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Semil Shah

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2022-11-21
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2022-11-21
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  1. “Well, I mean, again, your body of work is different, so your deck is all the two thousand plus Yeah, yeah. People wanted to support you. You were in that chatter zone. So you showed the ability to help, the ability to connect with people, the ability in the chatter zone. Again, I don't think people can extrapolate from what you did.”

    2022-11-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Semil Shah on The Biggest Mistakes VCs and LPs Made Over the Last 24 Months, Why LP Churn is Coming, Core Lessons on Scaling from $1M Haystack Fund I to Today and How To Find, Win and Manage LPs as an Emerging Manager · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “I think that if you're not getting name checked by institutional LPs and other people aren't talking about what you're doing, it's almost impossible to raise institutional capital, whether it's a $3 million check or $30 million check from an LP. So really that should be the first for an emerging manager is how do I get in the chatter zone of these LPs? And that's different than just having a deck. So you could argue the deck is one of the least important things. In the hierarchy of things you would need to do, which is do good deals, help entrepreneurs and other investors in the ecosystem have people talk about you as like a unique person or someone who's uniquely helpful or uniquely insightful. And then it's okay. They want to meet you. And then you could be like, oh, well, here's my little deck. Honestly, for like an emerging manager, the deck probably doesn't need to be more than five to ten slides.”

    2022-11-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Semil Shah on The Biggest Mistakes VCs and LPs Made Over the Last 24 Months, Why LP Churn is Coming, Core Lessons on Scaling from $1M Haystack Fund I to Today and How To Find, Win and Manage LPs as an Emerging Manager · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “You alluded to some, right? Which is just talking to people when they're raising not really having a richer conversation about what they're trying to do and why. Again, the decks or the presentation just show a lot of pontification. So I think people, most VCs or emerging managers especially are not good. Fundraisers because they don't really have a North Star to where they're going and why. And it kind of makes sense because it takes a while to develop that. But at the same time, it's not as inspiring for someone to let go of their dollars.”

    2022-11-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Semil Shah on The Biggest Mistakes VCs and LPs Made Over the Last 24 Months, Why LP Churn is Coming, Core Lessons on Scaling from $1M Haystack Fund I to Today and How To Find, Win and Manage LPs as an Emerging Manager · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “I think all of that is your mix of collateral that you're going to use to convey messages to different people at different times. I have a one-pager for every new fund we raise, which is on one page everything you would want to know and link to that's like not super sensitive. Obviously we have a deck and a data room, but now we're at a point where we just copy and paste a new data room into Dropbox and do all that. We try to reduce all the friction.”

    2022-11-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Semil Shah on The Biggest Mistakes VCs and LPs Made Over the Last 24 Months, Why LP Churn is Coming, Core Lessons on Scaling from $1M Haystack Fund I to Today and How To Find, Win and Manage LPs as an Emerging Manager · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “That is smart to do because I do think relationships matter. And then obviously the diligence you go through, I go through, is way more than what an entrepreneur goes through. That's the other thing, too, just having all of your ducks in a row. You have to have some kind of reputation where people call around and name check you.”

    2022-11-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Semil Shah on The Biggest Mistakes VCs and LPs Made Over the Last 24 Months, Why LP Churn is Coming, Core Lessons on Scaling from $1M Haystack Fund I to Today and How To Find, Win and Manage LPs as an Emerging Manager · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “I also think that's the hustle part, but I think closing the deals are harder. What I coach a lot of emerging managers on is like, okay, if you go meet an institutional LLP, they're predisposed to passing on your first fund, primarily out of the fact of they probably don't think you're going to raise your first fund or deploy a well if you do. So they just want to wait for the second one to just make sure you've actually raised the first one that you've stuck with it, that you like it. Because it is kind of a lot of busy work is painfully. So it chronologically makes sense that a lot of the people, for example, I introduced Knuckle to. I was like, think of them as a fun LP because they probably don't even think you're going to raise your target for this fund.”

    2022-11-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Semil Shah on The Biggest Mistakes VCs and LPs Made Over the Last 24 Months, Why LP Churn is Coming, Core Lessons on Scaling from $1M Haystack Fund I to Today and How To Find, Win and Manage LPs as an Emerging Manager · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “It just becomes a specific thing you can point to that you can have a richer conversation with. You could say, hey, look for two years I've made these 20 angel investments. Here's how much money I put in. Here's how much money other people gave me. Here's who followed on. It's just a richer conversation with an LP and a more substantive conversation than saying, hey, I just want to deploy 50 million bucks. So that would be number one is using AngelList. Again, for people who don't want to wait and go, I would just say you have to have other GPs vouch for you. The only way they vouch for you is if they see you work. The only way they see you work is if you're an executive in one of their companies or you're around to deal with them. So it was easy for me to, like you mentioned Anonyer and Nuckle Mandon and me making like a lot of impactful intros for them. That was easy to do because I'd worked with them a lot, but it's hard for me to do that with someone I haven't worked with.”

    2022-11-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Semil Shah on The Biggest Mistakes VCs and LPs Made Over the Last 24 Months, Why LP Churn is Coming, Core Lessons on Scaling from $1M Haystack Fund I to Today and How To Find, Win and Manage LPs as an Emerging Manager · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “People in the last three or four years, and I miss this wave, it's like I got married right when Tinder was taking off, bought two cars rang maneuver was taking off, and I didn't live in the city. So I just miss these waves. And I started my fun before Angelus. But I think in the last three years with the capital acceleration, you have people who their first debut fund or their second funds are actually pretty big and they don't have investment experience. A lot of people didn't go through the proof of concept funds like I went through. Then they go knock on the door of Notre Dame or somebody else and you sort of wonder why are you doing that? Again, my advice may not really click with people because they don't want to go through that. But I think one is on Angelus now, there's really no excuse not to have some kind of track record before you go talk.”

    2022-11-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Semil Shah on The Biggest Mistakes VCs and LPs Made Over the Last 24 Months, Why LP Churn is Coming, Core Lessons on Scaling from $1M Haystack Fund I to Today and How To Find, Win and Manage LPs as an Emerging Manager · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “For the early stage, I think it's both. You need access to creative people. You need to select from the ones that come your way. I think it's really hard to generate that access in a repeatable way. And it's super hard to select. So I think it's equal.”

    2022-11-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Semil Shah on The Biggest Mistakes VCs and LPs Made Over the Last 24 Months, Why LP Churn is Coming, Core Lessons on Scaling from $1M Haystack Fund I to Today and How To Find, Win and Manage LPs as an Emerging Manager · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “The good thing about all of this is that we have 5 to 10% positions in three or four really amazing companies that all could be public, actually, at some point. There's a ladder to get out of this. That's pretty exciting. But if I look back on it as a player looking over the game film, that's a fun I look over and say, oh, I wish I had made this play different. I wish I had done this different.”

    2022-11-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Semil Shah on The Biggest Mistakes VCs and LPs Made Over the Last 24 Months, Why LP Churn is Coming, Core Lessons on Scaling from $1M Haystack Fund I to Today and How To Find, Win and Manage LPs as an Emerging Manager · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “I think it's a mix in that fund. I would say 20% adverse and 80% poor selection that really course corrected in the next two funds where I feel boom just hit again. I remember an LLP telling me a long time ago just when I was starting that typically they stay with good managers for five funds and they assume that three of them will be so so maybe two to three X funds. One of them will be a complete turd and one of them will be spectacular. I kind of knew going into that one that this was going to be a change in motion. This is 2017 to 2019. That's a fun I look back on is where mistakes were concentrated.”

    2022-11-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Semil Shah on The Biggest Mistakes VCs and LPs Made Over the Last 24 Months, Why LP Churn is Coming, Core Lessons on Scaling from $1M Haystack Fund I to Today and How To Find, Win and Manage LPs as an Emerging Manager · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “I think in Fund 4, I always worry about the carnage and that fund. And I knew there was going to be turbulence because it was the first time was really going for ownership. And I knew in going for ownership to our earlier part of the conversation that there is a trade-off in quality when you're trying to make a move on just getting into a round versus getting a certain percent of ownership. We made a lot of errors of selection. Me. In that”

    2022-11-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Semil Shah on The Biggest Mistakes VCs and LPs Made Over the Last 24 Months, Why LP Churn is Coming, Core Lessons on Scaling from $1M Haystack Fund I to Today and How To Find, Win and Manage LPs as an Emerging Manager · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “That's crazy to me. I don't know how you go back to LPs unless you have a really deep relationship or history of returns when you deploy that fast in this environment.”

    2022-11-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Semil Shah on The Biggest Mistakes VCs and LPs Made Over the Last 24 Months, Why LP Churn is Coming, Core Lessons on Scaling from $1M Haystack Fund I to Today and How To Find, Win and Manage LPs as an Emerging Manager · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “No idea. I knew you would have sticked that. And I was thinking about it. So what I kind of concluded over that time and when I told our LPs is that for the seed market, I felt the thing we could promise as 24 to 30 month deployments and then doing new funds. And I would say that since we last spoke, I would say it's closer to 24 than 30. But I didn't try to make a promise of 36. I didn't think it was possible.”

    2022-11-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Semil Shah on The Biggest Mistakes VCs and LPs Made Over the Last 24 Months, Why LP Churn is Coming, Core Lessons on Scaling from $1M Haystack Fund I to Today and How To Find, Win and Manage LPs as an Emerging Manager · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  15. “They are, but the reality at the same time is they're more attracted to the more experienced people coming out in these big orgs, whereas most of what we do are first-time founders, maybe not as startup pedigreed as those. And also these funds are really big and slow. So they're not going to be able to move and prosecute the things in the same way that they say on Twitter.”

    2022-11-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Semil Shah on The Biggest Mistakes VCs and LPs Made Over the Last 24 Months, Why LP Churn is Coming, Core Lessons on Scaling from $1M Haystack Fund I to Today and How To Find, Win and Manage LPs as an Emerging Manager · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  16. “No, because I think the US market, there's so many seed funds. There's so many Series A funds. There's so many top tier funds. Our job isn't to invest when Excel, Lightspeed, Greylock. Our job is to invest around before that.”

    2022-11-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Semil Shah on The Biggest Mistakes VCs and LPs Made Over the Last 24 Months, Why LP Churn is Coming, Core Lessons on Scaling from $1M Haystack Fund I to Today and How To Find, Win and Manage LPs as an Emerging Manager · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  17. “I would say we stop around 5%. So if you look at what we tell the entrepreneur is look, we're trying to own 5% and 10% to start. We want to earn the right to maintain that over a few rounds. And we'll never own more than you as a founder. We'll always give you advice. You will be voting our shares. That's kind of a non-threatening way of sort of coming at an entrepreneur.”

    2022-11-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Semil Shah on The Biggest Mistakes VCs and LPs Made Over the Last 24 Months, Why LP Churn is Coming, Core Lessons on Scaling from $1M Haystack Fund I to Today and How To Find, Win and Manage LPs as an Emerging Manager · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  18. “Leading, but someone else is putting in a bigger check and we cut back a little bit to bring in a friend who really wanted to come in. I think this is like we're always trying to co-invest with people that we know and these are repeated gains. It's better over the long run to pick the entrepreneurs you want to work with and collaborate with those syndicates over time rather than trying to box out your territory on each one. I think going back to your previous question of if I had 100, 150 million dollar fund that whole collaboration layer of how we work would change, which would then set off a chain reaction of how the deal flow would change and how we would have to operate with the companies would change. Then you look back over 10 years where there's tons of DPI, tons of IPOs on paper Haystack looks like I can't believe it. Would you risk all that magic of meeting entrepreneurs early in order to have more money? It's just better to raise the next fund and go for it again.”

    2022-11-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Semil Shah on The Biggest Mistakes VCs and LPs Made Over the Last 24 Months, Why LP Churn is Coming, Core Lessons on Scaling from $1M Haystack Fund I to Today and How To Find, Win and Manage LPs as an Emerging Manager · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  19. “Yeah, I mean, you don't want to, but I think of it as like flipping it a little bit, which is if we try to lead everything, we would lower the quality of the portfolio that we're in. Being able to be flexible suits my personality, so it fits me, but then it also enables us to move around. So we've been tracking someone to do a deal. It's actually one of these three on 15s that you mentioned pre-everything, but it's someone who's a known quantity in a really interesting sector. We actually had a friend who's just kind of fund based in that sector. And so we sent it to them and we told the entrepreneur, like, we'll give you a term sheet if you want a term sheet from us, but we think you should talk to these three groups because they're right in the wheelhouse of what you do. The entrepreneur was super happy with that and it's probably going to work with one of them. By being flexible, we get to work with who we want to work with. On the cases where we do lead to come back to your original question, Harry, I think speed wins and convictions. So we will lead deals that we want to lead and we're just closing one now.”

    2022-11-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Semil Shah on The Biggest Mistakes VCs and LPs Made Over the Last 24 Months, Why LP Churn is Coming, Core Lessons on Scaling from $1M Haystack Fund I to Today and How To Find, Win and Manage LPs as an Emerging Manager · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  20. “Not really because I kind of have a Zen approach about it, which is our job is to teach the founders how to interact with investors and raise capital over successive rounds. And part of that should be to choose the best partners for you. I kind of learn this from a Brad Feld interview. And he just said, like I mentioned some deal that they did that they lost maybe the true. And he was like, I thought it was great. He's like, I'm friends with everyone and true. And the entrepreneur is really happy. So we're fine with that. I'm also fine with that.”

    2022-11-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Semil Shah on The Biggest Mistakes VCs and LPs Made Over the Last 24 Months, Why LP Churn is Coming, Core Lessons on Scaling from $1M Haystack Fund I to Today and How To Find, Win and Manage LPs as an Emerging Manager · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  21. “Biggest check, or we can be in the back seat as the third check, but that's basically it. We don't do party rounds and things like that. So I like that flexibility, and it enables us to play with entrepreneurs we want to play with.”

    2022-11-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Semil Shah on The Biggest Mistakes VCs and LPs Made Over the Last 24 Months, Why LP Churn is Coming, Core Lessons on Scaling from $1M Haystack Fund I to Today and How To Find, Win and Manage LPs as an Emerging Manager · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  22. “I think it comes down to like ownership and exit where I've done enough of these small funds on a small base that have been wildly successful and accretive and I just see how much dilution comes in, how long it takes, what the return profile is. It leads me to just think that we would need to start out if we had a hundred, $150 million fund, owning 15% of everything that we do. There's a possibility where, Harry, your question is right on, where you'd say, okay, in this environment now, why don't you wait do the $3 million checks for the 15% ownership and do the small A's and compete? I think it also changes what you need to bring. Do you have to lead every deal if you're competing for that entrepreneur? You have to bring a certain set of things to the table. And I'm not sure I'm ready to make that promise versus leading a few deals. And then also what we tell entrepreneurs sometimes is we can sit in the driver's seat and lead the deal. We can send the passenger seat and be a co-lead or the second.”

    2022-11-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Semil Shah on The Biggest Mistakes VCs and LPs Made Over the Last 24 Months, Why LP Churn is Coming, Core Lessons on Scaling from $1M Haystack Fund I to Today and How To Find, Win and Manage LPs as an Emerging Manager · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  23. “Overall, I think your observation is correct. I think there's a ton of capital that wants to follow the signal and validation of like a premium or competitive series A.”

    2022-11-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Semil Shah on The Biggest Mistakes VCs and LPs Made Over the Last 24 Months, Why LP Churn is Coming, Core Lessons on Scaling from $1M Haystack Fund I to Today and How To Find, Win and Manage LPs as an Emerging Manager · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  24. “A lot of people will say also now that once you make it through to like certain organizations and you are in this PM role, you do have more of a political job than you do a breaking glass job.”

    2022-11-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Semil Shah on The Biggest Mistakes VCs and LPs Made Over the Last 24 Months, Why LP Churn is Coming, Core Lessons on Scaling from $1M Haystack Fund I to Today and How To Find, Win and Manage LPs as an Emerging Manager · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  25. “Yeah, and that's what I'm getting towards where we try to interview the person to get to know them and how they got here. And then you're testing for overcoming adversity. It doesn't need to be in business. Enduring pain, passion that they've devoted. There's a hundred things you could evaluate where you could say, okay, this person expressed some bit of hustle, some bit of grit, some bit of handling adversity. Again, it's not all that you need to get there, but it feels you need to feel a little bit of that as an investor because what you're doing is you're kind of trading off talent, sophistication, artistic endeavors with grit and hustle. You can't just have 100 on one end and zero on the other or vice versa. There needs to be a bit of a blend.”

    2022-11-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Semil Shah on The Biggest Mistakes VCs and LPs Made Over the Last 24 Months, Why LP Churn is Coming, Core Lessons on Scaling from $1M Haystack Fund I to Today and How To Find, Win and Manage LPs as an Emerging Manager · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  26. “Again, this is just a very philosophical point, and I could be entirely wrong. Roger, we both went to the University of Michigan, so he just recently, about a month ago, invited me back and interviewed me, which was surreal for like three hours. And we talked about this point. And I said, which was possibly like a politically incorrect way of saying this, but I just felt that a lot of people that knock on our door with this amazing product experience or amazing experience, you don't get the sense that they sometimes, again, I'm not trying to cast all of them this way, that they really want it, that they're really hungry. And I also believe, again, this is just personal, that most people who have an entrepreneurial gene in their sort of hard coding have expressed that in some other way before they knock on our doors.”

    2022-11-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Semil Shah on The Biggest Mistakes VCs and LPs Made Over the Last 24 Months, Why LP Churn is Coming, Core Lessons on Scaling from $1M Haystack Fund I to Today and How To Find, Win and Manage LPs as an Emerging Manager · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  27. “ability. I'm sure you've seen in some of these rounds, Harry, because the rounds are so competitive and people are fawning over them and people believe that they're going to create the next big thing, there's sometimes lack of urgency, there's lack of direction, there's lack of passion.”

    2022-11-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Semil Shah on The Biggest Mistakes VCs and LPs Made Over the Last 24 Months, Why LP Churn is Coming, Core Lessons on Scaling from $1M Haystack Fund I to Today and How To Find, Win and Manage LPs as an Emerging Manager · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  28. “We avoid a lot of those to be honest. By the way, the logic for doing them for these big funds is applicable. Like it makes sense to me. But I think for a fund like ours, which is small and constrained, they'll get to take those type of shots. We maybe say we do three or four of those if we have a relationship per fund, but we're not able to do that as a matter of just normal business. What you're saying we can unpack a lot, which is, are those hot seed rounds necessarily indicators of entrepreneurial value creation? Probably not. Are they best suited to like understand what's at the cutting edge of product development or infrastructure? Probably. But I think it goes back to this more philosophical question, which is, are talented people also entrepreneurial? And I don't believe that. I believe there are tons of talented people who are not entrepreneurial and there are a bunch of entrepreneurial people who don't have the requisite talent. Really, what we're trying to do is trying to find that overlap of who has the talent plus entrepreneur.”

    2022-11-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Semil Shah on The Biggest Mistakes VCs and LPs Made Over the Last 24 Months, Why LP Churn is Coming, Core Lessons on Scaling from $1M Haystack Fund I to Today and How To Find, Win and Manage LPs as an Emerging Manager · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  29. “We've been able to get close to 7% initial entry ownership in the last two funds. It's been going up. I would say it's like a slow March, what I call it is like we slowly creep up the cap table. But one of the things I'm really proud of with Haystack is if you look at the activity of all the deals over 10 years, I would say there's a tight clustering between 8 and 15 million dollars as the entry point and the rest.”

    2022-11-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Semil Shah on The Biggest Mistakes VCs and LPs Made Over the Last 24 Months, Why LP Churn is Coming, Core Lessons on Scaling from $1M Haystack Fund I to Today and How To Find, Win and Manage LPs as an Emerging Manager · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  30. “I think there are classes around. I mean, this gets into this black hole of what is around and what do you call it, where I've sort of given up. I think that one thing we could talk about is these precede rounds where there are traditionally four or five, eight million dollar cap rounds where people are raising under a million. I think over the last 10 years, just simply because of inflation, those are all double. So to your point, the three on 15 does feel like a medium entry point. And then if you want to do the math and you want to own 10% of everything and have 25 names, you quickly get above with reserves over a hundred million dollar fund. I've tried to keep it under $100 million for a variety of reasons. One is we don't want to make a promise to LPs and founders that we have to own 10 plus percent of every company or lead every deal. And then also just the percentage that we would hold at exit if we're lucky enough to be part of an exit. It may not be meaningful enough if the fund is over $100 million.”

    2022-11-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Semil Shah on The Biggest Mistakes VCs and LPs Made Over the Last 24 Months, Why LP Churn is Coming, Core Lessons on Scaling from $1M Haystack Fund I to Today and How To Find, Win and Manage LPs as an Emerging Manager · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  31. “Clearly communicated that to everyone because the model was working. I just took the path of least resistance there rather than introducing more variability. We probably could erase a lot more, but I just felt, hey, it's an easier pitch to go back to people when they can't meet you and can't meet the portfolio. Our next funds, by the way, will modestly grow, but I still think for what we do, it's got to be under $100 million.”

    2022-11-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Semil Shah on The Biggest Mistakes VCs and LPs Made Over the Last 24 Months, Why LP Churn is Coming, Core Lessons on Scaling from $1M Haystack Fund I to Today and How To Find, Win and Manage LPs as an Emerging Manager · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  32. “Remember the first four I was never able to reach the target of what we wanted to raise. There were always underwhelming in that sense or was the opposite of oversubscribing the participant. Undersubscribed. And so for the last two, they were just marked at 50. And so they answer Hunter's question. I thought of 50 in the first $50 million fund as enabling us to get to a 10% position and precede seed rounds. And then in COVID, I felt like a lot of LPs were going to support us regardless of what we're doing in Fund 5 at that 50 million stake was working. So I just thought, let's not complicate things. Let's literally use the same documents, the same size. It's a rinse and repeat strategy.”

    2022-11-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Semil Shah on The Biggest Mistakes VCs and LPs Made Over the Last 24 Months, Why LP Churn is Coming, Core Lessons on Scaling from $1M Haystack Fund I to Today and How To Find, Win and Manage LPs as an Emerging Manager · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  33. “Someone that you and I have talked about, someone like Roger Ehrenberg, where you can try to become the investor of record and an important company and an important partner to a founder early. And then you show up on the S1 and people are surprised. That's just you're running towards is like a lot of us as investors for the most part, we can't do what entrepreneurs do. We choose not to do what entrepreneurs do. We have the best job in the world. And so to get a chance to be close to one, to sort of steal a line from the Reagan speech and touch a face of God is an amazing opportunity.”

    2022-11-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Semil Shah on The Biggest Mistakes VCs and LPs Made Over the Last 24 Months, Why LP Churn is Coming, Core Lessons on Scaling from $1M Haystack Fund I to Today and How To Find, Win and Manage LPs as an Emerging Manager · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  34. “Kind of like 2015, 2016, but there was probably like a two to three year period where I just wasn't sure. And then you see other people drop off. Again, people drop off voluntarily, but it's when you have people who leave involuntarily and you start to see that and it builds up. I sort of run away from that.”

    2022-11-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Semil Shah on The Biggest Mistakes VCs and LPs Made Over the Last 24 Months, Why LP Churn is Coming, Core Lessons on Scaling from $1M Haystack Fund I to Today and How To Find, Win and Manage LPs as an Emerging Manager · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  35. “In a professional context when I'm running from is just the fear of not being able to participate in the way I want to in the ecosystem. Way before we met, there was like a long period of time where I would even confide in my wife and say like, hey, I don't know if we'll live in the Bay Area and make it here. So over those 10 plus years, I've had lots of industry friends move out of the Bay Area when I say like involuntarily and a lot of personal friends, especially through COVID and the fires move. And I do love living in California. I feel like it's the only place I can live and do what I want to do.”

    2022-11-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Semil Shah on The Biggest Mistakes VCs and LPs Made Over the Last 24 Months, Why LP Churn is Coming, Core Lessons on Scaling from $1M Haystack Fund I to Today and How To Find, Win and Manage LPs as an Emerging Manager · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source