough equity and runway long term to be incentivized to run your company and then anything much above 10, I start to get concerned, right? If you”
2020-05-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Sarah Kunst on Why There Is Plenty Of Investor Money Still Available, The Megan Markle Effect and How It Impacts Hiring and Talent & Whether GP Commits Prevent Diversity and Inclusion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Six months, ten months, a year later, they're going to have to raise another $500,000 or a million at like a five or seven valuation and great, now another relatively large chunk of the company's gone. So by the time they're post-Series A, they're going to be pretty diluted, right? And that's if they only have two co-founders. So you keep doing that math assuming they have three or four. And all of a sudden, three years in when they're in that sort of brow of sorrow that every startup goes through, when you're like, I don't know how I got here, I don't know how I'm going to get out. I hate everything. I wish a meteor would hit me so I don't have to keep running the stupid company, right? Everybody has that. And then you look on paper and you go, wait, we could sell for a billion dollars. And sure, I'm going to be rich, but like if you don't own a lot of your company, right? If you get diluted down and down and down, right? Because if you're a series A and you assume you're still going to have to raise B through D before you can exit and you're going to just keep diluting yourself, diluting yourself, diluting yourself, that compounding, right? It's like when you're”
2020-05-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Sarah Kunst on Why There Is Plenty Of Investor Money Still Available, The Megan Markle Effect and How It Impacts Hiring and Talent & Whether GP Commits Prevent Diversity and Inclusion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I invest in precede, right? So I invest in friends and family. When you're in an accelerator, I'm happy to be the first check-in. If you have a bunch of other funds, I might still invest, but it's less likely that that would be a fit for me. So I go incredibly early. And the pricing questions are a lot different really early because I have one goal for you. It's the same goal you have for you, which is for you to build a wildly successful business. But there's two different things that I have my eye on for founders, which is one, I don't want them to be priced so high that other investors aren't going to want to invest. And I don't want them to be priced so low that they sell so much of the company that they're not going to be excited to keep building it two years from now. And so what that tends to look like when you think about it, assume a company has, we'll call it two founders. So day one of the company, they have a 50-50 split of that equity. If they raise a half a million dollars out of two million valuation, they've given away 25% of the company before they've done anything.”
2020-05-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Sarah Kunst on Why There Is Plenty Of Investor Money Still Available, The Megan Markle Effect and How It Impacts Hiring and Talent & Whether GP Commits Prevent Diversity and Inclusion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Y combinator company post demo day, three demo days ago. So it would have been about a year and a half ago. And you were paying 15 million valuation on a company that just launched and only had a tiny bit of revenue. And now six months from now, you can invest in a similar company, maybe at an $8 million cap or valuation. Fast forward five, ten years when they exit, who's going to make more money? Two companies that could have very similar trajectories have very similar exits if you got into one and it was cheaper and then it goes on through the economic cycles to do just as well as the other one that's real money in your pocket and so some of it is just sort of money ball it's the simplest thing in investing right buy low sell high and because of market forces for the past couple years it's been buy high and hope you can sell higher and i think that's going to change at least a little bit right now”
2020-05-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Sarah Kunst on Why There Is Plenty Of Investor Money Still Available, The Megan Markle Effect and How It Impacts Hiring and Talent & Whether GP Commits Prevent Diversity and Inclusion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So look, if I had a crystal ball, I would buy lotto tickets and I would not be a VC. I would just be an angel investor, right? So the short answer is who knows? The longer answer, right, if you want to extrapolate from history, is that it is incredibly hard to make a lot of money when things are expensive, right? So if you buy a house, I live in California and California is a living example of this, right? If you go and buy a house in a fancy neighborhood like Pacific Heights now in San Francisco, you're going to be paying multi-million dollars, right? If you bought that same house in the 80s, even adjusted for inflation, you probably paid 25% of the price, right? And so when you sell it, so two houses right next to each other could be on sale at the same time in five years, one person inherently is going to make a lot more money than the other one, even if the sale prices are similar. And it's similar when it comes to investing. So if you invested in a”
2020-05-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Sarah Kunst on Why There Is Plenty Of Investor Money Still Available, The Megan Markle Effect and How It Impacts Hiring and Talent & Whether GP Commits Prevent Diversity and Inclusion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so there is an end to this, and there's a relatively finite end to this, and this being sort of sheltering in place and social distancing and all of that. And when that is over, these 2018, 2019, and 2020 funds, places like General Catalyst are still raising multibillion dollar funds that they're announcing now, they're still going to be investing out for the next one, two, three years, depending on when they started. And so obviously their biggest shift now is, one, everybody, I think emotionally is a little bit shell-shocked and it's a little bit bizarre to go on like business as usual, right? So there's certainly the emotional component, but financially VCs are still getting paid. No VC has lost their paycheck over this, right? And they”
2020-05-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Sarah Kunst on Why There Is Plenty Of Investor Money Still Available, The Megan Markle Effect and How It Impacts Hiring and Talent & Whether GP Commits Prevent Diversity and Inclusion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Every VC, and it's very different for angel investors, they're investing off their own balance sheet, but for VCs, they're one of the only places right now that isn't going to see a huge reduction in their amount of money. They will struggle likely, we will all struggle likely in the coming year or two raise more money. But the money they have now, and the way to think about it is investors usually invest for at least three years after they close a fund. So a 2018 vintage year fund is investing through 2021. And a 2019 fund of which there were many very large ones, right? is going to invest through 2022, which pandemics last a year, right? And pandemics are something everybody thinks that Bill Gates is a psychic. No, Bill Gates just does a really good job of reading because he has lots and lots and lots of free time because that is what money buys you. So there's a pandemic roughly every hundred years. It lasts for about a year to a year and a half as it spreads through countries, the globe, and eventually everybody gets hurt immunity, right?”
2020-05-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Sarah Kunst on Why There Is Plenty Of Investor Money Still Available, The Megan Markle Effect and How It Impacts Hiring and Talent & Whether GP Commits Prevent Diversity and Inclusion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Thing to keep in mind, right? There's a book that I love, although it's not exactly the most exciting reading, but it's incredibly, incredibly informative called Venture Deals. And if you haven't read that book and you want to kind of understand what's going on in a venture capitalist mind, it's a great book to read because it really just talks about the economics. So the thing to keep in mind is that venture capital funds are sort of a complete black box of capital to our investors. We have to work probably harder than any other asset class to raise our money. But once we raise it, our investors can't come to us like they could do a hedge fund or to the public markets and say, hey, I'm down 30 in my other stuff. I got to take money out, right? They give us the money and we have the money. We do capital calls. It's incredibly, incredibly rare, even during the 2008 financial crisis that investors refuse to allocate to their venture funds unless they have actually gone bankrupt themselves, right? So your investors, your VC,”
2020-05-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Sarah Kunst on Why There Is Plenty Of Investor Money Still Available, The Megan Markle Effect and How It Impacts Hiring and Talent & Whether GP Commits Prevent Diversity and Inclusion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Amazing interesting experience, but ultimately that ran out of money. And as I was winding it down, I was also a scout for Sequoia. I was a limited partner at Michigan State University where I went to undergrad. And so I was just seeing all these different interesting opportunities. And I was sort of thinking I would go back into a bigger venture fund. But then I really got a lot of conviction around this idea that I was seeing all these scout investors across a bunch of different funds in the vast, vast, vast majority were men. And so decided to launch Clio Capital to do two things. One, to do my direct investing, and then two, to put a bunch of amazing female founders into business as scout investors.”
2020-05-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Sarah Kunst on Why There Is Plenty Of Investor Money Still Available, The Megan Markle Effect and How It Impacts Hiring and Talent & Whether GP Commits Prevent Diversity and Inclusion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of introduction into that world, and then I ended up working for a Y combinator backed startup in Silicon Valley. And when that, we sunsetted, and when that happened, I was talking to investors saying, what do we do? And a very nice investor told me, look, the company's definitely run out of money. It's definitely going to shut down. But you seem smart, do you want a job and venture? And I said, yes, I mean, I want a job, period. So I ended up at Moore David Alventures and was there. And it was a super interesting experience. They were a massive sandhill road fund, $1.7 billion under management, but like a lot of the firms in the 2007-2008 vintage, they'd had a really hard time coming through the financial crisis. And so they ended up drastically kind of reformulating, relaunched his wildcat. And there was quite the team shake up when that happened. So I ended up leaving and starting a startup. And so started Pro Day, which was a fitness and sports company and ran that for almost three years, the LA Dodgers were investors.”
2020-05-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Sarah Kunst on Why There Is Plenty Of Investor Money Still Available, The Megan Markle Effect and How It Impacts Hiring and Talent & Whether GP Commits Prevent Diversity and Inclusion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so I'm from Michigan. I went to Michigan State in college and I ended up working for Apple as a campus rep and that was sort of my first glimpse into Silicon Valley and my first opportunity to start to meet people who would go on to work in the tech world at places like Facebook. And so after college took a totally different direction, moved to New York, was working in marketing at Chanel. It was 2008. So much like now I was sitting at my desk one day and said, you know, who's Bernie Madoff? And then the entire world fell apart. within a year, a little after a little bit over a year there, I ended up in technology because no big company was hiring but startups were. And so I worked for the Winklevoss twins actually at an early media startup that Cameron Winklevoss was a founder of. And so got to know a lot of people in the New York Tech world, got to hear about crypto incredibly early, which I bought a little bit. Not enough. I held it for a little while, not nearly long enough, but it was a super interesting.”
2020-05-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Sarah Kunst on Why There Is Plenty Of Investor Money Still Available, The Megan Markle Effect and How It Impacts Hiring and Talent & Whether GP Commits Prevent Diversity and Inclusion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source