YouSaid · the spoken record

Seth Levine

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30
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2015-08-26
most recent
2015-08-26
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1
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  1. “Yeah, Chakra Vedant is a behavioral scientist. He's a correspondent on NPR. And he writes about the intersection of really psychology and social science that sometimes there's economics mixed in with that and that just plays to kind of my passion and some of my educational background.”

    2015-08-26 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 066: FOUNDRY GROUP WEEK 1: Seth Levine: 'VC Is Not A Scalable Business' · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “My most recent investment is a company called SourcePoint, which is helping publishers around the web deal with the fact that 30% or more in some countries of their traffic is ad blocked. It was founded by Ben Baroque, who was one of the founders of AdMel. I would back almost anything that Ben did. I really, I've had now an eight-year relationship with Ben, and we're close friends as well as business collaborators, and I just love the way that he thinks.”

    2015-08-26 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 066: FOUNDRY GROUP WEEK 1: Seth Levine: 'VC Is Not A Scalable Business' · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “No, I think that they enhance the traditional VC model. And it's great to see, I talked about the democratization of entrepreneurship. I'm equally excited and passionate about the democratization of capital.”

    2015-08-26 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 066: FOUNDRY GROUP WEEK 1: Seth Levine: 'VC Is Not A Scalable Business' · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “My answer to that is maybe a little bit sort of off the question, but I probably say Nikolai Tesla, I think he was such an innovator, not a contemporary, but I really admire his passion for what he was doing and obviously his creativity and innovation was really unparalleled really in the history of inventors.”

    2015-08-26 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 066: FOUNDRY GROUP WEEK 1: Seth Levine: 'VC Is Not A Scalable Business' · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “You take an order of magnitude or in some cases several order of magnitudes step sort of outside of the smaller box that you were in in terms of the number of businesses that can be impacted by that. And I'm actually very passionate about this. I believe that there is a lot of technology that will make business in general in the US. Of course, the vast majority of businesses in the US have 30 or fewer employees. There are a lot of technologies that can that have been built for larger businesses that now can be rebuilt for smaller businesses and really impact the US economy and small businesses and the proprietors of those businesses their lives in a positive way. And so I'm really excited about that. We saw the first wave of that in the”

    2015-08-26 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 066: FOUNDRY GROUP WEEK 1: Seth Levine: 'VC Is Not A Scalable Business' · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “That would point to a couple of different areas. So one is, which is a little mundane, but something that I've been spending some time in, and I've made a few recent investments in, we have this sort of great, there was the original wave of kind of technology that came into business, and that resulted in many large sort of consolidated companies, Oracle, SAP, et cetera, who built these large ERP-type packages. And then we had kind of the next wave of that where pieces of what were those packages were rebuilt for kind of the next generation of web technologies. And that went downmarket a little bit, right? Things like Salesforce and CORR, things like that. And I actually think we're seeing another wave of that into even smaller businesses. And of course, every time you take a step down in terms of the sophistication and the size of the business,”

    2015-08-26 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 066: FOUNDRY GROUP WEEK 1: Seth Levine: 'VC Is Not A Scalable Business' · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “I think that makes this last fund in the decision to raise that fund for us a little bit of a different decision, but also something that really focused us in on what we're most passionate about.”

    2015-08-26 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 066: FOUNDRY GROUP WEEK 1: Seth Levine: 'VC Is Not A Scalable Business' · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “And our passion for technology and technology and where technology is headed, right? Those things that we're most excited about that are changing in the world in general and specifically in the world of technology. And that's where the motivation comes from. And so yes, I guess the pressure is off in some respects, we sometimes talk about entrepreneurs who've had their first win and maybe they're not as worried about buying that house that they want or the ability to send their kids to college. And in a lot of cases, they become even more passionate because then they're working for the joy of the idea and the passion that they have for their project. And I think we've entered that phase of foundry where the four of us very fortunately have been successful in business and as a result both for our investors and for ourselves. And we're now working just because we're passionate about what we're doing.”

    2015-08-26 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 066: FOUNDRY GROUP WEEK 1: Seth Levine: 'VC Is Not A Scalable Business' · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “Thank you very much for that. And so we had a real conversation. This was really kind of the end of last year. And we already could kind of see where Fitbit was headed, how that would impact both the returns of the funds, but obviously fund return translates into return to us as the principals. And so we already saw that. And so that was a conversation that was purely about how passionate are we about what we're doing and how we're doing it and whom we're doing it with. And so we already, we made that decision and we made it together as a group. Now, I think the reality is that Brad has been kind of in that boat for longer than the rest of us in terms of working for passion reasons, not working for salary or income reasons. And so it was interesting to kind of have his perspective into that conversation. But really what motivates us is working with entrepreneurs.”

    2015-08-26 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 066: FOUNDRY GROUP WEEK 1: Seth Levine: 'VC Is Not A Scalable Business' · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “No, it really isn't. And we have this conversation very explicitly because we did have to decide whether we were going to raise sort of this next foundry fund, the one that we just announced closed last month.”

    2015-08-26 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 066: FOUNDRY GROUP WEEK 1: Seth Levine: 'VC Is Not A Scalable Business' · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “Then all of a sudden, lots and lots of people wanted to come in. And so we ended up choosing 225 because we felt like that was a manageable number. And when we chose it, we knew that that was going to be the number for the rest of our time as investors because we had always said in our fundraising process that we were going to raise a series of funds, they were all going to look exactly the same in terms of dollar size. And then when we were done, we were going to be done. We weren't going to be hiring people to backfill and sort of have this long tail that some partners do, and which is perfectly fine. But for our model, that wasn't what we wanted to do. We simply wanted to run our business until we were done. We figured that would be about 20 years together, and then we were going to shut the lights out. And that was the plan. And that is how the plan is worked out. And that's what our expectations are for the next 10 to 12 years.”

    2015-08-26 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 066: FOUNDRY GROUP WEEK 1: Seth Levine: 'VC Is Not A Scalable Business' · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “Really big win at that point. And, you know, Jason and I were, from an investment perspective, more junior than that. Jason had been the general counsel of Modi. It's very experienced in back office. And I have been this sort of junior, junior partner at Mobius. And so it was hard to raise that first fund. And it was funny. Something happened. There was a time in the middle of 2007 where I actually didn't think Foundry was going to come together, which was really a challenging time for me. I'd really truly had put up my entire life savings to back my portion of the startup cost for foundry. And there was a point at which I thought this wasn't really going to happen. Fortunately, we had kind of in the middle of that summer a few really key LPs say yes. And then, you know, again, I think it's not dissimilar to some experience of entrepreneurs.”

    2015-08-26 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 066: FOUNDRY GROUP WEEK 1: Seth Levine: 'VC Is Not A Scalable Business' · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “Well, the first, so we wrote an investment memo for our first fund, an offering memorandum, and we were trying to raise $175 million. And it's funny too. So when we started raising that fund, and this is, I think, true to the experience of many entrepreneurs as well, when they're raising money for their businesses, you get no's before you get yeses. And so we, you know, at the time there was really no such thing as an emerging manager. And we were four guys who were trying to sort of kind of create a name for ourselves in the business, but we're really, you know, only Brad had been kind of a full investment partner at a recognized venture firm. And the rest of us were associates or junior partners. And when we sort of cobbled together our various track records that Ryan had done, made an investment in Postini.”

    2015-08-26 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 066: FOUNDRY GROUP WEEK 1: Seth Levine: 'VC Is Not A Scalable Business' · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “We have so far been on just Google Calendar. We are experimenting a little bit with Clara as the latest experiment in a calendaring solution that we hope will automate some of the calendaring challenges that we have. Now we each have an assistant as well and that helps.”

    2015-08-26 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 066: FOUNDRY GROUP WEEK 1: Seth Levine: 'VC Is Not A Scalable Business' · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  15. “Company, maybe time that a venture capitalist doesn't realize is being taken to prepare for those sorts of meetings, interruption in sort of their normal process and flow. And I think we've been very thoughtful at Foundry to design the interactions that we have with the companies that we invest in in a way that's beneficial to them and beneficial to us, but that's relatively streamlined. And so that might mean, certainly in our case, we tend to have quarterly board meetings not more frequent, right? Maybe with some operational updates in between. We're very heavy users of technology, not just email, but Slack and Voxer, for example, probably the two most used pieces of technology inside of Foundry after email.”

    2015-08-26 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 066: FOUNDRY GROUP WEEK 1: Seth Levine: 'VC Is Not A Scalable Business' · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  16. “Well, I think it's important to recognize that venture capital is not a scalable business by any stretch of imagination. And in particular, it's not the way that Foundry is going after, which is that we're not looking to build a legacy. All the partners do their own work. We don't have any analysts or associates. And so we've had to be really thoughtful about in what ways and in what areas kind of venture capitalists add value to a business and in what ways are we just creating busy work for ourselves? And we've needed to be very focused on those things that give us real leverage. And so there are a few examples of that, but I think when you have too much time on your hands and maybe a little bit too much proximity, in some cases to your investments as a venture capitalist, you have a tendency to feel like you're doing a lot of good by swinging by for a day, for example, or holding monthly board meetings, things that end up chewing a lot of time up at the”

    2015-08-26 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 066: FOUNDRY GROUP WEEK 1: Seth Levine: 'VC Is Not A Scalable Business' · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  17. “across the rest of the US, which is our investment target market, the full US market. And we have some concentrations in New York, in Portland, in Seattle. We've done a few things up in Boston, so we've kind of naturally gravitated to a few markets. But a full third of our portfolio is outside of Colorado and outside of California.”

    2015-08-26 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 066: FOUNDRY GROUP WEEK 1: Seth Levine: 'VC Is Not A Scalable Business' · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  18. “It's easy to forget that, you know, of course, no one knew who Foundry was seven, eight years ago when we started the business. And the way, and Brad had some name recognition going into that. And so that obviously helped. But we really worked our asses off and traveled a lot and spent a lot of time in other markets where we wanted to make investments in order to get ourselves into the deal flow. And of course, now that we've got the reputation that we've been able to garner, now it's a little bit easier and more deal flow comes to us rather than us necessarily having to seek it out. But I hope Foundry serves as an example that you can build an investment business, a venture business, wherever you want. As long as you're willing to put the work in. And of course, in Foundry's case, we've had many successful investments outside of the Bay Area. And so only about a third of our investing has been in California. A third has been in Colorado, and a third has been spread really.”

    2015-08-26 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 066: FOUNDRY GROUP WEEK 1: Seth Levine: 'VC Is Not A Scalable Business' · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  19. “Are and we're seeing pockets of entrepreneurship pop up all over the place. Sometimes, like in the case of Boulder or New York, for example, many other markets around the country and around the world, that has resulted in larger pockets of entrepreneurship. And certainly we've seen that in Boulder, and really I've been witness to that in the almost now 20 years that I've been in the Denver Boulder market, of just the emergence of Boulder as a startup market or the Front Range really as a startup market. So I don't think that the valley has the entrepreneurial market locked up. I think that there are lots of great reasons to start a company in Silicon Valley, but I think there's lots of great reasons to start it out of Silicon Valley. And in terms of building a successful venture business, I will say I feel like Foundry had to be and was very scrappy, especially at the beginning.”

    2015-08-26 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 066: FOUNDRY GROUP WEEK 1: Seth Levine: 'VC Is Not A Scalable Business' · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  20. “No, unequivocally, no. And I hope Foundry would serve as a case study that that's not the case. Sure. So a couple things. One is I would start by acknowledging that the density of entrepreneurship in Silicon Valley is incredibly high. And so there's no question that there are many great businesses, the ones that you mentioned, but many, many, many others. The list is very long, that are being started and built in California and Silicon Valley. That said, there are lots of other great startup markets that are evolving. And I think one of the things that we're seeing change in the venture business and in the entrepreneurship business, if you will, is that there's sort of a democratization of entrepreneurship going on whereby it's easier to get access to those things that you used to only get access to by being in a densely entrepreneurial community. And maybe another way of saying that is you can create a virtual community for yourself almost no matter where you are.”

    2015-08-26 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 066: FOUNDRY GROUP WEEK 1: Seth Levine: 'VC Is Not A Scalable Business' · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  21. “And said, Hey, it sounds crazy, but we're thinking maybe we should do something different. What do you guys think? And over several conversations that evolved into what became Foundry. Hey, let's do this. Let's do it together. And Ryan, in Jason's case, let's move out here. And Ryan's case move his family as well out here. And that's what became Fat Foundry, which we really started working on in earnest in 2006. And then that's the year that Ryan and Jason moved out. And then in 2007, we started raising what became Foundry Group 2007, our very first fund, which we closed in November of that year.”

    2015-08-26 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 066: FOUNDRY GROUP WEEK 1: Seth Levine: 'VC Is Not A Scalable Business' · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  22. “Another fund. It's seven fun. And Brad, of course, had been really the top performer at Mobius. And so he was integral in that process. And at some point in that process, I actually said to him, hey, Brad, I'm not quitting today, but I'm not going to stay at Mobius with Mobius 7. I'm not interested in being a junior junior partner at Mobius. And that's probably not the experience that I'm looking for at this point. Some months later, and I think Brad at that point knew that Mobius was struggling raising a fund, and some months later, that kind of morphed into a discussion with Brad about, well, maybe we shouldn't do Mobius, maybe we should do something else together. And at that point, Brad and I established a really strong working relationship and friendship. And so, you know, that conversation evolved from one conversation, hey, what do you think to actually deciding that we might want to do something? That's when we called up Ryan and Jason.”

    2015-08-26 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 066: FOUNDRY GROUP WEEK 1: Seth Levine: 'VC Is Not A Scalable Business' · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  23. “Is really, I guess, what I wanted to get back to was maybe away from being a manager and more being a doer again. And this, you know, my job at Mobius was very much being a doer. I didn't have anyone reporting to me. So everything I wanted to have done was something I had to do myself. And so anyway, that's how I ended up in Venture, and that's how I met Brad. Fast forward a number of years, my two-year job turned into three, turned into four, eventually they created sort of a junior partner position in Mobius, and I got promoted into that very junior.”

    2015-08-26 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 066: FOUNDRY GROUP WEEK 1: Seth Levine: 'VC Is Not A Scalable Business' · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  24. “And I just thought I was 28 at the time. I wasn't married. I didn't have kids. And I thought, if I'm going to do this, now is the time. Because I had done a lot of corporate development. I'd had some management experience at that point. And I had a couple of other offers that were much better offers from a financial perspective, but doing more of the same. And I thought, you know, I really wanted to try venture capital. And so I decided to go in a very different direction, in some respects, take a step back and become an associate. And all of a sudden I went from having from managing a group that did modeling and everything else to running my own spreadsheets and captables again. And I just, you know, that experience is so important, right? I think that”

    2015-08-26 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 066: FOUNDRY GROUP WEEK 1: Seth Levine: 'VC Is Not A Scalable Business' · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  25. “And so I asked him who he thought I should go work for. And he said, you should go work for Brad Fell. And I said, awesome. Can you introduce me to him? And I knew who Brad was, but we had never met, never crossed paths. And so he introduced me to Brad, and I got an intro to Brad through someone else. And of course, Brad was crazy busy. This is 2000, and he's got 30 boards. And I think it was like a three-month wait to get And Brad's calendar. But I ended up meeting with Brad, and the timing was fortuitous and it was SoftBank Venture Capital at the time later renamed itself Mobius Venture Capital. And Brad's group was hiring. And so I ended up in this process and got a job at Softbank Venture Capital, which at the time was supposed to be a two-year job, hired as an associate at Mobius for two years.”

    2015-08-26 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 066: FOUNDRY GROUP WEEK 1: Seth Levine: 'VC Is Not A Scalable Business' · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  26. “I was so twenty six twenty seven when I took over that portion of that business. It was actually a couple different business lines. A really interesting experience for me, I'd been a manager. I'd managed groups before and maybe at the time I had, oh, I don't know, 15 people, let's say, reporting to me. But all of a sudden I had 250 people in the organization. And it was really a trial by fire. Fortunately for me, I had some really good mentors to kind of help me through that transition. And fortunately for me, I was able to successfully sell each of the pieces of that business. And I had made the decision along the way that I didn't want to stay with the core business. And so when I sold the last piece, I was looking for something else to do. And just, well, the advice that I received from another mentor of mine was you need to go work for someone amazing.”

    2015-08-26 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 066: FOUNDRY GROUP WEEK 1: Seth Levine: 'VC Is Not A Scalable Business' · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  27. “Yeah, no, never quite got out of that stock. But in any event, it was a very interesting experience to live through that. And that company had been private equity-backed. And so when the markets sort of took a downturn and we didn't have the access to capital that we needed, the private equity guys sort of had the business take a different direction and decided to sell off certainly the majority of the revenue of that company. They wanted to focus on another area of the business. And so they actually had me run that business, which was about a $50 million top line business.”

    2015-08-26 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 066: FOUNDRY GROUP WEEK 1: Seth Levine: 'VC Is Not A Scalable Business' · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  28. “young he gave me really the corporate finance half of the CFO role with that business and so I handled all the corporate finance M&A corporate planning business modeling and things like that and built up a team to do that there that company went public in March 2000 March 8th 2000 not to be confused with March 10th 2000 which is when the Nasdaq hit its high Sadly for me, about six months too early, or five months and 28 days too early.”

    2015-08-26 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 066: FOUNDRY GROUP WEEK 1: Seth Levine: 'VC Is Not A Scalable Business' · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  29. “On Wall Street. I was there for a couple years and decided that a banking wasn't really for me. And so I had spent my summers growing up in Colorado. My dad was from here. And so I called up a CEO that I've been working with and just asked him if I could have a job at his telecoms company. And so he hired me and I came out to Colorado in 96 really for lifestyle reasons. I wanted to have a little bit more balance than I had when I was a banker. And so I worked for this telecoms company doing business development. Basically, we were cutting deals with utility companies to lease access to their dark fiber. My boss from that company left and he hired me and I ended up at the company that he was at was really a restart of another telecoms company that we turned into more of a data comms company. And he actually, despite the fact that I was still pretty”

    2015-08-26 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 066: FOUNDRY GROUP WEEK 1: Seth Levine: 'VC Is Not A Scalable Business' · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  30. “Yeah, so, well, going way back, I grew up in Boston and needed to get some time away from the East Coast. So I went to college in the middle of the States in Minnesota in a small liberal arts college called McAllister. Always planned to be a psychologist and professor. And my plan got somewhat thwarted by taking too many econ classes as well as site classes. I ended up as an econ major as well, which has now become Really the study of economics and the study of psychology have become very interrelated in ways that are really exciting to watch. Back then, it was pretty novel. I was certainly the only one really in the history of my college that had done that joint major. Now I think it's very common for people. But anyway, I ended up through for a bunch of different reasons not pursuing an academic career. And I actually landed a job.”

    2015-08-26 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 066: FOUNDRY GROUP WEEK 1: Seth Levine: 'VC Is Not A Scalable Business' · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source