YouSaid · the spoken record

Taavet Hinrikus

lines on the record: 71
first: 2025-04-28
most recent: 2025-04-28
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“No, we pay our own legal fees Usually, the company pays investorate legal fees. I'll show you where it is in the term sheet after the discussion.”
2025-04-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: VCs are Spreadsheet Monkeys and are Commoditised | Why Fees and Carry Misalign GPs and LPs | Why Founders Will Realise Multi-Stage Funds Damage Seed Rounds | Why We Need European Sovereignty More Than Ever with Taavet Hinrikus · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We don't like the idea playing with a house money is something that we're not so keen on. So it's a personal check. The size of it depends on the individual's position. So for some people, it's smaller, for some it's bigger. But we want it to be something which is meaningful. So you think about like, I'm investing my own money in addition to the fund where I'm already an investor. And I think there may be a ritual part as well of wiring from your own account at the same time as we wire from the fund account. Maybe it's interesting to mention like, there are other weird things in venture like where does the idea come from that you should pay your investor's legal fees? Well, we pay our own legal fees. Vast majority of venture deals, as in the term sheets that you pay your investor's legal fees. What is this about? It comes from the money you give the company if the company pays their legal fees.”
2025-04-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: VCs are Spreadsheet Monkeys and are Commoditised | Why Fees and Carry Misalign GPs and LPs | Why Founders Will Realise Multi-Stage Funds Damage Seed Rounds | Why We Need European Sovereignty More Than Ever with Taavet Hinrikus · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Collectively, we are the biggest investor in the fund. I don't think we're not going to start talking about numbers, but you've been the business, you know how much the biggest LP in a fund could be as a percent so you can mount a mass of top of that.”
2025-04-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: VCs are Spreadsheet Monkeys and are Commoditised | Why Fees and Carry Misalign GPs and LPs | Why Founders Will Realise Multi-Stage Funds Damage Seed Rounds | Why We Need European Sovereignty More Than Ever with Taavet Hinrikus · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't think venture should be rich people's area only. Going back to what we spoke about before, look at where someone invests their own money. We are the biggest investor in the fund ourselves. And additionally, every deal we do, the lead partner of the deal, writes a personal check. So we are...”
2025-04-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: VCs are Spreadsheet Monkeys and are Commoditised | Why Fees and Carry Misalign GPs and LPs | Why Founders Will Realise Multi-Stage Funds Damage Seed Rounds | Why We Need European Sovereignty More Than Ever with Taavet Hinrikus · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, 10 years is short. I mean, if I look at why he's now looks like a simple fintech company, everyone is doing fintech companies. You know, it took us, we started working on it with Crysto in 2010. We launched beginning of 2011. We went public in 2021. I was a 10-year journey. But also to be honest, the last three years were probably pretty liquid, even we were private. Let's call it seven years. And maybe for deep tech companies it's 10 to 12, you know, if you hit the bad patch in the markets, it becomes 15. I think we need to recognize this. But I think also maybe at some point people just need to be more disciplined in returning some capital early. There are some investors outside who are very vocal. I think Fred Wilson has spoken a lot about taking some money off the table.”
2025-04-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: VCs are Spreadsheet Monkeys and are Commoditised | Why Fees and Carry Misalign GPs and LPs | Why Founders Will Realise Multi-Stage Funds Damage Seed Rounds | Why We Need European Sovereignty More Than Ever with Taavet Hinrikus · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I do worry. We need to come up with better solutions for some of the long liquidity problems. Some of these companies may need billions, but I think at the same time, if the companies are well capitalized, they can reach milestones, then you have liquidity. The best example of all is maybe SpaceX today. It's a private company, has had zero liquidity issues. There is a secondary market always open. So journey in the beginning was very hard, but being able to attract the capital to get to a place where you hit your milestone and make progress. So, especially in what you call crazy companies that we back, it is definitely harder. But I think we need to make sure these companies are hitting milestones, creating value even if revenues take longer. And I think Semsar will be opportunities.”
2025-04-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: VCs are Spreadsheet Monkeys and are Commoditised | Why Fees and Carry Misalign GPs and LPs | Why Founders Will Realise Multi-Stage Funds Damage Seed Rounds | Why We Need European Sovereignty More Than Ever with Taavet Hinrikus · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's a game. Don't blame the player, blames a game. It goes both ways. As the industry evolves, maybe things will change. And, you know, we're hopefully doing our part to make this a better game for everyone.”
2025-04-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: VCs are Spreadsheet Monkeys and are Commoditised | Why Fees and Carry Misalign GPs and LPs | Why Founders Will Realise Multi-Stage Funds Damage Seed Rounds | Why We Need European Sovereignty More Than Ever with Taavet Hinrikus · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Earn your right to do it. When hiring people for a startup, you want to hire the people who are dying to work to build this company. You don't want to hire the people who are coming here for the biggest salary. Yes, you want to make sure they are compensated ridiculously well if things go well. I am very proud of the fact that when we built WISE, everybody had stock options, including every customer support agent. As a customer support agent who joined in the beginning, they all made a million dollars when WISE went public. I'm super proud of this. Similarly in Venture, the team and GPs, once we have this magic DPI, they should make lots of money. But I don't think people in venture should make a lot of money just because they are deploying capital.”
2025-04-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: VCs are Spreadsheet Monkeys and are Commoditised | Why Fees and Carry Misalign GPs and LPs | Why Founders Will Realise Multi-Stage Funds Damage Seed Rounds | Why We Need European Sovereignty More Than Ever with Taavet Hinrikus · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't think Gaddis in general fundamentally the idea of collecting a 2.5% management fee does not really make sense. It does not align us with the outcomes. At plural, we charge about half the management fee, and we think we are much better aligned. And also what it enables us to do is make a few more investments per fund. So in fund one, we probably made two more investments because of this. Fund two, we think we'll make four more investments as a result. That's four more shots on goal. That is pretty damn important. And still, we have a fantastic team. We have 5G piece. Everyone is being paid well, but not ridiculously.”
2025-04-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: VCs are Spreadsheet Monkeys and are Commoditised | Why Fees and Carry Misalign GPs and LPs | Why Founders Will Realise Multi-Stage Funds Damage Seed Rounds | Why We Need European Sovereignty More Than Ever with Taavet Hinrikus · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What I would ask about is are they investing other people's money or their own money as well? I think there is one thing if you're a rich investor and you play with only other people's money. There's a different thing if you're a rich investor and you're investing your own money. It's a question of alignment and hopefully we'll talk more about this but like we've saw deeply about alignment in venture and how to make sure that we are better aligned with both our LPs and our founders. And I think that to me is a core thing of like look at what a person does with their own money and I think that's kind of the most important”
2025-04-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: VCs are Spreadsheet Monkeys and are Commoditised | Why Fees and Carry Misalign GPs and LPs | Why Founders Will Realise Multi-Stage Funds Damage Seed Rounds | Why We Need European Sovereignty More Than Ever with Taavet Hinrikus · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We love repeat founders. When we look at the people we've backed and the ones we haven't backed, what stands out to us is that so repeat founders, they typically go for a much bigger goal. Torsten did a gaming company and he went into defense. And we can talk about Danny Alec as the first company was e-commerce. And then he took on a massive challenge of building Spotify. So we love the fact that these people, they go for a massively bigger goal next time. And again, I don't know if they have a bigger likelihood of success, but even if the likelihood of success is the same, the outcome is so much bigger. They've learned a fair few things on the journey. I don't think I would be that excited to back a founder who built Fintech Company 1 and then goes on to build Fintech Company 2.”
2025-04-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: VCs are Spreadsheet Monkeys and are Commoditised | Why Fees and Carry Misalign GPs and LPs | Why Founders Will Realise Multi-Stage Funds Damage Seed Rounds | Why We Need European Sovereignty More Than Ever with Taavet Hinrikus · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We are looking to back some most ambitious entrepreneurs, whatever they're building. So we're looking at Proxima Fusion. That's maybe what you would call departure. Then we look on the other side, we have T-ton, which is using CCTV cameras to monitor patients. It's not that complicated maybe. It's a full spectrum. But I think it's a character of the entrepreneur, which it may be the most important. Approximately half of the founders we back are repeat entrepreneurs. We look at Torsten who built the gaming company. Then he went into building a defense company and he started Helsink in 2020 or 2021. You need to have something which makes you tick differently to go building a defense company four or five years ago before this became a hot topic.”
2025-04-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: VCs are Spreadsheet Monkeys and are Commoditised | Why Fees and Carry Misalign GPs and LPs | Why Founders Will Realise Multi-Stage Funds Damage Seed Rounds | Why We Need European Sovereignty More Than Ever with Taavet Hinrikus · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And that's why we were always looking for people who were a couple years ahead of us. And we feel also now, like even now when we speak to founders, she really appreciates the fact that we've been in our shoes. Does it make us a better investor? Frankly, I don't know. Time will tell. It makes us better partners for the people we invest in.”
2025-04-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: VCs are Spreadsheet Monkeys and are Commoditised | Why Fees and Carry Misalign GPs and LPs | Why Founders Will Realise Multi-Stage Funds Damage Seed Rounds | Why We Need European Sovereignty More Than Ever with Taavet Hinrikus · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's about ability to assess the founders and think about what could this look like once we get to product market fit. When you have product market fit, when you have metrics to look at, I think everything becomes a lot easier. It's a challenge is really before that. A big part of it is also we're five partners at plural. We've all built companies before. We've all raised money. We've either raised money or tried to raise money from pretty much everybody who was around 10 years ago. The best of the best and the worst of the worst. Every time we had the most insightful conversations with the people who had built their own companies. In the seed round, we got Max Levchin when we were raising money for transfer wise, as it was called before. Mino Send, we raised money from Ben Horowitz. And same for my partners. We had some most insightful conversations with people who had been on operating journeys.”
2025-04-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: VCs are Spreadsheet Monkeys and are Commoditised | Why Fees and Carry Misalign GPs and LPs | Why Founders Will Realise Multi-Stage Funds Damage Seed Rounds | Why We Need European Sovereignty More Than Ever with Taavet Hinrikus · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is a lot more unpredictability, but I think there is still companies that run a gross directory. I think SA will look somewhat similar and more spreadsheet-like. And they need capital and people need to give some capital. There's nothing wrong with that. But that's maybe even more similar to what public market investing used to look like long time ago. But I think if you're talking about trying to spot the next trillion dollar company, I think that's a lot harder. Maybe even harder now than it was back in the days because competition is bigger in some sense. There are more people trying.”
2025-04-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: VCs are Spreadsheet Monkeys and are Commoditised | Why Fees and Carry Misalign GPs and LPs | Why Founders Will Realise Multi-Stage Funds Damage Seed Rounds | Why We Need European Sovereignty More Than Ever with Taavet Hinrikus · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In an operating company, or even more Saskar tissue, you have from building, being a founder, being a CEO is very different.”
2025-04-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: VCs are Spreadsheet Monkeys and are Commoditised | Why Fees and Carry Misalign GPs and LPs | Why Founders Will Realise Multi-Stage Funds Damage Seed Rounds | Why We Need European Sovereignty More Than Ever with Taavet Hinrikus · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What I meant by this is that if you are looking at mid stage SAS company, consumer company, where all you need to do is stack up the cohort curves, take away the CAC, multiply by LTV, pay a very high price to win the deal, that is not very exciting to me. And that's what I mean by spreadsheet monkeys. But if you're talking about early stage when you're really looking the founder deep in the eye, trying to figure out why is he doing it, what is his unfair advantage to build a generational business, thinks that's very different. And some things that I've said many times is that if you look at the European landscape, the vast majority of the European GPs have not spent a single day working in a real company. They've worked in consulting firms, banks, but they haven't worked in a real operating company. And I think the scar tissue you have from working”
2025-04-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: VCs are Spreadsheet Monkeys and are Commoditised | Why Fees and Carry Misalign GPs and LPs | Why Founders Will Realise Multi-Stage Funds Damage Seed Rounds | Why We Need European Sovereignty More Than Ever with Taavet Hinrikus · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think a lot of that rings a bell, but I think we need to unpack it a little bit more. I think, you know, it's very different if you're talking about deploying beak checks in mid or late stage. It's very different if you're doing high speed investing in early stage kind of what I did as an angel. It's very different to what we do at Plural, which is backing the most ambitious founders. And sometimes there's no one else who wants to backs them. I think we need to unpack this into different parts of the venture ecosystem. And different parts, I think, are going through different journeys.”
2025-04-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: VCs are Spreadsheet Monkeys and are Commoditised | Why Fees and Carry Misalign GPs and LPs | Why Founders Will Realise Multi-Stage Funds Damage Seed Rounds | Why We Need European Sovereignty More Than Ever with Taavet Hinrikus · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, one of the things I missed out on investing in bolts seed round, but then a couple years later, I was really impressed with Marcus and I spent a bunch of time and I spent a lot of my limited liquidity buying up secondaries in Bolton like 2017.”
2025-04-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: VCs are Spreadsheet Monkeys and are Commoditised | Why Fees and Carry Misalign GPs and LPs | Why Founders Will Realise Multi-Stage Funds Damage Seed Rounds | Why We Need European Sovereignty More Than Ever with Taavet Hinrikus · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I made my first angel investment probably about 20 years ago, and I think, you know, through building wise and still working at Skype, I was like, I met other people who were building businesses. I was excited about what they were doing. I wanted to be part of the journey and wrote the small angel ticket. I went into overdrive once I stopped running-wise, doing 30, 40, 50 deals a year. I was fun, you know. But I think it was, it started feeling to me a little bit Wall Street-esque high speed deployment. I think it was a great portfolio strategy, since the portfolio has done really well, but it felt it wasn't very kind of mission aligned. I thought sorry is something more that can be done. And that's kind of what's the beginning of thinking, hey, we should start plural, we should really think about getting founders who have scar tissue from building companies to become investors.”
2025-04-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: VCs are Spreadsheet Monkeys and are Commoditised | Why Fees and Carry Misalign GPs and LPs | Why Founders Will Realise Multi-Stage Funds Damage Seed Rounds | Why We Need European Sovereignty More Than Ever with Taavet Hinrikus · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Do not be that asshole There are plenty of stories out sir of respectable VCs not picking up the Fomo in the bad times. We are commoditized productary VCs are a commodity you can press them down Fundamental is the idea of collecting two and a half percent management fee does not really make sense it does not align us with the outcomes If we can't imagine 100x we should not be entertaining this idea of this deal.”
2025-04-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: VCs are Spreadsheet Monkeys and are Commoditised | Why Fees and Carry Misalign GPs and LPs | Why Founders Will Realise Multi-Stage Funds Damage Seed Rounds | Why We Need European Sovereignty More Than Ever with Taavet Hinrikus · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source