YouSaid · the spoken record

Spencer Lazar

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31
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2015-06-29
most recent
2015-06-29
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1
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  1. “So, my most recent investment is a company called Campus Job, which is a new, which is the largest hiring marketplace where students find work. So it sort of brings together a lot of my interests in labor marketplaces and education and more. And we said yes because we absolutely love the team, the founding team, Liz Wessel in particular the CEO is an absolute dynamic force. And the company has really created a brand at A place in the hiring market where LinkedIn doesn't have a huge brand yet, and we believe that the first job that the first jobs even that a student or a kid gets are really emotional in a powerful place to build a brand in the online recruiting space, and we're just excited partners with campus job. We think they've got a really great future.”

    2015-06-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 049: VC is Getting Younger with Spencer Lazar @ General Catalyst Partners · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “So, current version, not going to fly, but very confident about future versions, including a front-facing camera, glucometer, some form of mobile connectivity, data connectivity, local processing, all those things. I think if they're in place, it has a lot of potential.”

    2015-06-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 049: VC is Getting Younger with Spencer Lazar @ General Catalyst Partners · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “You know, the one that I enjoyed reading over the course of the past year was the book The Everything Store, which is sort of a, I believe an unlicensed biography and story of Jeff Bezos and in the venture business there aren't many more legendary founders than Bezos himself. And I've just been fascinated with his incredible focus, ambition, and ability to kind of reinvent the business time and time again. It's just been fascinating.”

    2015-06-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 049: VC is Getting Younger with Spencer Lazar @ General Catalyst Partners · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “that contribute to potentially better underwriting of risk in insurance. And we have an investment in this space already in a company called Sensio in the auto space that uses data from your smartphone to try to understand your driving behavior better and use that to help insurance companies better price risk for their policies. So we're thinking about how you could apply that type of thinking to other verticals as well, whether it's in the home or otherwise.”

    2015-06-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 049: VC is Getting Younger with Spencer Lazar @ General Catalyst Partners · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “We find accepting. And so there the question is insurances, one of the broad sectors where there is very, very low consumer satisfaction. In many cases, particularly with the transition of millennials into real heads of household in the economy, there's still relatively low brand awareness of some of the old brands that our parents grew up with. And there's a real opportunity to use technology in new ways to kind of delight the consumer and to bring, to create new brand value. So OSCE, for example, is one of our investments. Oscar Health in the Health Insurance space, the we're exploring other verticals where potentially a new brand could be created. And similarly, looking at new distribution models that take advantage of a little bit of the work, for example, the lending Lending club is done.”

    2015-06-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 049: VC is Getting Younger with Spencer Lazar @ General Catalyst Partners · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “So I gave you a little bit of a sense of the areas that I'm interested in right now. I am focused on insurance, focused on other financial services in kind of a week called non-bank lending, which is where companies like Lending Club have emerged, but there are a bunch of other categories where you're seeing non-traditional sources of capital, so hedge funds, family offices, folks like that starting to provide credit to businesses and consumers in new ways. And so, yeah, insurance is one of the areas we're digging into right now.”

    2015-06-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 049: VC is Getting Younger with Spencer Lazar @ General Catalyst Partners · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “And so the question is, how big of a market do you need in order to support a billion dollar company? And if you have a market that is not growing incredibly quickly, that is less than a billion dollar market, you sort of definitionally should not be able to have a billion dollar company. So if you hear us or any venture person say, you know, the market's not big enough, part of what we're trying to get our arms around is can this actually become a company that's worth more than a billion dollars?”

    2015-06-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 049: VC is Getting Younger with Spencer Lazar @ General Catalyst Partners · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “Something typically that is several, you know, the way to think about it is we in the venture business where you're investing out of funds of our size, you really need outcomes to be billion plus dollar outcomes, which is one of the reasons why people have fascinated over the sort of unicorn idea. And in order for that to be the case, you need to have markets that can support billion-dollar companies.”

    2015-06-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 049: VC is Getting Younger with Spencer Lazar @ General Catalyst Partners · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “And so you could take Something like VR VR is not a place where we have made a ton of investments yet as a firm. We have one investment on the West Coast, but it's sort of an emerging ecosystem creative platform set of tools and sort of a new Canvas. And if you believe that that's going to be a big market in five or ten years, it may make sense to play there. But what size markets excite us? I would sort of put my pinky to the corner of my lip and say, you know, markets in the billions. like Docker Evil, but you know.”

    2015-06-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 049: VC is Getting Younger with Spencer Lazar @ General Catalyst Partners · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “It's a good question. I mean, one of the things we talk a lot about in our industry is kind of not necessarily investing in markets that are big today, but will be big in the future.”

    2015-06-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 049: VC is Getting Younger with Spencer Lazar @ General Catalyst Partners · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “Of a business in terms of kind of unit economics and sort of financial fundamentals as this business, and then how defensible is the business? Are there network effects associated with it, very significant barriers to entry, and then how uniquely suited the team in question is to solve the problem that they've laid out? And unfortunately, that's something that's harder to fully come across in the deck, and that's where if the first few boxes are checked, I will ask for a meeting to try to evaluate the team.”

    2015-06-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 049: VC is Getting Younger with Spencer Lazar @ General Catalyst Partners · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “Um... Very much dependent on the company. So if we're just talking about their deck, literally their deck, so I'm not in a meeting with them. I don't know that much about the company. In my mind, a deck is a storytelling device. So I'm really trying to understand the story of the company and why it's going to be very significant. And there are tons and tons of incredibly smart people out there. And the question is, can you take what many times can be a very complicated, sophisticated technology and explain it very clearly? And so at the most basic level, I look for, you know, is the opportunity significant and can they explain it well? And if I dig a layer deeper than that in the deck, what I'm looking for is how good of a good”

    2015-06-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 049: VC is Getting Younger with Spencer Lazar @ General Catalyst Partners · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “With attending and completing a course, they help students finance that and make that sort of the future income accessible.”

    2015-06-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 049: VC is Getting Younger with Spencer Lazar @ General Catalyst Partners · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “And this is a category of education that didn't exist 15 years ago. Certainly it didn't exist 100 years ago, and they're basically creating this new category that companies are doing really well. And then I go as far down as to say, you know, companies like Climb Credit, which is a new, sort of sits at the intersection of a number of my interests. It's a new financial services company which targets vocational schools and students to help people get access to vocational training that wouldn't be able to pay for it otherwise. There's a very, very significant funding gap in our country around tuition associated with vocational schools. And they focus exclusively on those. So anything from a coding boot camp to an aircraft maintenance school to a welding academy, anything where there's a very high ROI associated.”

    2015-06-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 049: VC is Getting Younger with Spencer Lazar @ General Catalyst Partners · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  15. “G-R-O-V-O. So instead of focusing on teaching people to be engineers, which is going to be a very, very important pocket of the economy and already is, Grovo basically says, look, not everybody's going to be a software engineer, but everybody should know how to use the leading software today. So they teach people how to use things like Salesforce or LinkedIn for recruiting or HubSpot for content marketing or the list goes on Dropbox enterprise.”

    2015-06-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 049: VC is Getting Younger with Spencer Lazar @ General Catalyst Partners · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  16. “To design and others going down the spectrum, accompany them a proud angel investor in. It's a company called Ropo, which is basically teaching people how to use regular people, how to use business software. So instead of”

    2015-06-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 049: VC is Getting Younger with Spencer Lazar @ General Catalyst Partners · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  17. “So I'll just kind of give you a full life cycle of stuff from late stage stuff, which I think demonstrate this point all the way down to early stuff that excites me. So on the most obvious example of this over the course of the past few months, folks would look to a company like Linda.com, which was just acquired by LinkedIn for well north of a billion dollars, I think a billion and a half dollars, incredible story of a company. And so that would be one example that's already exited. Another one would be a company called PluralSite, which is an online training company for developers. software developers not to teach development, but whose audience are people that are already developers to learn new skills. And then I would look down to companies like General Assembly, which is sort of this interesting online offline sort of next generation vocational school that teaches everything from software engineering in a variety of settings to digital markets.”

    2015-06-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 049: VC is Getting Younger with Spencer Lazar @ General Catalyst Partners · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  18. “I would say that historically that's been true, but I think that there are a lot of companies that are That was a truism built on old distribution models and a world that hadn't yet fully realized the pain of the skills sort of 21st century skills imbalance that our country faces. And in the face of that very, very significant imbalance, the demand for those skills, largely around not just software engineering literacy, but computer literacy more broadly creates an incredible appetite to spend on education and acquiring those skills. And I think the tide is really shifting and is going to shift significantly.”

    2015-06-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 049: VC is Getting Younger with Spencer Lazar @ General Catalyst Partners · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  19. “So I think about my role at our firm as being what I call a goalie and a sniper. So I'm a sniper in that there are some areas that I am particularly interested in. So, right now that is financial services. We could double click on that if you're interested. Still spend a bunch of time in education, spend a bunch of time in labor marketplaces and sort of broadly the future of work. And I'm now spending a lot more time in insurance. So those are some of the things that I've been chewing on recently.”

    2015-06-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 049: VC is Getting Younger with Spencer Lazar @ General Catalyst Partners · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  20. “What is my perfect founder? Well, I mean, I definitely am not interested in solo founders. I found that to be an unfulfilling journey for most and very much a lonely one. But there can only, in almost all cases, there can only be one CEO. And so I tend to gravitate towards CEO founders who Are very clear thinkers who have strong views about the world but still can be persuaded otherwise so they're good listeners. People who are great storytellers I think that in some ways storytelling is sales storytelling is fundraising storytelling is recruiting those are the things the key things that a great CEO does and you really have to do that well so there's some of the things that I broadly look for across all industries and yeah”

    2015-06-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 049: VC is Getting Younger with Spencer Lazar @ General Catalyst Partners · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  21. “Would do that by all means. I think the one caveat being your schedule may not be the same schedule as other people. So I would not be as the working folk. And so if it takes a couple follow-ups or it takes a couple times to engage someone, don't worry about it. Don't take it personally if you have strong views and you're smart. I'm sure people will appreciate whatever you have to share.”

    2015-06-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 049: VC is Getting Younger with Spencer Lazar @ General Catalyst Partners · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  22. “I would say The first thing is probably to put your opinions out in the world. To be somebody who sits in a library and reads books proverbially and has strong views is certainly one way to develop views. It's not necessarily a great way to be found or to develop a reputation for having those views in social media is a kind of democratic, in some ways democratic playing field where anybody can blog or tweet or otherwise do a video and distribute it and engage with other people. So I would say first and foremost kind of get out there. Don't be afraid to engage with people. Most of the smartest people in the world that do venture capital enjoy interacting and engaging with young people with strong views. So I would”

    2015-06-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 049: VC is Getting Younger with Spencer Lazar @ General Catalyst Partners · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  23. “So I think that venture firms typically are attracted to people with points of view and some degree of domain expertise. It's possible to get that as a young person.”

    2015-06-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 049: VC is Getting Younger with Spencer Lazar @ General Catalyst Partners · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  24. “That kind of thing is very common. It's also common. Young people, I do believe, are increasingly present in the venture business in a way that they were not 10 years ago.”

    2015-06-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 049: VC is Getting Younger with Spencer Lazar @ General Catalyst Partners · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  25. “I mean, a lot of ways venture is a young person's business in terms of knowing what phenomenon are emerging. We look at a lot of, for example, a lot of consumer products wind up becoming into vogue via teenagers and college students anyway. And so having some degree of connection and connective tissue, either in some cases you have partners at Venture Firms who have kids who are teenagers and that's how they learn about these things.”

    2015-06-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 049: VC is Getting Younger with Spencer Lazar @ General Catalyst Partners · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  26. “So it was a very different model. So it sort of gotten into the industry, but it didn't get me into doing early stage venture, which is largely what I do today.”

    2015-06-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 049: VC is Getting Younger with Spencer Lazar @ General Catalyst Partners · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  27. “I got into VC straight away, but remember, this is not early stage VC. And this is not, you know, I wasn't doing VC in the way that I do VC now. In the early stage business, for example, there's a meaningful amount of deal flow that comes to the venture capital firm for a variety of reasons, from a variety of sources, but the most significant of which is you are investing in companies that actually need cash. The insight model was going after companies that don't need cash that were profitable, had never raised money before, and were somewhat large. So it was a very different model. The way that we found companies was different. It was ultimately the early stage venture business typically only has one, two, or three junior people on a team nonpart. On a team, these guys today, Insight has 30 people on their junior team.”

    2015-06-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 049: VC is Getting Younger with Spencer Lazar @ General Catalyst Partners · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  28. “No, no, no, no. I'm sorry if I wasn't clear. No, I was recruited or went through the recruiting process when I was in school, but that was for a full-time job when I graduated. So at 22 was my first day at InSight, age 22. And no, I was not sourcing deals there.”

    2015-06-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 049: VC is Getting Younger with Spencer Lazar @ General Catalyst Partners · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  29. “You didn't really get to work on deals unless you found a deal. So there was very competitive, but also very collaborative, incredible group of people, and gave me the opportunity to learn a lot about the venture business. And now fast forward eight or nine years since I joined Insight at the time. The firm has gone on to at the time it was already a good growth equity firm and now has gone on to really set the bar for what great growth equity, great early growth stage sourcing is. And they do it with young people. For me, it was a great opportunity to, again, to learn the business and to do it from some of the best in the industry. So that's kind of how I got to start it.”

    2015-06-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 049: VC is Getting Younger with Spencer Lazar @ General Catalyst Partners · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  30. “I guess probably wouldn't be called a venture firm at all, called Insight Venture Partners, who had a very particular model for how they build their sourcing team or their sort of deal origination team, if you will, which is that they basically recruited kids exclusively out of college from somewhat notable schools in the US. They had about, at the time, about 10 or 12 of them at a given time. And you're basically an inside sales team. It was a glorified sales job, but the industry you were inside salesperson was venture capital. You were reaching out to companies that basically you thought were interesting working for one of their partners and trying to drum up interesting deals and opportunities. And it very much”

    2015-06-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 049: VC is Getting Younger with Spencer Lazar @ General Catalyst Partners · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  31. “Sure, happy to. BC World is a funny place, and I'm sure you know having talked to many. There historically haven't been sort of obvious channels into the industry. I went about it in a pretty kind of lucky way in a lot of ways. When I was in college, I forever had sort of dreamed of being a BC even since I was a little kid, about 10 years old. And when I was in college, I studied economics and always been in technology, kind of grew up in the same dorm room as the same dorm as the guys that started Facebook while they were there. So there was a tremendous amount of energy around the startup world at the time. There weren't really opportunities to join venture firms at the early stages, but there was a later stage venture firm.”

    2015-06-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 049: VC is Getting Younger with Spencer Lazar @ General Catalyst Partners · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source