YouSaid · the spoken record

Sean O'Sullivan

lines on the record: 59
first: 2022-01-17
most recent: 2022-01-17
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“I've learned that people's confidence And actually competence is aided with a lot of confidence, for sure, but 20% of chancers and you got to just power through the falsehoods that they're willing to put out there. Confidence is also used as con man is confidence man, obviously. So there's a lot of problems with confidence being used as a metric for a good entrepreneur. I much prefer confidence over confidence.”
2022-01-17 · Capital Allocators · Sean O'Sullivan – Start-up Development at SOSV, Venture is Eating the Investment World 3 (Capital Allocators, EP.231) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And if you have a base instinct or base intention, you're going to attack pretty base people with a lack of commitment to the business and easy for them to jump ship to the next opportunity that comes along. It's just the wrong way to build a business.”
2022-01-17 · Capital Allocators · Sean O'Sullivan – Start-up Development at SOSV, Venture is Eating the Investment World 3 (Capital Allocators, EP.231) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“After my first company, I started a company when somebody came to me, it was the beginning of the internet era and they said, oh, let's start a company. We can make a lot of money really fast and we can sell it. So starting a company to make money rather than starting a company to make a difference is a massive fault. I should have had better self-control to realize and sit back and think about it. Whenever you start a company, it's like a seven-year commitment. If it's going to be successful anyway, and are you really in it just to make money for the next seven years? Whenever you start anything, you're surrounding yourself with people that have similar intentions. And so I was surrounding myself with others that also sort of had that base intention and that permeated the atmosphere. The company was an important company. Eventually, that's where I coined the term cloud computing, but it didn't end up succeeding in the end. I lost millions of my own money and VCs that came in lost money as well. The thing that I guess I learned is that you attract people with similar intentions.”
2022-01-17 · Capital Allocators · Sean O'Sullivan – Start-up Development at SOSV, Venture is Eating the Investment World 3 (Capital Allocators, EP.231) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Stan France, and then Warren Bergaman would have been the other person who had a great impact. He was a senior vice president at General Electric. He was a graduate of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. And so when I started my first company and I made a presentation to this regional board of angels, he took a liking to what we were trying to do and he agreed to join our board. And he really took me under his wing. And he helped me understand a lot of things about time management and about working with customers. So he was one of the original mentors that really made a huge difference in the success of my first company.”
2022-01-17 · Capital Allocators · Sean O'Sullivan – Start-up Development at SOSV, Venture is Eating the Investment World 3 (Capital Allocators, EP.231) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If a founder was to spend the majority of the time trying to chase investment rather than improving their business, I think that is a crime. It's often, by the way, the same people who expect that every next round is going to be an up round, despite not meeting their objectives and their commitments that they've made to their investors”
2022-01-17 · Capital Allocators · Sean O'Sullivan – Start-up Development at SOSV, Venture is Eating the Investment World 3 (Capital Allocators, EP.231) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I hate finger pointers, people who are not willing to take responsibility for their own actions or always finding others to blame because I think the antithesis is people who are builders and creators is very easy to blame people who are actually creating things. The critics have an easy job. I would much rather be on the side of the builder and creator than the finger pointer type person.”
2022-01-17 · Capital Allocators · Sean O'Sullivan – Start-up Development at SOSV, Venture is Eating the Investment World 3 (Capital Allocators, EP.231) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Walking I walk five miles a day, at least I make calls or I'm doing some meditation or whatever while I'm doing it, but it's really important to clear my head and get out in the woods a little bit and just get grounded.”
2022-01-17 · Capital Allocators · Sean O'Sullivan – Start-up Development at SOSV, Venture is Eating the Investment World 3 (Capital Allocators, EP.231) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I am an avaricious reader, as I mentioned earlier, learning is a huge thing for me. So whether it's molecular biology or the physics of energy or whatever, I'm just really interested in learning all the time. I'm a duolingal user. I'm trying to improve my Chinese all the time.”
2022-01-17 · Capital Allocators · Sean O'Sullivan – Start-up Development at SOSV, Venture is Eating the Investment World 3 (Capital Allocators, EP.231) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, in Ireland, I was on a TV show called Dragon's Den, which is the equivalent of the US's Shark Tank. So I was on that show for a couple of years, and for some reason, people watch that show avariciously in Ireland. 40% of the televisions, when that show is running, which doesn't happen in the United States, you don't have a show where even 10% of the market turns it on. But it was like 40% of the population would turn that TV show on the night that it was airing. And I was one of the five judges on that. And as a result of even being a judge on that program, I was sort of drafted into writing the National Entrepreneurship Policy for the government of Ireland. And I created a movement called Open Ireland, which helped the technology industry and Irish society by allowing the free entry into the Irish population of any money that had an engineering degree from anywhere in the world. They could just basically get into Ireland and start.”
2022-01-17 · Capital Allocators · Sean O'Sullivan – Start-up Development at SOSV, Venture is Eating the Investment World 3 (Capital Allocators, EP.231) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So that's a value add that we create for the VC industry. And then for them, we're entirely dependent on them. We manage a billion dollars, but we are really, really small compared to most people. And we have a huge number of companies that we're putting out. So we can't be on the boards of every one of these companies. We are entirely dependent on having a very collaborative working relationship with the rest of the VC industry, at least those that work in the sectors that we produce companies for.”
2022-01-17 · Capital Allocators · Sean O'Sullivan – Start-up Development at SOSV, Venture is Eating the Investment World 3 (Capital Allocators, EP.231) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We're early, so I get seven different university research publications that are sent to me. You know, the alumni magazines, and they always talk about the innovations that are made at those universities, whatever, I find the interesting stories in there about some scientists doing something cool. I call them up occasionally, and our people do, call these people up and they say, do you have any postdocs that are really good and really want to actually make this happen in the world? And then we'll take it to market. We've started several companies that way. Most VCs don't do that. They're waiting for somebody to come in and show their PowerPoint presentation of what the traction numbers look like, et cetera. We're starting way earlier. And as a result, we're a helpful piece to the rest of the industry. We are taking ideas that are very early and giving credibility to them, actually. When we put our name behind a company in the life sciences area, you know that we've had numerous PhDs do all the due diligence on it. It's been dererisked.”
2022-01-17 · Capital Allocators · Sean O'Sullivan – Start-up Development at SOSV, Venture is Eating the Investment World 3 (Capital Allocators, EP.231) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We think in the end will ultimately help people. That's the job of a VC is to make those societal advancements that are traumatically beneficial for humanity and for our planet, for our planetary health, for our human health to make those changes possible.”
2022-01-17 · Capital Allocators · Sean O'Sullivan – Start-up Development at SOSV, Venture is Eating the Investment World 3 (Capital Allocators, EP.231) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, this is me showing the underpinnings of what we're looking for. This is not me talking about returns or anything. But my assumption is that if you can actually affect billions of people, that you'll find a business model that'll make that work, and that you'll find a way to bring that light into the world. And so that's what we're looking for. We're looking at these points of light, these incredibly bright founders that come to us all the time, and we're trying to unveil their brilliance and magnify it and then fund it and then help other people who also deeply believe in the changes that we're trying to make enable them to get involved, as Gandhi would say, be the change you want to see in the world. That's the underlying core of what we really do, honestly, and it goes beyond just allocating what portion of the money that we put to one startup development program or to another, but it is where we put our weight on the things that”
2022-01-17 · Capital Allocators · Sean O'Sullivan – Start-up Development at SOSV, Venture is Eating the Investment World 3 (Capital Allocators, EP.231) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Create a new model that makes the existing model obsolete. You can't fight by directly challenging the incumbent. You have to create a new model that makes the incumbent obsolete. So when I did the thing with maps, the incumbent was Rand McNally paper maps in cars or whatever. We made that completely obsolete. There's nobody that bothers to stop me as I'm walking down the sidewalk anymore because they know where they're going now. And it's a much better solution. We're always looking for models that make the existing model obsolete. We're always looking for how”
2022-01-17 · Capital Allocators · Sean O'Sullivan – Start-up Development at SOSV, Venture is Eating the Investment World 3 (Capital Allocators, EP.231) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And back in 2014, when we invested in a company that was saying we were going to make milk without cows, people thought we were crazy and they had good reason to think we were crazy. It was a long shot. And it's actually happening. When I started my first company putting street maps on computers, it was crazy. How are you going to get all the addresses? Who's going to do that? How are you going to get all the streets and put those maps into computers? How are you going to figure that out in all these different geographies around the world? Well, it turns out that it took us around seven years to get a million people to be users to type an address and see street maps, whether that be mostly corporate users or whatever. But it only took another 10 years for that million people to be a billion people. And it only took another two years beyond that for that billion people to be two billion people that use that technology and that capability. So you can't change the world by fighting the existing reality.”
2022-01-17 · Capital Allocators · Sean O'Sullivan – Start-up Development at SOSV, Venture is Eating the Investment World 3 (Capital Allocators, EP.231) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“and lowered cost of life as well. So when we look at things like the future of food, back in 2014, we said, okay, what if we were able to say a company came to us and they said, we're going to make milk without cows? We said, okay, that's a ridiculous idea. I like that idea. Let's look into that idea. And that was possible back then. And it was possible in gram quantities. But if you're going to make a world where you can make it available to everyone, then that means you're going to need to make that price better than cows can currently compete with. We see this obviously having lots of societal gain in terms of global warming in particular because of the methane generated by cows. A very, very bad contributor to climate change. So after six or seven years, the company Perfect Day is called, is now selling their ice creams in supermarkets all across the country. And they're hitting tens or hundreds of millions in revenues now.”
2022-01-17 · Capital Allocators · Sean O'Sullivan – Start-up Development at SOSV, Venture is Eating the Investment World 3 (Capital Allocators, EP.231) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The funny thing is, it's kind of a mix. There's a lot of impact investors in the world today, and I'm in this business for the impact that we create and the societal change that I think we need, and we have an obligation as venture capitalists to provide to society. That's also a big factor in what we choose to invest in. The responsibility that you have as a VC is taking something that has never been made available to the public before and actually making something. There's an expression the future is already here. It just hasn't been evenly distributed by the science fiction writer Bill Gibson. And that's really the job of the venture capitalist to see a future picket, back it, and then make sure that it's evenly distributed. You could say that the internet has loads and loads of problems with it. It does, but it is a spectacularly enabling force for billions of people in terms of knowledge, in terms of capabilities, and in terms of productivity.”
2022-01-17 · Capital Allocators · Sean O'Sullivan – Start-up Development at SOSV, Venture is Eating the Investment World 3 (Capital Allocators, EP.231) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Just look at the metrics. So in an SOSV fund, we're on SOSV4 is the fund we're deploying right now, it's a $277 million fund. We look at what is the megatrend that matters. We're investing for the long term. So we have to be thinking about what does this investment look like in 10 years. We're only working on things that we consider megatrends that are not the flash in a pan-style social media network for conservatives or something. We're just going for deep tech ventures where the societal trend is unstoppable, where the forces are unstoppable. And so when we look at the deployment of capital, we think, okay, the more we deploy through our accelerators, the better, but we also need to support those companies and be very active in the later stages. So we're looking to make sure that we have enough of a balance that we can be competitive with the top performing players in the VC industry.”
2022-01-17 · Capital Allocators · Sean O'Sullivan – Start-up Development at SOSV, Venture is Eating the Investment World 3 (Capital Allocators, EP.231) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But because we've been successful with that investment and other investments in the space, we decided to create more of a studio kind of thing with DLAB. And we're backing, say, six or ten companies a year that are in the blockchain space, particularly in financial control systems or fintech style innovations in blockchain.”
2022-01-17 · Capital Allocators · Sean O'Sullivan – Start-up Development at SOSV, Venture is Eating the Investment World 3 (Capital Allocators, EP.231) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Actually, we backed the leading Bitcoin futures trading company through our China Accelerator program. It was two Americans and a Brit that started a company called BitMex. They were working on Hong Kong. They went to a Chinese Accelerator program in Shanghai. They have done extraordinarily well. They've run into some tussles with the SEC more recently. But we're generating hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue within a few years after attending China Accelerator. So it was a huge success. We were the only venture company to have backed them. And then they became profitable very quickly after exiting our program. They were as profitable as Nasdaq was for a couple of years in there. They've been challenged by Binance, which is now, I think, the world's most active or leading trading platform. But they're still generating many hundreds of millions in revenue and profits, God willing every year. It's great. They've kicked off huge amounts of dividends and whatnot. We've been happy with that.”
2022-01-17 · Capital Allocators · Sean O'Sullivan – Start-up Development at SOSV, Venture is Eating the Investment World 3 (Capital Allocators, EP.231) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“growth happens. Sometimes it doesn't work just because of personalities. They need to add to their team. And so we will help them to some extent. But really, this is their business. We are only a pretty minority player. We aim to own 10 or 12% of the business up to Series A. So it is their business and it's their responsibility and their drive that is making the success of the business possible. But it's also their responsibility to build that team around them. We will let them know that in our opinion, they need a new CEO or they need a new business development person or whatever, but it's up to them to accept that advice.”
2022-01-17 · Capital Allocators · Sean O'Sullivan – Start-up Development at SOSV, Venture is Eating the Investment World 3 (Capital Allocators, EP.231) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it's much easier to train a scientist to be an entrepreneur than it is to train a business guy, to be a scientist. So we start with people who are incredibly focused on customers and that have a desire to see their change be made in the world. For anyone to be an entrepreneur, they have to have a really strong internal drive that they're unsatisfied with the status quo, that they don't like the world the way that it is and they're incredibly motivated to see a change happen. And those are people that will actually do things that are very unnatural to them, like go and make sales calls, when forced. And we will actually force them to make sales calls. We'll give them assignments, okay, here are 20 people on LinkedIn. Make sure you get through to each and every one of them and let me know next Monday how you did and what they had to say, what were the feedback on this survey. So it's about getting people out of their comfort zones and that's where.”
2022-01-17 · Capital Allocators · Sean O'Sullivan – Start-up Development at SOSV, Venture is Eating the Investment World 3 (Capital Allocators, EP.231) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Honesty is the number one thing. So we need fundamental radical candor of the founders. And that is actually the primary detractor. It's more likely that people don't meet the profile from a personality perspective than they do not meet the profile from a scientific perspective. By the time they get through our program, their science is generally really well known. If there was ever a company that graduated our programs where we don't feel comfortable about the science, we actually don't let them graduate the program. So that is a screen that we would use as well.”
2022-01-17 · Capital Allocators · Sean O'Sullivan – Start-up Development at SOSV, Venture is Eating the Investment World 3 (Capital Allocators, EP.231) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We fund companies at that relatively high level for a first check and where we're the only check in the business, the only investor in the business. And then we will go on at a similar level on the subsequent rounds, so couple hundred grand to $500,000 on the follow-on rounds and then up to a million and a half on subsequent rounds after the seed round out of the program. So when a company comes into the program, they may be valued at whatever the typical valuation is, a couple million, three million. And when they leave, they generally raise two to three million out of $10 million pre-money or post money, depending on how hot the company is.”
2022-01-17 · Capital Allocators · Sean O'Sullivan – Start-up Development at SOSV, Venture is Eating the Investment World 3 (Capital Allocators, EP.231) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Not every company succeeds. And I guess one of the things I would highlight is that we want to take risks that are relatively inexpensive and we can afford for many of those risks to outright fail, honestly. So when we're making these bets, call it a half a million dollars. It's a small enough bet that if the founder can't make it with that business, it's very easy for us to be able to actually write that off. I'd say only 70% of our companies actually make it past that first stage. That is the number that we've been getting out of the indie bio program, for example, which is still higher than a lot of the software programs, which are more in the 30% range.”
2022-01-17 · Capital Allocators · Sean O'Sullivan – Start-up Development at SOSV, Venture is Eating the Investment World 3 (Capital Allocators, EP.231) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, we'll kick him out within six months generally. So sometimes they'll keep a couple of people there if we have more space. We have some space to do that. But often they're going to be growing their own businesses. And sometimes they want to create their own cultures. Obviously, other businesses. And that tends to require a space to do that. In the hardware case, because hardware does take a longer time for the prototyping, et cetera, that could be 12 or 18 months and sometimes even two years. And if we have the space to accommodate them, we do. In the life sciences space, generally, it's a shorter period, like six months and sometimes a year.”
2022-01-17 · Capital Allocators · Sean O'Sullivan – Start-up Development at SOSV, Venture is Eating the Investment World 3 (Capital Allocators, EP.231) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When we do a startup development program, we will give the company, say, $500,000, and there will be, say, $75,000 or $50,000 that will go towards their cost at the program level, all the free rent, the free beer, the free pizza, but also to cover some of our staffing expense for the people that are working to support their businesses. And then we also have sponsorships and things like that. We recently got $25 million sponsorships. one for the IndieBio New York program, a multi-year sponsorship, and then a $25 million for the HACS USA, both from the states of New Jersey, one from the state of New York, which economically makes a lot of sense because for every $50 million we invest, there's about a billion dollars that goes into the startups. So this year we invested over $100 million in over $2 billion just going into the startups, creating a lot of economic activity.”
2022-01-17 · Capital Allocators · Sean O'Sullivan – Start-up Development at SOSV, Venture is Eating the Investment World 3 (Capital Allocators, EP.231) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Two or three people plus maybe some new staff that they hire with the funds that we give them that are based on the facility. And that's where it starts. And in our HACS program, we have bigger facilities, maybe 40,000 square foot facilities with a lot more prototyping space. And some of the older teams that stay in the space as well as they continue to get their next runs of their production. So those maybe have 300 people working out of those facilities, 200, 300 people.”
2022-01-17 · Capital Allocators · Sean O'Sullivan – Start-up Development at SOSV, Venture is Eating the Investment World 3 (Capital Allocators, EP.231) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So each one of the co working centers would spend many millions of dollars building out these facilities with the wet labs and with the co-working space. We like to have the teams there on site, which was tougher during COVID, but it's great now. And there's the greatest level of learning when everyone's physically together and learning from the other teams as well as from the mentors that we bring in. We have adjunct partners that come in and they're very distinguished folks from Stanford and MIT and Harvard and whatnot, the George Church would be a very famous person in the life sciences area who's an adjunct partner for the indie bio programs. And we have other leading thinkers for various other industries like the hardware industries. So we have staff of probably about eight or so people that are constantly there to serve the needs of the startup and help connect them with people. And there's probably a group of around 40 of the entrepreneurs, say 12 teams.”
2022-01-17 · Capital Allocators · Sean O'Sullivan – Start-up Development at SOSV, Venture is Eating the Investment World 3 (Capital Allocators, EP.231) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's about 135 people. I know that sounds ridiculous because we're not a 16Z and we don't have 10 billion or 20 billion in our management. Half of our people are in Asia and our focus for all of our people is working at the program level where they're helping the entrepreneurs one-to-one with the teams. We also do a tremendous amount of deals a year. We're the world's most active investor in life sciences and hardware and also just generally we would rank as perhaps the world's”
2022-01-17 · Capital Allocators · Sean O'Sullivan – Start-up Development at SOSV, Venture is Eating the Investment World 3 (Capital Allocators, EP.231) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There has to be a major inflection point for us to feel satisfied. And so we expect they would have a similar approach and a similar viewpoint that they're coming in hoping for transformation and hoping that we'll be able to guide them in that transformation. A lot of the issue is helping scientists or engineers recognize how it fits into the industry and what the business models are. And we're reworking the business models and sometimes we're working the science on trying to understand where the economic opportunity is so they'll have a foothold in a marketplace. So that's where the customer engagement side would be kicking in.”
2022-01-17 · Capital Allocators · Sean O'Sullivan – Start-up Development at SOSV, Venture is Eating the Investment World 3 (Capital Allocators, EP.231) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Founders would be more focused on the marketplace traction side. And by traction, this could be pharmaceuticals or small molecular therapeutics or other things that may not be actually getting that much traction from a revenue side for years, but we still want to make sure that there's traction in the marketplace with those partners, those pharmaceutical companies or those researchers that are known in those areas. So it's just about working with all of those traction metrics for the business and then also working on the scientific traction and then also just making sure that the team is really ready and can do fundraising and do all the other things that's necessary to take it from a science project into a business.”
2022-01-17 · Capital Allocators · Sean O'Sullivan – Start-up Development at SOSV, Venture is Eating the Investment World 3 (Capital Allocators, EP.231) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If we were to look at, say, IndieBio, we have wet lab facilities where they can do their biological work and experiments. And we would have certain scientific goals that we would expect them to achieve during the program that would de-risk them. So most early stage investors are looking to de-risk everything about the investment that they're making to make a comfortable, make the water safe for later stage investors to be able to come in. And so we have to de-risk the science. We have to de-risk the team and we have to de-risk the marketplace. And this is why we always require founding teams. I admire the iconic image of one founder driving a business, but that's not realistic to accomplish anything of significance in the world. You have to build a team around you. And so we're looking for founders to have come in with co-founders from the very start. So they would come in and we'd be working with the team on multiple issues at the same time.”
2022-01-17 · Capital Allocators · Sean O'Sullivan – Start-up Development at SOSV, Venture is Eating the Investment World 3 (Capital Allocators, EP.231) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The things that we're looking for from the founding team are a capability and excellence in being able to deliver real working products. So unlike most investors that wait until the product is already working and they already have product fit, we are actually looking at companies that haven't shipped a product in many cases, in most cases. They don't have real revenue. means that we have to look at what they've done in the past, what they have been able to be successful at prior in terms of bringing a change to the world. And that could be on open source projects or that could be in a role that they'd had, even in university or PhD, some groundbreaking research that they did in discovering some new fundamental property of physics or some new capability in a biological pathway in some cell, in some metabolic process. So we would be looking for those”
2022-01-17 · Capital Allocators · Sean O'Sullivan – Start-up Development at SOSV, Venture is Eating the Investment World 3 (Capital Allocators, EP.231) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So we are getting 8,000 applications per year. That's a lot considering the specialties that we are in. And we select about 130 of those companies a year for investment. And our typical investment package is at least a quarter of a million dollars and more often around a half a million dollars for each company that's accepted into one of our startup development programs.”
2022-01-17 · Capital Allocators · Sean O'Sullivan – Start-up Development at SOSV, Venture is Eating the Investment World 3 (Capital Allocators, EP.231) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The best ideas always come from the entrepreneurs. And we can be researching themes and we know areas that we care deeply about. We're super active in climate change. We're super active in the future of food. We're super active in medical devices. In fact, if you wanted to look at our general themes, it's human and planetary health in IndieBio. In hacks, it would also include human and planetary health, but also the re-industrialization of society, in particular the Western societies and the rebirth of our manufacturing sector. But where are the ideas coming from? They're always coming from the entrepreneurs. They know where we can help and they know we have facilities and capabilities and financing to help connect them to later stage capital as well. But we're always finding that the best ideas are straight out of the minds of entrepreneurs.”
2022-01-17 · Capital Allocators · Sean O'Sullivan – Start-up Development at SOSV, Venture is Eating the Investment World 3 (Capital Allocators, EP.231) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Rest of the world or not a massive player like your traditional accelerator programs would be like the YCs and the tech stars and all the other accelerator programs they focus on those areas predominantly or exclusively”
2022-01-17 · Capital Allocators · Sean O'Sullivan – Start-up Development at SOSV, Venture is Eating the Investment World 3 (Capital Allocators, EP.231) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The ones that we are running that are active and successful besides those three China Accelerator hacks and IndieBio are mocks, which is a global mobile first app development. It's focused on cross-border Internet, but it's predominantly in Asia, although it is everywhere in the world that's run out of Taipei. And then the other program that is more of a virtual program is DLAB, which is a blockchain accelerator type program. We actually don't call them accelerators anymore. We call them startup development programs because we don't run in the way that most people run accelerators. We give a lot more money. We put a lot more talent and network into the process than what a normal accelerator would be able to do. One area I specifically didn't highlight is software. We're not a huge player in software. We do in Asia. We do have a lot of cross-border internet applications and marketplaces. But in the”
2022-01-17 · Capital Allocators · Sean O'Sullivan – Start-up Development at SOSV, Venture is Eating the Investment World 3 (Capital Allocators, EP.231) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Would need to be cloud connected, would need to have AI built into it, and would need to basically replace all existing physical devices over time. And so that was a megatrend. It would take 20, 30 years for that to fully play out. And we just said, okay, let's be a real leader in that. Let's actually put tens of millions of dollars of our own money in building out the facilities and the prototyping and building out the staff that can really advise and help companies help startups actually get their products through the manufacturing process and out into the market. So that was one. And then we also did IndieBio, which is our life sciences accelerator, where we had a similar deep tech theme. That was started in 2014 originally in Europe and then in San Francisco in 2015. And that also followed the idea that if you take scientists and you can make them entrepreneurs, you can actually transform what society is capable of doing by providing these comprehensive news.”
2022-01-17 · Capital Allocators · Sean O'Sullivan – Start-up Development at SOSV, Venture is Eating the Investment World 3 (Capital Allocators, EP.231) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That to the US. It's also in Tokyo and one other place, Xi'an and San Francisco as well. We have locations for hacks. So that's the world's first hardware accelerator, a physical device accelerator, built on the theme that if you're going to create new physical devices, they need to be cloud-connected. They need to have computing capability in them in order to vastly increase what's possible for humanity to do with these new devices. And we've all seen how watches have become more than what our old watches were or how headphones are suddenly capable of reading our brain waves and actually doing other feedback loops for our bodies, et cetera. There are so many different things that can be done with physical devices once you start to cloud connect them. So we created these programs specifically targeted around megatrends that were unstoppable megatrends in the industry. So hardware.”
2022-01-17 · Capital Allocators · Sean O'Sullivan – Start-up Development at SOSV, Venture is Eating the Investment World 3 (Capital Allocators, EP.231) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, from China Accelerator, which was differentiated just by its geography, we really always wanted to invest very deeply into a set where we would be the world leader in. And so Front China Accelerator, which was started in Dalian and now is in Shanghai mostly, we then launched the Hacks Accelerator because in China there are a lot of people that create hardware companies. And it just didn't make any sense to have a software and a hardware company. There's very little overlap in terms of what the problems are, who the investors are in those spaces, and in terms of how they need to deal with the physical issues versus the SaaS businesses of the world. So we decided to create new accelerators deeply focused on deep tech verticals where we would be the only people in the world that had that level of focus. And so we created hacks, which was originally in Shenzhen, and it now is in Newark, New Jersey as well. We're just announced the expansion of.”
2022-01-17 · Capital Allocators · Sean O'Sullivan – Start-up Development at SOSV, Venture is Eating the Investment World 3 (Capital Allocators, EP.231) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I still co invest with him these days. But when he started up Tech Stars in Boulder and then went to expand it to another city in Boston, one of the guys I had previously backed and that Brad had previously backed was picked to run textiles in Boston. And so I became one of the founding backers of Tech Stars in Boston. So I really loved that model and I'd been actually looking actively for a model like that for years. And so when I saw that, I said, okay, well, let me do this in a place that's never been done before, which was China. And so I started China Accelerator, which was the first accelerator program in Asia. And that became over the last 10 years a runaway success in that region.”
2022-01-17 · Capital Allocators · Sean O'Sullivan – Start-up Development at SOSV, Venture is Eating the Investment World 3 (Capital Allocators, EP.231) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Size other than the professional investors. So that's what got me focused at that early stage. And I also just thought back in terms of my own growth and my own experience, how what had made me successful in the beginning was that mentorship that others had provided. And so when I saw these mentorship models developing, actually one of the real first people to develop this sort of at scale was Bill Gross, not the hedge fund Bill Gross, the other Bill Gross, the Idea Lab, Bill Gross from Pasadena, who is really the precursor for all accelerator programs. His was run more as incubator style thing rather than the model, which I really like the most, which is like TechSars model, where you actually have cohorts of people that were investing. And actually, I co-invested with Brad Feld of a founder group on a number of investments in the 1990s and in the”
2022-01-17 · Capital Allocators · Sean O'Sullivan – Start-up Development at SOSV, Venture is Eating the Investment World 3 (Capital Allocators, EP.231) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I had always identified with the original engineering, the inventors, the foundation of the company. That's where I was the best at, effectively. In the companies that I created, and I did create other startups after that first one, the most comfortable time was when it was less than 100 people, where I really could walk around the place and be able to have the greatest impact. So I really liked being at that stage of the business, the earliest stages of the business, and even earlier when it's just really a couple of founders and the investors just figuring out what the course of the investment would need to look like. So that's why I got into the very, very early stages at the seed stage and the pre-seed stage. I was writing checks of generally a couple hundred thousand dollars, which would make me sort of more of a super angel rather than a regular angel. $250,000 or $500,000 check into the startups when nobody else is writing checks.”
2022-01-17 · Capital Allocators · Sean O'Sullivan – Start-up Development at SOSV, Venture is Eating the Investment World 3 (Capital Allocators, EP.231) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It was called SOS Ventures initially, and it was retitled SOSV 10 years later. I didn't actually consider it a full-time job because I was just a guy with a checkbook going around. And I knew the technology and I knew the people. And so I was just investing in friends' technologies. But after, I'd say eight years of doing other things as I was running other businesses, I was in the music industry. I was in the film industry. It was a humanitarian worker. So after a while, I noticed that this had grown to be worth $70 or $80 million. And so I said, okay, I probably should treat this a little bit more seriously. And so I brought together a couple of people in the back office to just manage the financial aspects. And then I brought on some investment partners as it grew to be more like $150 million or something a few years after that.”
2022-01-17 · Capital Allocators · Sean O'Sullivan – Start-up Development at SOSV, Venture is Eating the Investment World 3 (Capital Allocators, EP.231) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“After we went public, I said, okay, well, I got this money. It was like $14 million. It's listed in the papers, et cetera. And that seemed like an infinite amount of money. That was my part of the IPO. And so that was after taxes and charity. I give away another inbox or whatever. And then $7 million in taxes. So I had about 7 million left or something. And so I needed to do something with that. And so I started investing it in startups for the most part and also other public companies.”
2022-01-17 · Capital Allocators · Sean O'Sullivan – Start-up Development at SOSV, Venture is Eating the Investment World 3 (Capital Allocators, EP.231) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, as I said, my first company went public. I was around 28, I think, when it went public. And so had to do something with that money. This was actually a big deal back then, I think it was 1994. And so we were the 28th largest software company in the United States at the time. And we went public at a decent valuation. We were profitable and had been profitable from very early on. So we didn't need to take a lot of investment money, actually.”
2022-01-17 · Capital Allocators · Sean O'Sullivan – Start-up Development at SOSV, Venture is Eating the Investment World 3 (Capital Allocators, EP.231) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I probably learned a number of wrong things, which was that, oh, I'm God and that whatever I do is going to work the next time. And I found out the next company I tried to start that it isn't quite so easy. But I did learn, and what I was extraordinarily grateful for was the mentors that helped me out. I didn't know what a cap table was or how to sell to big corporate customers or anything that you need to know how to hire and fire people. All of those things I had to sort of suffer through.”
2022-01-17 · Capital Allocators · Sean O'Sullivan – Start-up Development at SOSV, Venture is Eating the Investment World 3 (Capital Allocators, EP.231) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“MapInfo created the industry of street mapping on computers. So if you type an address into a computer, whether it's your smartphone or on your PC and you see a street map, that's what we invented. But we never went to the consumer side of it. There were about a thousand different companies that used our core technology and our products and built their products around it. So everyone from Microsofts and the Oracles would bundle it into their products and also just hundreds of smaller value-added resellers. We called them back in the day who had a variety of different applications for school buses or for using routing or whatever type of other mapping use you'd have.”
2022-01-17 · Capital Allocators · Sean O'Sullivan – Start-up Development at SOSV, Venture is Eating the Investment World 3 (Capital Allocators, EP.231) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I don't know what it is about my face or whatever, but I walk down the street. And back in those days, people would pull over their car and just roll down the window and said, hey, do you know how to get to wherever? And I would say, oh yeah, you're about a mile away, or it's just around this corner or whatever. So I was just confounded by the sheer number of people, just didn't know their way around. So I decided to try to solve that problem. And actually, we did. We created a company called MapInfo. And we put all street maps onto computers. And that became a very popular company with eventually hundreds of millions in revenues and became a public company about seven years after I started it.”
2022-01-17 · Capital Allocators · Sean O'Sullivan – Start-up Development at SOSV, Venture is Eating the Investment World 3 (Capital Allocators, EP.231) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source