YouSaid · the spoken record

Seth Bannon

lines on the record: 32
first: 2017-08-07
most recent: 2017-08-07
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

“The founders are incredibly brilliant and passionate, and this is one of those things where they can not only reduce the healthcare costs in the developed world substantially while making a ridiculous amount of money, but they can make blood diagnostics available to people who just before were not able to afford it.”
2017-08-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why We Will Continue To See An Explosion In Deep Tech Financing, Why Much of Silicon Valley's Talent Is Going To Waste & How Fund Cycles Need To Be Adjusted To Work With Deep Tech with Seth Bannon, Founding Partner @ Fifty Years · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think that the company that has announced most recently is a company called Othellus, founded by two incredible Sanford dropouts. They've built a device that rapidly and accurately gives blood diagnostics with a drop of blood. Instead of saying we're going to tell you everything about your blood with one drop, they are just attacking the most common blood test, which is called a complete blood count. Currently, if you want a complete blood count, which is a measure of overall immune health, the devices are called flow cytometry devices. They cost $10,000 each. Each test cost $100 to run and take several hours. The Ethelus device costs $250, and each test costs $5. And it gives you your results in minutes. And it works. I actually have one in my house. I've been testing my blood. And they achieve this by using some really clever microfluidics engineering plus computer vision to actually see cell by cell what's happening in your blood. And then they use machine learning on top of that to turn that into a diagnostic. And we invested alongside Sequoia. And it was just a super easy yes for us.”
2017-08-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why We Will Continue To See An Explosion In Deep Tech Financing, Why Much of Silicon Valley's Talent Is Going To Waste & How Fund Cycles Need To Be Adjusted To Work With Deep Tech with Seth Bannon, Founding Partner @ Fifty Years · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Trivial things. And I see it around me a lot where people are going through existential crises. And you talk to them and you figure out that they are spending all their days figuring out how to squeeze a bit more money out of every ad impression. And it's like, you know, of course you're having an existential crisis. You know, you have such potential in the world and this is what you're spending your days doing. So I would love to see people realize that they can make a difference and that they can have everything you want in a career, right? So typically people want to work on interesting problems with cool people, make money, and do good. And you used to have to choose two to three of those things. Now you can have all four. And I would love people to realize that. Career in motiv Speaking is also on the cards for you.”
2017-08-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why We Will Continue To See An Explosion In Deep Tech Financing, Why Much of Silicon Valley's Talent Is Going To Waste & How Fund Cycles Need To Be Adjusted To Work With Deep Tech with Seth Bannon, Founding Partner @ Fifty Years · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I believe aside from what we talked about in terms of the future of business, I feel like we've beaten that bush. I believe that animal agriculture will be eliminated from the face of the earth within the next hundred years. But let's talk about your favorite blog or news that Rainy Day, what's Seth reading? Oh, geez. I read way too much hacker news. I think it does a really great job of pulling together the best insights from across the web for our industry. And I actually find the comment threads are incredibly insightful, considering that it is a comment board on the internet. It's not often where you can have one of the initial kernel hackers of Linux commenting on some tech thread. So yeah, I spend way too much time on hackers. What would you most like to see change in the world of startups and Silicon Valley itself? I think there's just such incredible talent in Silicon Valley. And I think it is largely going to waste. I think that way too many incredibly talented people are working on incredibly”
2017-08-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why We Will Continue To See An Explosion In Deep Tech Financing, Why Much of Silicon Valley's Talent Is Going To Waste & How Fund Cycles Need To Be Adjusted To Work With Deep Tech with Seth Bannon, Founding Partner @ Fifty Years · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, I think a lot of it is the mission alignment that we talked about, right? So the co-investors on some of our last deals were Sequoia, Unuscra Ventures, General Catalyst, Kosla. So, you know, and these are often very competitive rounds. And as a new fund, it's hard to necessarily prove your worth. And so a lot of it, I think, is driven by these entrepreneurs want investors that they can talk to about the entire comprehensive picture of their business. And so they want to be able to talk about their impact mission and how they are not succeeding there, how they can do better. and they want to talk about how they can just generate more profits. And with a lot of investors, that's hard. With us, it's super easy because that's what we're all about.”
2017-08-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why We Will Continue To See An Explosion In Deep Tech Financing, Why Much of Silicon Valley's Talent Is Going To Waste & How Fund Cycles Need To Be Adjusted To Work With Deep Tech with Seth Bannon, Founding Partner @ Fifty Years · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, my favorite book has a book called G ⁇ del Escher Bach by Douglas Hofstadter that explores the concept of consciousness through G ⁇ del's mathematics. Escher's artwork and box compositions. And the theory behind it has actually largely been discredited by cognitive science research. But for me, it just lit my mind on fire and peaked my interest in math and cognitive science and computer science. And so I'm super grateful for it. But in terms of actionable books, I just read one called The Idea Factory, which is an incredible book. It's the history of Bell Labs. It examines both the organization itself and the people who were there. And Bell Labs, if you don't know, invented the transistor, data networking, cellular tidophony satellite telecommunications, the laser, the solar cell, Unix, the C programming language, and just the list goes on. And this book examines how they were able to build an organization so consistently innovated. And I think there's a lot of lessons in there for every investor and every entrepreneur.”
2017-08-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why We Will Continue To See An Explosion In Deep Tech Financing, Why Much of Silicon Valley's Talent Is Going To Waste & How Fund Cycles Need To Be Adjusted To Work With Deep Tech with Seth Bannon, Founding Partner @ Fifty Years · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Technical diligence. And then our favorite people to diligence are entrepreneurs who have a PhD in the field, who are two to three years ahead of the entrepreneur that we're looking at, right? Because ideally, diligence done right is additive for the entrepreneur. So it's not just a waste of time. And so that formula works really well because the later stage entrepreneur is typically really excited to see what's happening at the cutting edge of their field. So they're happy to take the call. You're introducing the younger entrepreneur to a person that might be a mentor or might be able to help open up some doors and business relationship. And then as an investor, you're getting not only a sort of technical diligence, but you're also getting some pragmatic insight that someone purely from academia might not give you. And so we've worked really hard to sort of build out that network. And we're very lucky that given our fund's mission, people are willing to help us do that more so than they would be with a traditional fund.”
2017-08-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why We Will Continue To See An Explosion In Deep Tech Financing, Why Much of Silicon Valley's Talent Is Going To Waste & How Fund Cycles Need To Be Adjusted To Work With Deep Tech with Seth Bannon, Founding Partner @ Fifty Years · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A lot of hustle. It is definitely harder, right? Like you can't be lazy. So one of our portfolio companies is called Memphis Meats. They are culturing meat to eat, so they're basically replicating the same biological processes happening inside of the cow, just outside of the cow to create meat without the animals. And when we were looking into that, we were like, oh my God, this from a first principle standpoint seems interesting, but is this ever going to be economically feasible within the life cycle of a fund? And so we talked to a lot of smart people. We read literally every paper that was available on cultured meat in academia and on the scaling techniques. You know, I spend a lot of time on Sci-Hub. We're lucky to have some LPs that can sort of help us diligent. So one of our LPs is Jan Talon, the technical co-founder of Skype. So whenever we're looking at a sort of machine learning startup and we want to technical diligence whether or not there's any there, he's happy to talk to them and give us his opinion. We have a network of people in labs throughout academia who can help us to”
2017-08-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why We Will Continue To See An Explosion In Deep Tech Financing, Why Much of Silicon Valley's Talent Is Going To Waste & How Fund Cycles Need To Be Adjusted To Work With Deep Tech with Seth Bannon, Founding Partner @ Fifty Years · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think they should. I mean, I think the biggest opportunity in investing right now might just be a fund that has a 15 to 20 year life cycle because it would allow you to make a lot of bets that everyone else sort of sees as incredibly attractive but can't necessarily make because of their fund lifecycle. Our fun lifecycle is at 10 year plus two, right? So we're also constrained by that. And part of the reason we did that is because we want to inspire a lot of copycat funds that are investing in the same type of companies we are. And so we wanted to sort of model what everyone else is doing. Our feeling is that the sort of secondaries market is maturing really attractively and that likely this sort of black and white between private and public IPO is going to sort of disappear into shades of gray and that there are likely going to be a lot of extra opportunities throughout a company's lifecycle as sort of everything becomes a bit more liquid. And so even for deep tech companies, as long as they are making strong progress in laying down strong IP and showing market traction, we think that there will be”
2017-08-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why We Will Continue To See An Explosion In Deep Tech Financing, Why Much of Silicon Valley's Talent Is Going To Waste & How Fund Cycles Need To Be Adjusted To Work With Deep Tech with Seth Bannon, Founding Partner @ Fifty Years · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I hate to use this analogy, but George Bush once said that he looked into Vladimir Putin's eyes and saw his soul. And to be frank, a lot of it is that, right? You can't ask directly. You can't ask, you know, would you sell for 50 million? Because first of all, a smart founder is going to know that as an investor, you have a certain model and that that would not be good for your model. And so they might just say no because they really want the money. And so you have to really dive deeply into the why of the business, right? Like what drive them? Where do they come from? What is their personal story? How did they end up working on this problem? Why is this a problem that they would be incredibly excited to grind out for the next 10 years? And through those questions, I think you can really get close to the truth in terms of what sort of tolerance for risk someone has and how hard someone will push. And especially for us, our founders are not just driven by being a startup founder or building a business. These are people who see a fundamental problem in the world that they think needs to be solved and they're out to solve it.”
2017-08-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why We Will Continue To See An Explosion In Deep Tech Financing, Why Much of Silicon Valley's Talent Is Going To Waste & How Fund Cycles Need To Be Adjusted To Work With Deep Tech with Seth Bannon, Founding Partner @ Fifty Years · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I am happy to calm you down. I think you're actually right, right? So when you develop IP, that is a disruptive threat to a larger industry, it only makes sense as a strategy to try and acquire it, just to bide it away, even if you just buy it and bury it. And so a lot of this comes in just screening the founders. You need to figure out the why behind what they're doing. Are they someone who would be super happy founding a company, selling it for $40 million, and then going on vacation in a visa for a while? If so, they're probably not the best ones to back. But if they are someone, so like, you know, we've invested in a couple companies that are either using directed evolution of enzymes or synthetic biology to make industrial chemicals. And the founders of these companies are absolutely intent on taking down DuPont, taking down Dow, and replacing them with chemical production that is completely sustainable and cheaper. Those teams aren't just not going to sell for $100 million to the people that they're trying to disrupt. And so I think if you choose wisely, then you can push past that. And you can absolutely build.”
2017-08-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why We Will Continue To See An Explosion In Deep Tech Financing, Why Much of Silicon Valley's Talent Is Going To Waste & How Fund Cycles Need To Be Adjusted To Work With Deep Tech with Seth Bannon, Founding Partner @ Fifty Years · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think a lot of money is moving into this space. So right now, this very moment, I think it's a little shaky, but in terms of us as seed investors, we need to see what that landscape will look like two to three to four to five years from now. And when we see what the later stage investors are doing and we see a lot more later stage funds spinning up biotech specific either pools of capital or hiring biotech partners, we think that the transition is definitely heading that way. Even if you look at something early stage like why Combinator, right? They have invested way more attention and resources into attracting and helping synthetic biology and biotech companies than they did four years ago. Four years ago, they weren't doing it at all.”
2017-08-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why We Will Continue To See An Explosion In Deep Tech Financing, Why Much of Silicon Valley's Talent Is Going To Waste & How Fund Cycles Need To Be Adjusted To Work With Deep Tech with Seth Bannon, Founding Partner @ Fifty Years · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Companies that can grow off of debt financing at some point in their lives. So almost every single deep tech company that we've invested in has a clear path to growing off of equity for maybe three rounds and then growing off of project or debt financing for the rest of their life.”
2017-08-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why We Will Continue To See An Explosion In Deep Tech Financing, Why Much of Silicon Valley's Talent Is Going To Waste & How Fund Cycles Need To Be Adjusted To Work With Deep Tech with Seth Bannon, Founding Partner @ Fifty Years · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so especially when you're working with biology, you can't just sort of force progress in the way you can when you're just working with code. And so there definitely is some element of that. We try and only support companies that have a very clear product development timeline. So it can never be as clear and as, you can't be as confident of it as you can be with a pure SaaS company. But we try and avoid, for instance, the companies where they're developing a new therapeutic and if it gets approved by the FDA, the company is worth $2 billion and if it doesn't, it's worth zero. So that we sort of try and stay away from. We try and back companies that are building actual products so they can sell fairly early in their life cycle as a company so that they can actually test market demand fairly early. So something like a symbio company or a small satellite company, things that are still hard and require advanced degrees to pull off, but things that don't necessarily require these very long timelines to at least see if things are working. We also have a strong preference for”
2017-08-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why We Will Continue To See An Explosion In Deep Tech Financing, Why Much of Silicon Valley's Talent Is Going To Waste & How Fund Cycles Need To Be Adjusted To Work With Deep Tech with Seth Bannon, Founding Partner @ Fifty Years · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Or things like CRISPR enabling genome editing to be done cheaply and efficiently, or things like the cost of sequencing dropping faster than Moore's law. And so a lot of these sort of deep tech areas, it is now possible to do a lot more with a lot less.”
2017-08-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why We Will Continue To See An Explosion In Deep Tech Financing, Why Much of Silicon Valley's Talent Is Going To Waste & How Fund Cycles Need To Be Adjusted To Work With Deep Tech with Seth Bannon, Founding Partner @ Fifty Years · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I would say there are a couple things that we're seeing. So, first, it seems to be increasingly difficult to compete with the Googles and the Facebooks and the Amazon on sort of pure SaaS plays, right? They have incredible network effects. They have incredible advantages in the marketplace. They have incredible channel advantages that it seems like it's becoming very difficult to compete with. And then on the flip side, we're seeing the actual costs and complexity of launching a lot of these deep tech businesses drop radically. So one of the areas that we're most excited about is synthetic biology. Five years ago, if you were going to launch a SynBio startup, the very first step would be to raise $5 million and build out a lab before you did anything else. There have been a number of changes over the last five years that actually allow you to get from idea to prototype product on the same amount of money you would need to raise for a seed round if you were raising for a SaaS company, right? So things like shared wet labs or cloud laboratories.”
2017-08-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why We Will Continue To See An Explosion In Deep Tech Financing, Why Much of Silicon Valley's Talent Is Going To Waste & How Fund Cycles Need To Be Adjusted To Work With Deep Tech with Seth Bannon, Founding Partner @ Fifty Years · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You have to find a problem where the more money you make, the more good you do, the more good you do, the more money you make. So we really don't like the sort of like one-for-one model companies, right? So like the Tom's shoe or for every shoe we sell, we're going to donate shoes to a country in the third world. Because then the good you're doing always has to be defended. When you're going into the board meeting, you have to say, why does this still make sense financially for us to be doing this? We prefer things where like for every dollar you make, you're doing one unit of good. So, you know, for instance, a company that is figuring out a cheaper, more sustainable way of producing industrial chemicals using synthetic biology. That's a company that they can literally just put the pedal to the middle and go, and they don't have to worry about any divergence between their impact and their profit.”
2017-08-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why We Will Continue To See An Explosion In Deep Tech Financing, Why Much of Silicon Valley's Talent Is Going To Waste & How Fund Cycles Need To Be Adjusted To Work With Deep Tech with Seth Bannon, Founding Partner @ Fifty Years · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“From an investor standpoint, certainly it's difficult to tell what we call sort of the goody two shoes, the people that are only interested in doing good in the world and really are not interested in building these incredibly valuable businesses from the people who are interested in doing both. So our sort of like very high level filters are we want founders that are interested in building billion dollar businesses that have positive impact. Then we want to see ourselves a path to a billion dollars in revenue. And then we want to see ourselves the path to massive impact. And we get deluded with companies that sort of see that we have this mission but are running a cash flow business in sub-Saharan Africa. And so for us as investors, that's certainly a downside. I don't think that there are many downsides as a business to choosing something that is impactful. If you don't tie it very closely into your profit model, then you run into problems just because you can't finance your company.”
2017-08-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why We Will Continue To See An Explosion In Deep Tech Financing, Why Much of Silicon Valley's Talent Is Going To Waste & How Fund Cycles Need To Be Adjusted To Work With Deep Tech with Seth Bannon, Founding Partner @ Fifty Years · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, I really think the lens of sort of profit plus impact doesn't have to shift anything else, right? So any investor can bring to bear whatever strategy they have in terms of follow-on financing, in terms of ownership percentage, and just say on top of all that, we're going to imply this additional lens. For instance, if you are investing in machine learning technologies, you don't have to, because you're investing in machine learning technologies, change your sort of ownership targets. And so I think most of what we do is sort of pretty typical in terms of how early stage CVCs look at valuations and ownership percentages. We just apply on top of that this additional lens of we only want to invest in companies that are solving these big systemic problems.”
2017-08-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why We Will Continue To See An Explosion In Deep Tech Financing, Why Much of Silicon Valley's Talent Is Going To Waste & How Fund Cycles Need To Be Adjusted To Work With Deep Tech with Seth Bannon, Founding Partner @ Fifty Years · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, exactly, exactly. And so for us, we see those numbers, we see that trend, and we say, my God, if you want to build a truly globally impactful company over the next 10 years and you want to attract the top talent of tomorrow, which is going to be millennials, then you better bake impact into your business model.”
2017-08-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why We Will Continue To See An Explosion In Deep Tech Financing, Why Much of Silicon Valley's Talent Is Going To Waste & How Fund Cycles Need To Be Adjusted To Work With Deep Tech with Seth Bannon, Founding Partner @ Fifty Years · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So 57% of millennials who are in senior management positions, so this is VP or C-level, were planning on leaving the place that they worked in the next four years. And when they were asked why, it was because their values, these impact values, did not align with their business. They thought that their business that they were working for was driven by profits, and they wanted something more. And it's not just the sort of like goody two-shoes. So net impact to a study of MBA students and found that 83% would take a 15% pay cut to work for a company that had positive societal or environmental ends. And just sort of to give you as an investor, I love sort of trend graphs. So it's 83% last year. Nine years ago, it was 26% in five years before that, it was 15%. So this is the continued and sustained growth.”
2017-08-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why We Will Continue To See An Explosion In Deep Tech Financing, Why Much of Silicon Valley's Talent Is Going To Waste & How Fund Cycles Need To Be Adjusted To Work With Deep Tech with Seth Bannon, Founding Partner @ Fifty Years · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it still lies fundamentally in the technology stack, but I think one of the greatest inhibitors to growth of any startup that's achieving any sort of product market fit is attracting the best talent, right? So if you ask a CEO of a company that's growing fast, what is preventing you from growing faster, the vast majority of the time, you will hear them say, I cannot hire great people fast enough. And these companies have a incredible advantage in attracting the top talent of tomorrow, right? So very interesting in the same Deloitte study, even though 87% of the people surveyed thought that a business should be measured in terms of more than just financial performance. Over half, I think it was 54%, believed that businesses had no ambition beyond profits. And what that means is that millennials at these companies are planning on leaving. So that survey showed 25% of millennials were planning on leaving in the next year. 44% were planning on leaving in the next two years, and 66% were planning on leaving in the next four years. And it wasn't just sort of juniors.”
2017-08-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why We Will Continue To See An Explosion In Deep Tech Financing, Why Much of Silicon Valley's Talent Is Going To Waste & How Fund Cycles Need To Be Adjusted To Work With Deep Tech with Seth Bannon, Founding Partner @ Fifty Years · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, it's largely driven by the attitudes of millennials. And the way millennials view business is just radically different than every other generation that came before them. So there was an open-ended question asked to millennials, and the question was, what is the purpose of business? And 47%, which was a plurality in the survey, said the purpose of business is to improve society or protect the environment. And this is just absolutely diametrically opposed to what any other generation would have said, every other generation said number one something about making money. Number two, maybe something about achieving personal success. And this is a global phenomenon. So Deloitte, for example, did a study of 7,700 millennials across 29 countries. And 87% of the millennials they surveyed said that the success of a business should be measured in terms of more than just its financial performance. And in no country did more than 30% of people say that a business”
2017-08-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why We Will Continue To See An Explosion In Deep Tech Financing, Why Much of Silicon Valley's Talent Is Going To Waste & How Fund Cycles Need To Be Adjusted To Work With Deep Tech with Seth Bannon, Founding Partner @ Fifty Years · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I believe you can. And so we get this question a lot. And one of, I think, the analogies that I like to give is at some point people thought the transition to the cloud was going to be a really big deal. And that cloud-based companies would have very real advantages in the marketplace versus ones that were not cloud-based. And it would be kind of silly to say, but can you really pursue a cloud-based strategy while also optimizing for profits? And like the answer, of course, is yes, because the cloud-based strategy gives you very real advantages versus competitors and allows you to take advantage of a lot of sort of systemic things. And so we believe the same thing about businesses that are solving these big systemic problems in the world.”
2017-08-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why We Will Continue To See An Explosion In Deep Tech Financing, Why Much of Silicon Valley's Talent Is Going To Waste & How Fund Cycles Need To Be Adjusted To Work With Deep Tech with Seth Bannon, Founding Partner @ Fifty Years · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“How people have generally thought about business over the last 50 years, right? The purpose of business is to make money. It's to increase profits. Now, you don't do it while breaking the law, but as long as you're operating within the bounds of the law, that is your sole responsibility. And we think it's actually one of the most wrongheaded and probably dangerous doctrines in the history of the world. And I know it sounds a little strange to say that an economic doctrine is very dangerous, but we think it's allowed a lot of businesses.”
2017-08-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why We Will Continue To See An Explosion In Deep Tech Financing, Why Much of Silicon Valley's Talent Is Going To Waste & How Fund Cycles Need To Be Adjusted To Work With Deep Tech with Seth Bannon, Founding Partner @ Fifty Years · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The Friedman Doctrine, in a nutshell, is this idea that the purpose of business and the sole purpose of business is to increase profits, or put another way, to increase shareholder value. It was popularized by Milton Friedman, Nobel Prize-winning economist, in a 1971 op-ed in the New York Times called The Social Responsibility of Business is to increase its profits. And it's actually, that op-ed I highly recommend everyone go and read. It's actually quite absurd. And he says, quote, the businessmen who say that business is not concerned merely with profit, but also with promoting desirable social ends and socials and quotes, and take seriously their responsibility for providing employment, eliminating discrimination, avoiding pollution, or whatever else may be the catch words of the contemporary crop of reformers. But unfortunately, this is how...”
2017-08-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why We Will Continue To See An Explosion In Deep Tech Financing, Why Much of Silicon Valley's Talent Is Going To Waste & How Fund Cycles Need To Be Adjusted To Work With Deep Tech with Seth Bannon, Founding Partner @ Fifty Years · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so we ended up going with the latter group and raised from some really incredible investors like Founders Fund and RE and I Adventures, but it never felt great. And so instead of launching into the multi-year winding process and knowing everyone and having them tell me to fix it, decided to skip that step. And so founded 50 years. And the goal is to sort of be the intersection of that Venn diagram between investors that genuinely care about the why of these companies, but also have some knowledge and experience to at least help them get from nothing to Series A.”
2017-08-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why We Will Continue To See An Explosion In Deep Tech Financing, Why Much of Silicon Valley's Talent Is Going To Waste & How Fund Cycles Need To Be Adjusted To Work With Deep Tech with Seth Bannon, Founding Partner @ Fifty Years · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Fantastic. Just incredible guy. He had a background in politics himself. He immediately got what we were trying to solve. He convinced us to come out to Y Combinator or at least apply. We applied, got in. And then at that point, we had some of the biggest nonprofits in the country using our tool, like every town and human rights campaign, afterwards raised $3 million more. And through that entrepreneurial adventure, I was always a little frustrated because we had every intention of building a billion dollar globally dominant company. But we wanted to do it because we thought this idea of civic empowerment was really important. And like that was the why of what we were doing. And when we talked to investors, we found that they all basically fell into one of two buckets. Either you had the people who really cared about the why or what are traditionally called impact investors, but who knew basically nothing about technology or startups, or you had the people who knew a lot about technology in early stage startups and it could help you build your business and hire and fire and scale, but who probably at the end of the day only cared about the profits.”
2017-08-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why We Will Continue To See An Explosion In Deep Tech Financing, Why Much of Silicon Valley's Talent Is Going To Waste & How Fund Cycles Need To Be Adjusted To Work With Deep Tech with Seth Bannon, Founding Partner @ Fifty Years · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Pulled a database of the Yale Alumni Network filtered by anyone that had founder or co founder in their title and just emailed all of them, basically saying, please help. We have no idea what we're doing. We just raised all this money. Most people didn't respond. We got one person who was very enthusiastic, what was supposed to be a half hour call turned into a two-hour call. That guy's name was Michael Cybel, who is now the president of Y Combinator Corps.”
2017-08-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why We Will Continue To See An Explosion In Deep Tech Financing, Why Much of Silicon Valley's Talent Is Going To Waste & How Fund Cycles Need To Be Adjusted To Work With Deep Tech with Seth Bannon, Founding Partner @ Fifty Years · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I coped by whining about it a lot, and that worked fine for me, didn't work so well for the people around me. I ended up just annoying everyone in my life, friends, family coworkers, and started to hear a lot of people say, you know, if you've got so many great ideas, why don't you fix it? And I thought, me fix it. It's an interesting idea. And so teamed up with some other people who were enthusiastic about it, built a product that I always wanted to use. It turned out that some other people also wanted to use that product. Surprising to us. And I think our first customers were some city council members in New Haven, Connecticut, and they were paying us like $50 a month. And we thought that that was just unbelievable that someone would pay us for this thing we built. And then one of their friends was an angel investor who saw the tool, reached out, asked if he could invest in our startup, and we realized, oh, we have a startup. Cool. That somehow turned into a $600,000 seed round. We very quickly realized after closing it that we had absolutely no idea what we were doing.”
2017-08-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why We Will Continue To See An Explosion In Deep Tech Financing, Why Much of Silicon Valley's Talent Is Going To Waste & How Fund Cycles Need To Be Adjusted To Work With Deep Tech with Seth Bannon, Founding Partner @ Fifty Years · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sure, my professional career actually started off in electoral politics. I think when you're young and want to make a big impact, that's a sort of natural default place to go. And so I started volunteering in this space since I was 14, started working in it as soon as I legally could, helped run campaigns for people running for Senate and governor, worked for President Obama in 2008 on his first campaign. And basically from day one in this space, it was just horrified at the technology and didn't understand why it was 10 years behind the video games that I was playing when I go home at night. And thought, you know, given the importance of the two fields, it should probably be reversed.”
2017-08-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why We Will Continue To See An Explosion In Deep Tech Financing, Why Much of Silicon Valley's Talent Is Going To Waste & How Fund Cycles Need To Be Adjusted To Work With Deep Tech with Seth Bannon, Founding Partner @ Fifty Years · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Thank you for having me, Harry. And I just want to say thank you to Morgan Freeman for that lead in. I don't think he gets enough credit for his consistent performance on this podcast week by week.”
2017-08-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why We Will Continue To See An Explosion In Deep Tech Financing, Why Much of Silicon Valley's Talent Is Going To Waste & How Fund Cycles Need To Be Adjusted To Work With Deep Tech with Seth Bannon, Founding Partner @ Fifty Years · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source