YouSaid · the spoken record

Sheel Mohnot

lines on the record: 81
first: 2023-07-14
most recent: 2023-07-14
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“He looked at that and you're like, it wasn't a surprise. No, like literally from day one. So, okay, on that company, I met a guy who invested in that company relatively early. It was a data-driven VC. I was like, what data do you have for this company? And he was like, we have all this data on number of shares on Facebook of this video about them. And I was like, why the fuck would you invest off of a shares on Facebook shares on a pizza company? Like people were sharing this video about this pizza company on Zoom. It's like a robotic pizza company. And they used as input to invest.”
2023-07-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Fund Sizes Should Be Smaller, Should Founders Also Have Their Own Funds, Is Emerging Markets Investing Gone, Is Fintech Investing Dead & Who Will Be The Winners and Losers in VC in the Next 10 Years with Sheel Mohnot, Co-Founder @ BTV · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Southbank, I think, is just really tough. Like, they made just a ton of incredibly poor decisions, poured a ton of money into bad companies. And we talked about 5125. For them, it's more like 500 on 2.5 for a company that was nowhere near ready to accept that kind of money”
2023-07-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Fund Sizes Should Be Smaller, Should Founders Also Have Their Own Funds, Is Emerging Markets Investing Gone, Is Fintech Investing Dead & Who Will Be The Winners and Losers in VC in the Next 10 Years with Sheel Mohnot, Co-Founder @ BTV · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They recently led a series A of one of our portfolio companies, and they actually, in contrast to their investments in 2021, which John Curtius and others were writing a lot of checks and sometimes very quickly. This one, they led our series A. They did a ton of work and they've actually been super helpful to the company. It's a very different tiger than the one of 2021. They're doing a really good job now. I think it's going to be a much smaller fund. And like you said, it's going to be a ton of their own GP money. I think they're good actors”
2023-07-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Fund Sizes Should Be Smaller, Should Founders Also Have Their Own Funds, Is Emerging Markets Investing Gone, Is Fintech Investing Dead & Who Will Be The Winners and Losers in VC in the Next 10 Years with Sheel Mohnot, Co-Founder @ BTV · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Tough question. I think there's this overhang of valuations, and we haven't yet seen the drop that is going to come and it's going to be so severe. All these growth-round investors that had companies go pipe IPO and then fall, they haven't made any investments. What we're not seeing in some of these companies that have raised more money is just the immense amount of structure that's going into them.”
2023-07-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Fund Sizes Should Be Smaller, Should Founders Also Have Their Own Funds, Is Emerging Markets Investing Gone, Is Fintech Investing Dead & Who Will Be The Winners and Losers in VC in the Next 10 Years with Sheel Mohnot, Co-Founder @ BTV · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Fewer douchebags who like think they know it all. I think there's a lot of insecure folks who just like put down other people. We don't need that”
2023-07-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Fund Sizes Should Be Smaller, Should Founders Also Have Their Own Funds, Is Emerging Markets Investing Gone, Is Fintech Investing Dead & Who Will Be The Winners and Losers in VC in the Next 10 Years with Sheel Mohnot, Co-Founder @ BTV · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They should get hate. I don't hate the founders at all for doing it. But if you did an index of companies where founders took a lot more than that, what I described, like 1x ARR off the table, you have a very negative returning fund.”
2023-07-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Fund Sizes Should Be Smaller, Should Founders Also Have Their Own Funds, Is Emerging Markets Investing Gone, Is Fintech Investing Dead & Who Will Be The Winners and Losers in VC in the Next 10 Years with Sheel Mohnot, Co-Founder @ BTV · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My rule that I like to live by is at the series B and Beyond, you can take as much secondary as you have in ARR. Just think about it. It makes sense, right? Like if you're building a real business, I don't mind if you take chips off the table, but like you've got to be building a real business.”
2023-07-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Fund Sizes Should Be Smaller, Should Founders Also Have Their Own Funds, Is Emerging Markets Investing Gone, Is Fintech Investing Dead & Who Will Be The Winners and Losers in VC in the Next 10 Years with Sheel Mohnot, Co-Founder @ BTV · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We talked about secondary a bunch. I think I'm much more likely to do to take some chips off the table earlier than I was before.”
2023-07-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Fund Sizes Should Be Smaller, Should Founders Also Have Their Own Funds, Is Emerging Markets Investing Gone, Is Fintech Investing Dead & Who Will Be The Winners and Losers in VC in the Next 10 Years with Sheel Mohnot, Co-Founder @ BTV · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We've messed it a lot with Excel. I think they do a really good job in the spirit of keeping fun size small, it is hard to beat benchmark.”
2023-07-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Fund Sizes Should Be Smaller, Should Founders Also Have Their Own Funds, Is Emerging Markets Investing Gone, Is Fintech Investing Dead & Who Will Be The Winners and Losers in VC in the Next 10 Years with Sheel Mohnot, Co-Founder @ BTV · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't know. They gave me 500 bucks for my birthday in Taco Bell credits, which actually Taco Bell gets you pretty far. They also paid for a honeymoon, 25K, which is pretty nice. And they've been great”
2023-07-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Fund Sizes Should Be Smaller, Should Founders Also Have Their Own Funds, Is Emerging Markets Investing Gone, Is Fintech Investing Dead & Who Will Be The Winners and Losers in VC in the Next 10 Years with Sheel Mohnot, Co-Founder @ BTV · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so you're sitting in a room with some of our friends were there too, and we're on camera and there's this metaverse. It's in Decentraland. It was actually really cool. For a while, I was pretty skeptical about it. I've never spent any time in the metaverse, but it was actually, really, really cool. I wrote it on an elephant. People from around the world were there. My family in India was attending. They have their avatars. It was actually really cool. It sounds really stupid. Actually the day of I was thinking this is cool.”
2023-07-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Fund Sizes Should Be Smaller, Should Founders Also Have Their Own Funds, Is Emerging Markets Investing Gone, Is Fintech Investing Dead & Who Will Be The Winners and Losers in VC in the Next 10 Years with Sheel Mohnot, Co-Founder @ BTV · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Submit it, we're not going to win. If we win, we're not going to do it. So, you know, what happens? We get back from the trip. And I'm just like, let me just submit it, whatever. And then we get notified by Taco Bell, we've won. And then we kind of push back and said, hey, like, I don't know if this is for us. We don't want to get married in this Taco Bell metaverse. And then they were like, hey, just get a Zoom call with us. So we got a Zoom call with them. They convince us. They say it's going to be your wedding. We're going to do whatever you want. It can be Indian. We'll design it for you. You're going to be part of the Taco Bell family. They said you're going to be part of the Taco Bell family. And I was like, that's what I've always wanted. So we eventually did it. It was really fun. It was in February.”
2023-07-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Fund Sizes Should Be Smaller, Should Founders Also Have Their Own Funds, Is Emerging Markets Investing Gone, Is Fintech Investing Dead & Who Will Be The Winners and Losers in VC in the Next 10 Years with Sheel Mohnot, Co-Founder @ BTV · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“How do you, okay. So it was in the Taco Bell metaverse. It was an Indian wedding Taco Bell in the metaverse. And you're like, why in the fuck would you do that? And credit to my wife Amrita because she went along with all this crazy shit. You know me, I say yes to a lot of stupid stuff. And this was just another one in a long line of those examples. In this case, Taco Bell had a contest about getting married in the Taco Bell Metaverse. And I'm a fan of Taco Bell. People on my Twitter know that. So when they came out with this, a lot of folks tagged me. They were like, Shield, this is for you. They saw that I just got engaged and they were like, this is perfect for you. You should do it. I was with my wife driving on a road trip. And I mentioned to her, I was like, hey, look at this casually, like, hey, look at this. Wouldn't it be fun? And to my surprise, she said, yeah, all right, let's make the video. It'd be fun. It'd be like a fun exercise. So we took 20 minutes and thought about what we would say and we stopped and recorded it. We only recorded it twice. We didn't think that much about it because we just thought it's a fun thing to do, but we're probably not going to actually submit it.”
2023-07-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Fund Sizes Should Be Smaller, Should Founders Also Have Their Own Funds, Is Emerging Markets Investing Gone, Is Fintech Investing Dead & Who Will Be The Winners and Losers in VC in the Next 10 Years with Sheel Mohnot, Co-Founder @ BTV · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Founders who are funds on the side who lead deals, and that is crazy to me. If you think about, especially now, when we have a bunch of companies that are struggling, we had the SVB crisis, like you need to be there for your founders. And if you're there for your founders, you're not there for your company. And that is a problem. So founders would like investing checks on the side occasionally is fine, or if it's strategic, it's fine. But there are founders who are like leading rounds. I think that's bonkers. We have a company going through some shit right now. I'm there for them anytime of the day or night. And if I was running my own company and this wasn't all I was doing, like I wouldn't be able to do that. I don't know how you square that. How can you be operating a fund and running a company? What do you think?”
2023-07-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Fund Sizes Should Be Smaller, Should Founders Also Have Their Own Funds, Is Emerging Markets Investing Gone, Is Fintech Investing Dead & Who Will Be The Winners and Losers in VC in the Next 10 Years with Sheel Mohnot, Co-Founder @ BTV · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But it's a really hard business. If you're running a tiny fund, it's really hard. Many of these folks are going to continue on. Like their fun two, fun threes are going to be really tough.”
2023-07-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Fund Sizes Should Be Smaller, Should Founders Also Have Their Own Funds, Is Emerging Markets Investing Gone, Is Fintech Investing Dead & Who Will Be The Winners and Losers in VC in the Next 10 Years with Sheel Mohnot, Co-Founder @ BTV · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think that's true, but I think the way things are a couple percent, one to two percent. If you can't do it, it's probably fine, but I actually don't think we need like 100 new managers or thousands of new managers every year. Do you think we see”
2023-07-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Fund Sizes Should Be Smaller, Should Founders Also Have Their Own Funds, Is Emerging Markets Investing Gone, Is Fintech Investing Dead & Who Will Be The Winners and Losers in VC in the Next 10 Years with Sheel Mohnot, Co-Founder @ BTV · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Totally, and I'll tell you what can happen if the GP commit is too high. You can be financially strapped and you can say, oh, I'm going to sell my position in this company in the Series B because I need to return that capital to myself. And that can be a misalignment.”
2023-07-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Fund Sizes Should Be Smaller, Should Founders Also Have Their Own Funds, Is Emerging Markets Investing Gone, Is Fintech Investing Dead & Who Will Be The Winners and Losers in VC in the Next 10 Years with Sheel Mohnot, Co-Founder @ BTV · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, yeah, a lot of GPs went a little crazy in 2021. LPs were probably unhappy about that. I think if you do what you say you're going to do, LPs are happy.”
2023-07-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Fund Sizes Should Be Smaller, Should Founders Also Have Their Own Funds, Is Emerging Markets Investing Gone, Is Fintech Investing Dead & Who Will Be The Winners and Losers in VC in the Next 10 Years with Sheel Mohnot, Co-Founder @ BTV · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I have a board with Jeff Hooring, the founder of Insight. He doesn't speak that much, but when he does, it's like, oh, he's absolutely right. And I can look back a couple times about what he said. He was like, absolutely right. One of my other companies, we had David Lowey, who was CMO of Google. Same thing. Didn't speak that much, but when he did, he was absolutely right. He had a story about Google. And it was really good. Their experience is right. And I think a lot of younger guys can discount that experience. But it's really valuable. And the same shit happens time and time again. And you realize that like them having seen it over the past 20 years is incredibly valuable.”
2023-07-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Fund Sizes Should Be Smaller, Should Founders Also Have Their Own Funds, Is Emerging Markets Investing Gone, Is Fintech Investing Dead & Who Will Be The Winners and Losers in VC in the Next 10 Years with Sheel Mohnot, Co-Founder @ BTV · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I want to be supportive to a founder in there when they need me. And that can happen in a board relationship. But usually that's not what happens in the board. And so I'm meeting with the founder every week or every couple weeks anyway. And the board is a totally different beast that's like structured. A board can be helpful for the founders to sit back and reflect on their business once a quarter. And it's very effective for that.”
2023-07-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Fund Sizes Should Be Smaller, Should Founders Also Have Their Own Funds, Is Emerging Markets Investing Gone, Is Fintech Investing Dead & Who Will Be The Winners and Losers in VC in the Next 10 Years with Sheel Mohnot, Co-Founder @ BTV · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I've seen it in some of our portfolio companies. Like a lot of ECs are very prescriptive on how to do things. We try to not be that. We try to be supportive, but not too prescriptive. I think you can get into a mistake being too prescriptive, telling founders what to do rather than like recommending what to do. And I've seen that even from good investors that I've been alongside on the board, I've had founders like call me after a board meeting saying, like, hey, what the fuck was that? I'm doing everything I was supposed to do. Why is this VC telling me what to do?”
2023-07-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Fund Sizes Should Be Smaller, Should Founders Also Have Their Own Funds, Is Emerging Markets Investing Gone, Is Fintech Investing Dead & Who Will Be The Winners and Losers in VC in the Next 10 Years with Sheel Mohnot, Co-Founder @ BTV · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think the chippeg. They're both doing what I would call series A's as well. Like they are writing $10 million checks. And I don't think of that as a seed round. But I think it's too big. And I think as you get bigger, you're more open to doing these 5125 deals that actually aren't good for the founders either. You're like, oh, yeah, it doesn't matter to me as your fund size increases.”
2023-07-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Fund Sizes Should Be Smaller, Should Founders Also Have Their Own Funds, Is Emerging Markets Investing Gone, Is Fintech Investing Dead & Who Will Be The Winners and Losers in VC in the Next 10 Years with Sheel Mohnot, Co-Founder @ BTV · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They do a lot of seeds and they have had good success. My friends at Excel have done a pretty good job. I think the folks that have done the spray and prey approach is very bad. And people go in and out of it. So like Andreessen did a lot of it early on in Andreessen Horowitz's tenure. And then they stopped doing it and they started doing it again. And I would guess they stopped doing it now.”
2023-07-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Fund Sizes Should Be Smaller, Should Founders Also Have Their Own Funds, Is Emerging Markets Investing Gone, Is Fintech Investing Dead & Who Will Be The Winners and Losers in VC in the Next 10 Years with Sheel Mohnot, Co-Founder @ BTV · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's a learning check. But what happens is my portfolio company that is working is raising a Series A or Series B. They don't want to talk to that investor because that investor invested a million dollars in their competitor. That competitor is almost dead anyway, but they're like, fuck them. I'm not going to talk to that guy. They invested a million dollars in my competitor. And so they missed the opportunity to invest hundred million dollars in a great company that is winning the category because they invested a million dollars in their competitor. So I just don't think it makes sense for a multi-stage fund to do it, especially in a category where like there are multiple competitors. Why would you invest when you know that you might have invested in the wrong one and that prevent you from investing in the code one?”
2023-07-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Fund Sizes Should Be Smaller, Should Founders Also Have Their Own Funds, Is Emerging Markets Investing Gone, Is Fintech Investing Dead & Who Will Be The Winners and Losers in VC in the Next 10 Years with Sheel Mohnot, Co-Founder @ BTV · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Lot of the multi stage stuff is quite dumb. A lot of these folks have invested like million dollar checks to kind of a lot of folks and letting their junior team invest million dollar checks in anyone.”
2023-07-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Fund Sizes Should Be Smaller, Should Founders Also Have Their Own Funds, Is Emerging Markets Investing Gone, Is Fintech Investing Dead & Who Will Be The Winners and Losers in VC in the Next 10 Years with Sheel Mohnot, Co-Founder @ BTV · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, it's actually almost impossible because what happens is if you raise five, the expectations people have for salaries are different than if you raise two. It's basically impossible to have the same mentality as if you raise two. Absolutely. And I agree with you completely. Like raising big rounds makes people cushy. You end up attracting people with salaries that they could have gone into a big company. Actually, they belong at a big company.”
2023-07-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Fund Sizes Should Be Smaller, Should Founders Also Have Their Own Funds, Is Emerging Markets Investing Gone, Is Fintech Investing Dead & Who Will Be The Winners and Losers in VC in the Next 10 Years with Sheel Mohnot, Co-Founder @ BTV · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think bad founders raise a ton of money and spend it. Great founders raise a ton of money and still have the same sense of urgency, still are on the same roadmap as if they'd raised a much smaller role.”
2023-07-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Fund Sizes Should Be Smaller, Should Founders Also Have Their Own Funds, Is Emerging Markets Investing Gone, Is Fintech Investing Dead & Who Will Be The Winners and Losers in VC in the Next 10 Years with Sheel Mohnot, Co-Founder @ BTV · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“First of all, you can fail to find product market fit even if you're a great founder, and you can get stuck behind your idea, not pivot early enough. I think you have to come to a point, and this is actually where feces, I think, actually can be very value add, is say we should think about a different business and make a plan. So actually I have this going on with one of my portfolio companies now. We have a plan, and if we don't get to that plan in the next two months, we're going to think about a different company. We're going to pivot. We have years of runway, but the current thing, it's working a little bit. There's signs that it's working, but we worry that even if it's working, it's not going to get to a huge business. We're going to test this out for a few months, and we're staying close on it as investors. And if it doesn't work, we're going to pivot.”
2023-07-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Fund Sizes Should Be Smaller, Should Founders Also Have Their Own Funds, Is Emerging Markets Investing Gone, Is Fintech Investing Dead & Who Will Be The Winners and Losers in VC in the Next 10 Years with Sheel Mohnot, Co-Founder @ BTV · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, but it was an interim win. It was like a too early win. I've seen in my age your portfolio a founder that I thought was just okay, ended up getting to an exit. And I think if they'd continued on the business, it wouldn't have been that successful. And that happens all the time. Like you have companies that are successful up to a certain point. The worst company gets an acquisition. The better company sticks around and then they go public and then totally tank. It's happened many times in the past few years.”
2023-07-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Fund Sizes Should Be Smaller, Should Founders Also Have Their Own Funds, Is Emerging Markets Investing Gone, Is Fintech Investing Dead & Who Will Be The Winners and Losers in VC in the Next 10 Years with Sheel Mohnot, Co-Founder @ BTV · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And what he said about her was he said, I would back her in anything she did, any business she wanted to go into, she would be successful. And so it's actually a counter. Like, it's a great founder. She would be successful at anything she did.”
2023-07-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Fund Sizes Should Be Smaller, Should Founders Also Have Their Own Funds, Is Emerging Markets Investing Gone, Is Fintech Investing Dead & Who Will Be The Winners and Losers in VC in the Next 10 Years with Sheel Mohnot, Co-Founder @ BTV · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And actually, what's really funny is they pushed it out of the business in part because they were fighting over the control of the carpet department. She said, I never want to let go of the carpet department. That's going to be my thing still. And they were like, no, you should get out of here. They pushed her out. Her kids. And then what she does is six months later, she opens a place across the street from them, literally a furniture store competing with them across the street. It's called Mrs. B's furniture clearance market or something like that across the street from the Nebraska Furniture Mart. And then eventually Warren Buffett has to buy that one too. And then he puts a non-compete clause in there that she, whatever, 96 years old is not going to compete with him again.”
2023-07-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Fund Sizes Should Be Smaller, Should Founders Also Have Their Own Funds, Is Emerging Markets Investing Gone, Is Fintech Investing Dead & Who Will Be The Winners and Losers in VC in the Next 10 Years with Sheel Mohnot, Co-Founder @ BTV · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Omaha. Originally in their basement, then they grows and grows and grows. She didn't even go to school. She never even went to kindergarten, but she's just got such a mind for business. She continues to grow this thing incredibly. He eventually buys it 90% of it for like $60 million or something. It was actually the largest acquisition that Berkshire had made at that point. Her kids end up kind of pushing her out of the business. She's 95 years old at this point.”
2023-07-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Fund Sizes Should Be Smaller, Should Founders Also Have Their Own Funds, Is Emerging Markets Investing Gone, Is Fintech Investing Dead & Who Will Be The Winners and Losers in VC in the Next 10 Years with Sheel Mohnot, Co-Founder @ BTV · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't think that's exactly true. I think there are founders who can do both, but many of our top ones, they had a competitor that was raising more and more money than they were. And then in the end, that competitor tanked our like build guy who never was a great fundraiser ended up doing well. One thing about this founder versus market, there's a Warren Buffett quote that everybody likes to reference, which is when a great founder meets a bad market, the market wins. So he says that. But one of my favorite stories is Rose Blumpkin. So there was this woman who came over from”
2023-07-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Fund Sizes Should Be Smaller, Should Founders Also Have Their Own Funds, Is Emerging Markets Investing Gone, Is Fintech Investing Dead & Who Will Be The Winners and Losers in VC in the Next 10 Years with Sheel Mohnot, Co-Founder @ BTV · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“People can get too excited about an idea and invest behind the wrong founder just in that idea. In our case, banking as a service, we talked about unit. So units of banking as a service company, a lot of folks looked at that company and said, we love this company, but they couldn't invest. They ended up investing in another company in the same space. And that was just a mistake. Invest in the best company, not in number two or number three. And a lot of those haven't shaken out to not work out that well.”
2023-07-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Fund Sizes Should Be Smaller, Should Founders Also Have Their Own Funds, Is Emerging Markets Investing Gone, Is Fintech Investing Dead & Who Will Be The Winners and Losers in VC in the Next 10 Years with Sheel Mohnot, Co-Founder @ BTV · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, we haven't found it difficult in the selling. Well, we said, like, we're at a point where we've invested for so many years in this company. We want to start reducing our position. And founders get it. It's not a big deal, especially back then when there was way too much demand for every round of the company.”
2023-07-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Fund Sizes Should Be Smaller, Should Founders Also Have Their Own Funds, Is Emerging Markets Investing Gone, Is Fintech Investing Dead & Who Will Be The Winners and Losers in VC in the Next 10 Years with Sheel Mohnot, Co-Founder @ BTV · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's one company I'm thinking of that could have returned multiples on the fund. And in between when I had started to discuss taking money off the table and when we had finally like the documents, it took like a few months. And during that time, this company grew so much. And they were like, you know what? I wouldn't sell at that price. They told me we'll get this through for you, but I wouldn't sell at that price given how much we've increased in value. And they were like, we'll probably do another round in the next couple months. You might want to wait. I talked to the founders and they were like, you might want to make wait, we might be worth double what you're selling at. And so I did that. And then, of course, they never were able to, this is, you know, beginning of 2022. The market started tanking and they were never able to get that round done that they thought would be a double.”
2023-07-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Fund Sizes Should Be Smaller, Should Founders Also Have Their Own Funds, Is Emerging Markets Investing Gone, Is Fintech Investing Dead & Who Will Be The Winners and Losers in VC in the Next 10 Years with Sheel Mohnot, Co-Founder @ BTV · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I generally think in one case we sold our entire position to a later stage investor. But that's unusual for us. I think generally speaking, we'd like to just ease our position. And if you can return an entire fund, there's something about having one XDPI that's quite nice. If you can get to a point where you can return one XDPI and still have upside in a company, that's great. Ideally, if you're still excited about the company, you want to keep half of your capital or half of your equity still in the company.”
2023-07-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Fund Sizes Should Be Smaller, Should Founders Also Have Their Own Funds, Is Emerging Markets Investing Gone, Is Fintech Investing Dead & Who Will Be The Winners and Losers in VC in the Next 10 Years with Sheel Mohnot, Co-Founder @ BTV · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's right. You had to see the market and say we should sell here. So we did, in some cases, now, of course, we didn't sell nearly enough. We should have sold more and we had opportunities too and we did.”
2023-07-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Fund Sizes Should Be Smaller, Should Founders Also Have Their Own Funds, Is Emerging Markets Investing Gone, Is Fintech Investing Dead & Who Will Be The Winners and Losers in VC in the Next 10 Years with Sheel Mohnot, Co-Founder @ BTV · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it's the best time to do an accelerator. Number one, so I ran an accelerator from 2016 to 2018, and that fund has incredible performance. More important than that, founders that we backed back then in the accelerator said, hey, my friends are starting a company. What's the closest thing to what we had, which was in person, super hands-on. So we had experts in growth, marketing, recruiting available to them. The answer was there's nothing like it. Why sees a totally different beast? But it's really built for scale. Some of our portfolio companies I went through YC said they didn't really get the support in fintech that they needed. They have like a generalist mentor who doesn't know anything about fintech. And so they would be asking these questions and they had no idea what to do. So we felt like, oh, there's an opportunity here. Once again, people are asking for a fintech solution and we can give them that. In 2016 to 2018, I did it five cohorts. I was investing in a two and a half million dollar valuation then. And we have five companies that are more than 70x. So we did five cohorts of six to ten companies out of all those. So say it's like 40 companies in total.”
2023-07-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Fund Sizes Should Be Smaller, Should Founders Also Have Their Own Funds, Is Emerging Markets Investing Gone, Is Fintech Investing Dead & Who Will Be The Winners and Losers in VC in the Next 10 Years with Sheel Mohnot, Co-Founder @ BTV · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Five of our biggest investors, one family office, and then the others are fund of funds. I would say we don't use it that much. We use it for conflicts or we launched this accelerator recently. When we launch the accelerator, we said, hey, we should get their approval. And so we talked to them.”
2023-07-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Fund Sizes Should Be Smaller, Should Founders Also Have Their Own Funds, Is Emerging Markets Investing Gone, Is Fintech Investing Dead & Who Will Be The Winners and Losers in VC in the Next 10 Years with Sheel Mohnot, Co-Founder @ BTV · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“All of our LPs are 10% or less of our fund. It makes us feel good now in a market where if any one LP doesn't come into our next fund because circumstances changed, it's fine for us. We have other folks who want to fill those gaps. We actually pushed folks down to the 10%. So some folks had wanted to do larger checks and we pushed them down.”
2023-07-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Fund Sizes Should Be Smaller, Should Founders Also Have Their Own Funds, Is Emerging Markets Investing Gone, Is Fintech Investing Dead & Who Will Be The Winners and Losers in VC in the Next 10 Years with Sheel Mohnot, Co-Founder @ BTV · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So we ended up closing pretty quickly. Some of these folks that we actually would really like to have in our fund, some like University Endowments that we have a great relationship with. And we told them that they had more time than they did. So that didn't really work out”
2023-07-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Fund Sizes Should Be Smaller, Should Founders Also Have Their Own Funds, Is Emerging Markets Investing Gone, Is Fintech Investing Dead & Who Will Be The Winners and Losers in VC in the Next 10 Years with Sheel Mohnot, Co-Founder @ BTV · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, we didn't know that that was going to happen. And it actually caught us by surprise and screwed us up a little bit in some ways. We had intended on running a process and we'd spoken to a bunch of LPs and actually told these LPs, like, you have plenty of time. And, you know, for some LPs like University Endowments, it just takes time. It takes a few months. Like they have a different IC process. And we told them like, yeah, we're meeting now, but don't worry. We're going to raise in Q1 and you can commit to us by March. What ended up happening was we closed everything in December and we did it all pretty quickly. Part of it was December 2021 was a good time to raise them.”
2023-07-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Fund Sizes Should Be Smaller, Should Founders Also Have Their Own Funds, Is Emerging Markets Investing Gone, Is Fintech Investing Dead & Who Will Be The Winners and Losers in VC in the Next 10 Years with Sheel Mohnot, Co-Founder @ BTV · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. So there's no easy way. I think you give them a date, and then odds are they're going to be, okay, hey, like, I know that date doesn't matter because if I want to invest, I'm going to be able to invest. And so that's what happened in Fun one. It took a while. So it took us about a year from start to finish. And Fund Two was very different. There really was much more demand than we had space. We told our existing LPs, fund one LPs, commit to us by this date. All of them came back and committed by that date. We were actually kind of surprised.”
2023-07-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Fund Sizes Should Be Smaller, Should Founders Also Have Their Own Funds, Is Emerging Markets Investing Gone, Is Fintech Investing Dead & Who Will Be The Winners and Losers in VC in the Next 10 Years with Sheel Mohnot, Co-Founder @ BTV · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Now, fun two, we raised in December 2021 the whole process only took a month. For fun two, we had a bunch of folks who knew us by reputation. They talked to other managers about us. They knew companies in our portfolio well. Like they tried to invest in them or whatever. So there were folks who were literally just checking the box by talking to us. And in a 20 minute meeting, they were willing to commit large sums of money. So like double-digit millions because they knew us. And I get where they're coming from. They know us by reputation. They've spoken to other managers who sit on boards with us or whatever. What more do you need?”
2023-07-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Fund Sizes Should Be Smaller, Should Founders Also Have Their Own Funds, Is Emerging Markets Investing Gone, Is Fintech Investing Dead & Who Will Be The Winners and Losers in VC in the Next 10 Years with Sheel Mohnot, Co-Founder @ BTV · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so our target was 60. We ended up going to 75. And even at the 75, we had to push people down from what they wanted to invest.”
2023-07-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Fund Sizes Should Be Smaller, Should Founders Also Have Their Own Funds, Is Emerging Markets Investing Gone, Is Fintech Investing Dead & Who Will Be The Winners and Losers in VC in the Next 10 Years with Sheel Mohnot, Co-Founder @ BTV · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Like shit. So we're like at that point, we were shooting for a $60 million fund. We sent a letter to LPs saying, you know what? We're going to go for like 30 to 40. We said all these things that in hindsight were wrong, which is we thought valuations were going to come down, which, you know, at the time it seemed like that was going to happen. Of course, actually the opposite happened. So we said we're going to do a smaller fund. And then what happened was May interest rates go down, money printer goes br. Everyone came back. And even folks that had said no to us came back and said, hey, actually, like we were looking at the managers that we spoke to, we'd like to talk to you again. And several of the folks that said no to us actually came back and came into the fund and we ended up with a pretty institutional fund.”
2023-07-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Fund Sizes Should Be Smaller, Should Founders Also Have Their Own Funds, Is Emerging Markets Investing Gone, Is Fintech Investing Dead & Who Will Be The Winners and Losers in VC in the Next 10 Years with Sheel Mohnot, Co-Founder @ BTV · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So then we were like, we were feeling pretty good. It was December of 2019. And so we're like, all right, we're going to do a second close. We decided March of 2020. And we felt like we had a bunch of folks committed. We did one road trip. We went out to the East Coast from San Francisco, Jake and I went out. The second week of March 2020. When we flew out there, things were fine. All of a sudden, everyone canceled all the meetings. COVID started. The NBA shut down. Like everything happened. And it was basically a totally wasted trip. And we came back on a completely empty flight. There were 10 people on a flight that would hold 200 people. And this clothes that we were supposed to do in March, everyone who had already committed, including people who had signed, backed out. So we were like, shit, we don't have a fund. The world is melting. The world is falling apart. The stock market is going strictly downwards. I don't mind that people were like, I can't invest in your fund. I don't know how much money I have. I don't know what's going on in the world. Totally get it.”
2023-07-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Fund Sizes Should Be Smaller, Should Founders Also Have Their Own Funds, Is Emerging Markets Investing Gone, Is Fintech Investing Dead & Who Will Be The Winners and Losers in VC in the Next 10 Years with Sheel Mohnot, Co-Founder @ BTV · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. I think we did our first call of like 10%, which is a lot, but it was also fine. And then once you do a first capital call of 10%, we were able to get a line of credit. So then you can take more on the line of credit.”
2023-07-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Fund Sizes Should Be Smaller, Should Founders Also Have Their Own Funds, Is Emerging Markets Investing Gone, Is Fintech Investing Dead & Who Will Be The Winners and Losers in VC in the Next 10 Years with Sheel Mohnot, Co-Founder @ BTV · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, exactly. Yeah. So it was amazing because that company has been super successful. Like, I think the winner in this banking is a service space.”
2023-07-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Fund Sizes Should Be Smaller, Should Founders Also Have Their Own Funds, Is Emerging Markets Investing Gone, Is Fintech Investing Dead & Who Will Be The Winners and Losers in VC in the Next 10 Years with Sheel Mohnot, Co-Founder @ BTV · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source