YouSaid · the spoken record

Tim Chang

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26
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2017-01-16
most recent
2017-01-16
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1
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  1. “Ah, right, right I said yes because so this is a company called Next Entertainment They are taking the China live streaming phenomena and trying to see if that playbook will apply to the rest of the world. A rare case of instead of China doing copy-paste ventures on a successful US model may be the reverse possibly being true.”

    2017-01-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why We Will See A Big Series B Crunch? Why Proprietary Data Pools & AI Talent Will Be The New Limited Natural Resources? Why Now Is The Closest Thing To A New Normal with Tim Chang, Managing Director @ Mayfield Fund · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “Genius, I know two things that would, but they'll never get passed in my lifetime because people would throw off at the thought. But the first is treating processed sugar like a scheduled narcotic substance because let's admit it.”

    2017-01-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why We Will See A Big Series B Crunch? Why Proprietary Data Pools & AI Talent Will Be The New Limited Natural Resources? Why Now Is The Closest Thing To A New Normal with Tim Chang, Managing Director @ Mayfield Fund · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “Trying to keep a beginner's mind, our human brains are basically shortcut in biased machines, and I find myself always falling into this trying to use pattern recognition and prior experience to shape whether I think something's good or not, trying to stop myself and say, wait, are those assumptions still true?”

    2017-01-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why We Will See A Big Series B Crunch? Why Proprietary Data Pools & AI Talent Will Be The New Limited Natural Resources? Why Now Is The Closest Thing To A New Normal with Tim Chang, Managing Director @ Mayfield Fund · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “I am a big fan of Jason Hirshhorn's redef blog. I think that's a pretty good one. But wait, but why is, of course, my favorite blog? I know that's a common answer by now, but Tim Rud is such a great writer.”

    2017-01-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why We Will See A Big Series B Crunch? Why Proprietary Data Pools & AI Talent Will Be The New Limited Natural Resources? Why Now Is The Closest Thing To A New Normal with Tim Chang, Managing Director @ Mayfield Fund · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “My friend of all Ravicant, founder of Angelists, has influenced me quite a bit. He's opened up the doorway to a lot of conscious hacking, a lot of deep discussions about the nature of technology, our fate and destiny as a species, the nature of love versus fear as a core driving principles for any decision at any moment. Wonderful guy.”

    2017-01-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why We Will See A Big Series B Crunch? Why Proprietary Data Pools & AI Talent Will Be The New Limited Natural Resources? Why Now Is The Closest Thing To A New Normal with Tim Chang, Managing Director @ Mayfield Fund · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “It combines all my favorite elements, consciousness hacking, burning man, the singularity, AI, robotics, kung fu fighting.”

    2017-01-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why We Will See A Big Series B Crunch? Why Proprietary Data Pools & AI Talent Will Be The New Limited Natural Resources? Why Now Is The Closest Thing To A New Normal with Tim Chang, Managing Director @ Mayfield Fund · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “That's just cutting out breakfast and snacks. If you then also add on top of that a high intensity 30 to 40 minute weight training only schedule on, say, three, four days a week, you will pretty much achieve kind of the six-pack Abercrombie Fitch model look, economic guarantee it.”

    2017-01-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why We Will See A Big Series B Crunch? Why Proprietary Data Pools & AI Talent Will Be The New Limited Natural Resources? Why Now Is The Closest Thing To A New Normal with Tim Chang, Managing Director @ Mayfield Fund · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “So, you know, it's always a work in progress. I'm always trying to learn, but I think I have maybe the ingredients for a silver bullet on this. The first is if you can switch your diet to more of a ketogenic or paleo-like diet. So you're eating a lot of lean protein, you know, a lot of high fiber superfood type of vegetables like spinach or kale and broccoli, those sorts of things. If you can do it, cut out all processed sugar, cut out carbs that are starchy and low quality carbs, so namely no more bread, no more pasta, no more rice, no more those sorts of things. Increase your healthy fat intake. These are coconut oils, avocado, etc. And then if you can throw intermittent fasting into the schedule, you'll see immediate wonderful results. I've been playing with intermittent fasting on a daily schedule where it's basically 16 to 18 hours off and then only eating within say a six to seven hour window. Call it noon to 7 p.m. 1 to 7 p.m. something like that. That's not actually that hard. Think about it really.”

    2017-01-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why We Will See A Big Series B Crunch? Why Proprietary Data Pools & AI Talent Will Be The New Limited Natural Resources? Why Now Is The Closest Thing To A New Normal with Tim Chang, Managing Director @ Mayfield Fund · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “Oh, sure. Actually, there's someone related because you're getting data signals back about yourself, right? Machines learning about you and teaching you about your actual behavior. I am embarrassed to try to lay claim to that. I think I'm probably one of the most lazy and vain people in the valley perhaps. So those are my true motivations. There are far more people truly into fitness and athletics, but not me. I dread the thought of hiking or running a marathon. I was more interested in how do you get maximum output for minimal input, especially being as busy as I am. So early on, I was exploring body hacking, and my big learning on it was it's actually 70-80% about what you eat, not even the exercise part. So a lot of body hacking is less about the exercises, more about timing and changing your regimen and what you're putting into your body. I guess that kind of makes sense, right? Because sort of, you know, what you're putting in is what you're going to have to burn off, right?”

    2017-01-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why We Will See A Big Series B Crunch? Why Proprietary Data Pools & AI Talent Will Be The New Limited Natural Resources? Why Now Is The Closest Thing To A New Normal with Tim Chang, Managing Director @ Mayfield Fund · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “The most elegant ones are if you can leverage existing business models like SaaS, right? And so for SaaS, often it's priced on functionality or receipt or things like that. You will have some variance. Some people will go in and try to do it on a value-based saying, oh, hey, why don't we try freemium? We can price it based on lyft or cost savings I should demonstrate for you. But the most straightforward one is probably a standard SaaS-based pricing model.”

    2017-01-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why We Will See A Big Series B Crunch? Why Proprietary Data Pools & AI Talent Will Be The New Limited Natural Resources? Why Now Is The Closest Thing To A New Normal with Tim Chang, Managing Director @ Mayfield Fund · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “We, a salesperson, before you send that email, let me tweak it a bit for you. I think I can write it even better than you could. And so that's an example of machine learning stepping in to help an existing worker do their job better than they could do currently.”

    2017-01-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why We Will See A Big Series B Crunch? Why Proprietary Data Pools & AI Talent Will Be The New Limited Natural Resources? Why Now Is The Closest Thing To A New Normal with Tim Chang, Managing Director @ Mayfield Fund · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “So the most obvious entry point is can you either generate more revenue for an existing line of business or save immense cost on a cost line? Customer service is a great example. Can you either augment the existing customer service workers so they can support 10 people instead of one customer at a time? Or could you flat out replace, for example, the Filipino or Indian call center, right? So that's a direct cost savings there. The other model would be for AI machine learning on the productivity side, what I think of as the AI augmented worker. Can a salesperson handle 20 times more accounts or could they write their emails 10 times better than they could before? We've got a wonderful company called Outreach.io that's playing in this space. Imagine a machine learning system that is seeing the emails of every salesperson, not just in your company, but across all of them, seeing the open rates, response rates, even traction to close. So then you'd have a system that could say,”

    2017-01-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why We Will See A Big Series B Crunch? Why Proprietary Data Pools & AI Talent Will Be The New Limited Natural Resources? Why Now Is The Closest Thing To A New Normal with Tim Chang, Managing Director @ Mayfield Fund · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “So there'll be several broad horizontal ones. These will be business unit applications. You've got your customer service, CRM, ERP. Those that already have large existing enterprise software businesses for them right now that you could potentially augment or disrupt with machine learning AI. Customer service probably the first one I've seen there will probably then also see marketing, sales, CRM being augmented with AI. And then there's vertical applications. These would be your, you know, for example, in healthcare, being able to read radiology charts more accurately with AI, those sorts of things. The big verticals I do like that have big data pools would be financial services, especially things like insurance.”

    2017-01-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why We Will See A Big Series B Crunch? Why Proprietary Data Pools & AI Talent Will Be The New Limited Natural Resources? Why Now Is The Closest Thing To A New Normal with Tim Chang, Managing Director @ Mayfield Fund · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “That's what my biggest fear is that if startups can't train on massive proprietary data sets, then they'll never get that advantage on their algorithms. And then they're really targeted for AquaHire by Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Google, et cetera. I have seen some early cases, though, where some startups have been able to go to large corporate customers. Think of, say, for example, financial institutions, insurance companies, telecom carriers, those with vast data pools that they could train on. And if you're able to get a pilot deal with a major enterprise like that, get access that data, train up your algo, you might have a fighting chance.”

    2017-01-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why We Will See A Big Series B Crunch? Why Proprietary Data Pools & AI Talent Will Be The New Limited Natural Resources? Why Now Is The Closest Thing To A New Normal with Tim Chang, Managing Director @ Mayfield Fund · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  15. “Brand AI rock stars. And I only use the term rockstar loosely in the sense that they are being approached almost like NBA draft picks now, same salary amounts, same recruiting efforts. And so being able to land those people, that is the new test these days. I like to say in this era where we're going to be building for AI first on a lot of companies, proprietary data pools and AI talent are the new natural limited resources. They are the new oil and gold, if you will.”

    2017-01-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why We Will See A Big Series B Crunch? Why Proprietary Data Pools & AI Talent Will Be The New Limited Natural Resources? Why Now Is The Closest Thing To A New Normal with Tim Chang, Managing Director @ Mayfield Fund · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  16. “Okay, so here's the thing because machine learning and AI is the hot new buzzword, expect every single startup pitch to incorporate that as a bullet point, just like they did back when UGC or crowdfunding or any trend of the year was hot. They'll see that in every deck. But the truth is a lot of times it's probably overreaching, if not total bullshit. The way you can suss that out is look at the PhD caliber backgrounds of the teams on their machine learning or AI staff. If they don't come from one of the six world-class centers will be at MIT or others, it probably isn't true. It's probably just automation dressed up as machine learning. So that's something we look at is what is the bench strength of the AI machine learning team there? If those people aren't being systematically poached at by Google or Facebook or whatnot, they're probably not world-class AI machine learning talent. If we're true world-class AI machine learning startups, they're going to need names.”

    2017-01-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why We Will See A Big Series B Crunch? Why Proprietary Data Pools & AI Talent Will Be The New Limited Natural Resources? Why Now Is The Closest Thing To A New Normal with Tim Chang, Managing Director @ Mayfield Fund · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  17. “It is the best way to look at a deal because really your risk is yes, ultimately does it succeed or not, but the immediate risk, can you raise the follow-on round for the company? And so if you've got sort of benchmarks that you're working towards, you at least know where the goalposts are to be able to raise the next round. Probably the riskiest thing is if you don't know what the business model is and you don't know what the metrics will be, then you're really flying kind of blind in the dark and just hoping that traction picks up and that you'll be able to track around. In certain spaces today, like virtual reality, that can work because you've got a lot of interest from Chinese overseas investors and there's no revenue or model that needs to be proven. It's just very strategic for them so that can happen. But in well-known spaces with well-defined metrics like SaaS or e-commerce or other things, you probably should know what your metrics are to hit for your strong series B upround rays.”

    2017-01-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why We Will See A Big Series B Crunch? Why Proprietary Data Pools & AI Talent Will Be The New Limited Natural Resources? Why Now Is The Closest Thing To A New Normal with Tim Chang, Managing Director @ Mayfield Fund · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  18. “Yeah, I think so. And, you know, for us, a lot of it boils down to on series A to B is scalability and is there enough data to show that unit economic model is working case in point, let's say you are an e-commerce company or an on-demand company or something like that, typically people used to say, look at my GMB run rate. My top line is growing really quick. But these days, people are a lot more shrewd. They're going to double click down and say, well, tell me about your payback on contribution margin basis. You know, best of breed is you're paying back on first transaction. Or can you make your payback on contribution margin versus CAC in six months? Can you make 2x on your CAC within, say, 12 to 18 months? Those sorts of things are your acquisition channels for paid users. Is it scalable or does it start topping out after this amount of Facebook ads? It's all those sorts of things that people are really digging into now as opposed to, oh, wow, the GMV is growing really quickly.”

    2017-01-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why We Will See A Big Series B Crunch? Why Proprietary Data Pools & AI Talent Will Be The New Limited Natural Resources? Why Now Is The Closest Thing To A New Normal with Tim Chang, Managing Director @ Mayfield Fund · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  19. “It could be both, but I'm going to throw it out there. Let's call a spade a spade, and there is no real seed two or seed three. That's basically a bridge, right? That pretty much means you haven't found proper product market fit to extend over into a proper series A. So we will see a big Series A crunch, Series B crunch, because rounds that used to be done on momentum now will need more metrics behind them to really prove those out. And if you don't get those, you're looking at a bridge round, whether you call it a Series A2, a Series C2, those sorts of things, right? So the undercapitalized seed or Series A will be the new big risk for founders. It is easy to get that first seed ground because there's so many seed funds around and it's easy to do rolling clothes and do a safe note and get your 750K in. But you could say that is a recipe for being underfunded because the milestones you can prove on only 750k might not really be enough to get you a true Series A later.”

    2017-01-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why We Will See A Big Series B Crunch? Why Proprietary Data Pools & AI Talent Will Be The New Limited Natural Resources? Why Now Is The Closest Thing To A New Normal with Tim Chang, Managing Director @ Mayfield Fund · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  20. “Pro 2009 2 So that is something that we're thinking. The normal pace. You know, mainstream We're typically doing 10, 12 deals a year. So, a main line VC”

    2017-01-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why We Will See A Big Series B Crunch? Why Proprietary Data Pools & AI Talent Will Be The New Limited Natural Resources? Why Now Is The Closest Thing To A New Normal with Tim Chang, Managing Director @ Mayfield Fund · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  21. “The consensus is that right now might be the closest thing to a new normal. And what I mean by that is, you know, Brexit didn't take the world like we thought it would. Evaluations are definitely correct so it's not just 10x GMV on a sharing economy business, how you get valued anymore. People are much more sensitive to economics, LTVs, payback ratios on CAC, all these sorts of sensible ways to value business. And because of that, I actually think it's pretty good time to invest because you also have several massive platform shifts taking off, whether it's AR, VR, my favorite AI machine learning, you know, the business plan of the next 10 years will be take machine learning, AI, add it to existing industry X, disrupt the whole thing. So I actually think you're starting at a wonderful time because you've got a lot of comparables to look at, as well as a more sane valuation environment.”

    2017-01-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why We Will See A Big Series B Crunch? Why Proprietary Data Pools & AI Talent Will Be The New Limited Natural Resources? Why Now Is The Closest Thing To A New Normal with Tim Chang, Managing Director @ Mayfield Fund · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  22. “It made me sometimes wonder what is going on. Am I missing something? And I think the honest answer is yes, because I believe to be a good venture capitalist, you probably need to see a couple cycles both up and down so you know the full spectrum of possibilities, how bad things can go when they go wrong, but also how massively they can explode when things go right or when there's a rising tide. And the way you start into the industry can definitely shade your perception of sort of positive bias or negative bias. So for me, I would say it took a good six, seven years of seeing both up and down cycle to be able to calibrate and say, you know, to be able to see what the possibilities are both in good times and bad times.”

    2017-01-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why We Will See A Big Series B Crunch? Why Proprietary Data Pools & AI Talent Will Be The New Limited Natural Resources? Why Now Is The Closest Thing To A New Normal with Tim Chang, Managing Director @ Mayfield Fund · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  23. “Well, I entered at the fall of two thousand one, so my second week at work was 9-11. This was a very, very scary time to enter the industry because after 9-11, basically it was three years of nuclear winter and seeing startups only go out of business. And that sort of shaded my perspective because I only saw how things could go wrong. In some ways, I think it was a disadvantage because I'd never seen an upcycle when your work is composed of playing interim CFO and helping companies shut down or reduced workforce. You just get a sort of pessimistic view. And sometimes that's a disadvantage because you don't see how things can take off like they did when the Web 2.0 wave took off subsequently.”

    2017-01-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why We Will See A Big Series B Crunch? Why Proprietary Data Pools & AI Talent Will Be The New Limited Natural Resources? Why Now Is The Closest Thing To A New Normal with Tim Chang, Managing Director @ Mayfield Fund · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  24. “These days, perhaps a wide variety of backgrounds are very suitable for venture capital, whether it's journalism, popular personality, a founder operating executive, personal angel investor, any number of these roads could become a successful venture capitalist.”

    2017-01-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why We Will See A Big Series B Crunch? Why Proprietary Data Pools & AI Talent Will Be The New Limited Natural Resources? Why Now Is The Closest Thing To A New Normal with Tim Chang, Managing Director @ Mayfield Fund · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  25. “Oh boy, I'm in the industry now. Now what do I do? Keep in mind this was a prior era when a lot of VCs entered as post-MBA associates. These days, I think the qualifications and specs are a little bit different.”

    2017-01-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why We Will See A Big Series B Crunch? Why Proprietary Data Pools & AI Talent Will Be The New Limited Natural Resources? Why Now Is The Closest Thing To A New Normal with Tim Chang, Managing Director @ Mayfield Fund · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  26. “So I have a confession. I fell into venture capital when I was at Stanford Business School and I didn't know about the industry before I got there. Quite frankly, during my time as an MBA student, people used to say venture capital is one of the hardest industries to get into and it's a hot thing to do. And so I basically said, well, that sounds like a challenge. I wonder if I could get into it. And that is possibly the stupidest reason to get an venture, but it is the honest truth. And it turned out to be a good fit because I had a master's degree in electrical engineering, which is often one of the prerequisites that worked at large companies like Gateway and General Motors and the technology side and product marketing side. So that was helpful. And then I had some time in entrepreneurship doing some stints as an EIR at IDEA Lab. So I checked the boxes as an associate qualification for venture capital firms was recruited into the industry. But my mindset at the time was let's see if I can get into it. And I remember my first day of work thinking.”

    2017-01-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why We Will See A Big Series B Crunch? Why Proprietary Data Pools & AI Talent Will Be The New Limited Natural Resources? Why Now Is The Closest Thing To A New Normal with Tim Chang, Managing Director @ Mayfield Fund · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source