YouSaid · the spoken record

Tim Harris

lines on the record
22
first
2017-09-01
most recent
2017-09-01
sittings or episodes
1
sources
podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

  1. “Yeah, well, I love the. Basically, I read the first round review religiously. I don't know if people have heard of this. Then on the next five years for you and for Swift, what's on the roadmap ahead? There's just an enormous amount to build for us. I mean, we put out kind of first generation of our product. There's some really exciting stuff that we need to be able to do to unlock the autonomous market. And that's deep in production. Now it's going to take us several years to get that to market and to enable the future of autonomous vehicles. So that's what we're focused on. Have you on the show, Tim. As I said, I heard so many great things from the teams at Len Nawson and first round and Felisis, so thank you so much for joining me today. Yeah, thanks, Harry.”

    2017-09-01 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: What Is The Big Lie To Silicon Valley, Why Silicon Valley Is No Longer Optimised For Deep Tech Investing & Why AI Will Lead To More Business Model Innovation Than Technology Innovation with Tim Harris, Founder & CEO @ Swift Navigation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “Patience, I'm an inherently impatient guy, and especially deep technology takes so much longer than you originally think. We're going into five years now and you realize, wow, these things are hard and they're big problems and you really have to take them piece by piece. It's kind of a strange one without knowing our business, but universal cell coverage is just incredibly important, something it's pretty difficult to do because it's actually more of infrastructure investment more than anything else, but just because I think it would cause huge ripple effects for us and for lots of other industries. Favorite blog or newsletter, it's a rainy day. What are you going to curl up on the sofa with? Once again, another cop up. This is just my family newsletter.”

    2017-09-01 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: What Is The Big Lie To Silicon Valley, Why Silicon Valley Is No Longer Optimised For Deep Tech Investing & Why AI Will Lead To More Business Model Innovation Than Technology Innovation with Tim Harris, Founder & CEO @ Swift Navigation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “Get real momentum behind other bits of business because their main business is so good already. It sounds good. Meditations by Marcus Aurelius. Why is that? The reason is because I think a lot of fundamental lessons of leadership have already been litigated and relitigated many times and they haven't changed. Humans are still fundamentally humans and books like meditations and several others are the best form to learn about these basic human leadership aspects. I'd like to say what I believe the most people around me disbelieve is your own bullshit. I think you have to be just as critical of what your own thoughts are, even around your business and challenge your own assumptions. But that's maybe a cop-out answer.”

    2017-09-01 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: What Is The Big Lie To Silicon Valley, Why Silicon Valley Is No Longer Optimised For Deep Tech Investing & Why AI Will Lead To More Business Model Innovation Than Technology Innovation with Tim Harris, Founder & CEO @ Swift Navigation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “It's all about incentives. It's really all about what are the incentives of their business typically when you're dealing with these large corporate entities that whatever their main businesses, it's more important to them than you are. That's just a fact. So if you go to a company, a large company in telecom or silicone or automotive and their main product line is doing $50 billion a year in revenue and you come to them and you say, look, I have a great idea. You can make $100 million in four years. You know what? You can make more than that. You can make $500 million in four years. Yeah, they may find that attractive or they make a step back and look at that and say, well, you know, that's 1% growth. And what is the investment that we should really put in to go after that 1% growth over five years? These companies need to deliver higher than that anyway. So their incentives are not aligned. So what you need out of a partner is some value that you can offer them on their main product line is what I personally believe because a lot of them have these innovation departments and they want to explore lots of other things, but politically they just cannot.”

    2017-09-01 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: What Is The Big Lie To Silicon Valley, Why Silicon Valley Is No Longer Optimised For Deep Tech Investing & Why AI Will Lead To More Business Model Innovation Than Technology Innovation with Tim Harris, Founder & CEO @ Swift Navigation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “I think you see a lot more partnership as a result. I think entirely replacing what's out there is not terribly feasible. If you look at what's happening, and this is not entirely the case, but if you look at what happened, let's say, the automotive market, which is particularly difficult to disrupt because of just the amount of regulation, standards and practices, what I call the automotive bureaucracy, there are a lot of startups, but most of their plan is to partner with automotive companies. Very few of them are competing directly alongside the large automotives. I mean, obviously Tesla, but you don't consider them a startup once their valuation passes General Motors. But by and large, I think, yes, I think a partnership model is actually more appropriate because you can't win at everything now. It used to be the rules of change, things are harder. You want to figure out what is the thing that you can do better and just that thing and then partner with people for the other bits.”

    2017-09-01 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: What Is The Big Lie To Silicon Valley, Why Silicon Valley Is No Longer Optimised For Deep Tech Investing & Why AI Will Lead To More Business Model Innovation Than Technology Innovation with Tim Harris, Founder & CEO @ Swift Navigation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “Yeah, I mean, well, I'm not particularly worried about the other startups in our space. I think we're head and shoulders of them. But I really take seriously the corporate innovation departments and the different larger, I wouldn't call them startups, but technology companies out there. They're very smart people and they work very hard and they have pretty good forethought on what to build. You hear this question all the time as an entrepreneur. Well, how do you win if Google decides to go do this? Someone with more time, more people, more money than you, by people I mean smarts, right? More smarts time in people and money than you. The honest answer is you can't if that's totally the case, right? You have what I call Silicon Valley arrogance going around where people are just like, look, because our people are better or, you know, we're smarter or our plan is better. In reality, you can only really win by picking a new direction and then accelerating towards it faster than anyone else. Everyone else is running in another direction at a very high speed. What you want to do is pick a new point on the horizon, accelerate as fast as you can. So by the time they turn ship and get after you, you already ahead of them.”

    2017-09-01 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: What Is The Big Lie To Silicon Valley, Why Silicon Valley Is No Longer Optimised For Deep Tech Investing & Why AI Will Lead To More Business Model Innovation Than Technology Innovation with Tim Harris, Founder & CEO @ Swift Navigation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “So building Deep Tech has actually gotten significantly easier, mostly because of the mobile phone ecosystem. So, for instance, if you look at what we actually build, we build as little hardware as possible. What I mean by that is we actually are building just a PCB board, which is just a little computer board. And we're using all commodity components. We're using what are called FPGAs, which are programmable logic chipsets that are made by folks like Xilinx for, I mean, actually, I think Bitcoin drove a lot of the Bitcoin mining drove a lot of the development of the technology. But the point being that we use fully programmable chipsets such that our hardware is actually very flexible and everything is software updates for us. And that really lets us run software development cycles on what is essentially a hardware product. Now, that's different from back when you were actually spinning silicon chipsets for everything. But that market has been entirely taken over by the larger players.”

    2017-09-01 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: What Is The Big Lie To Silicon Valley, Why Silicon Valley Is No Longer Optimised For Deep Tech Investing & Why AI Will Lead To More Business Model Innovation Than Technology Innovation with Tim Harris, Founder & CEO @ Swift Navigation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “Oh, entirely. Yeah. When we went out and raised a couple years ago our seed round, it was a little under three million, which at the time was large for a seed round. Now I've seen seed rounds $5, $10 million. It's absolutely frothy. And I think it's because the companies are being somewhat realistic in what it's going to take them to perform. Now, Fowers and Investor with equal competency and business model innovation companies and technology model innovation companies, I would put those two side by side and say, you know, is it really a good use of capital? The cost of capital being so high on the deep tech company. Now, that said, the deep tech companies, the reason why you see lots of investment in them is because the business model innovation companies themselves are not particularly, only a few of them work as well. They're not particularly defensible, a lot of them. They're playing, they're small opportunities and they're easy to compete when the barriers are low on technology. So the barriers end up being quite high in DTEC, and that's one of the advantages.”

    2017-09-01 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: What Is The Big Lie To Silicon Valley, Why Silicon Valley Is No Longer Optimised For Deep Tech Investing & Why AI Will Lead To More Business Model Innovation Than Technology Innovation with Tim Harris, Founder & CEO @ Swift Navigation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “Yeah, well, I mean, there's some debate on whether or not four women can make a baby in six months or this or that. Some things just take time. They take teams working for a certain amounts of time. And when you're building a web app, that can already take enough time. But if you're actually building something that requires a fair amount of research on the R&D component, that also takes even longer. And you need as a founder to be able to build out a runway that does that. And that's also why I personally believe building a revenue source alongside it is particularly important.”

    2017-09-01 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: What Is The Big Lie To Silicon Valley, Why Silicon Valley Is No Longer Optimised For Deep Tech Investing & Why AI Will Lead To More Business Model Innovation Than Technology Innovation with Tim Harris, Founder & CEO @ Swift Navigation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “Yeah, I think for us, yeah, you definitely need more capital. There are more capital intensive businesses than anything else. And if you're smart, it's not because you're moving fast. A lot of things just take time. You've probably heard the old engineering adage, nine women can't make a baby in a month, right? Well, that's...”

    2017-09-01 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: What Is The Big Lie To Silicon Valley, Why Silicon Valley Is No Longer Optimised For Deep Tech Investing & Why AI Will Lead To More Business Model Innovation Than Technology Innovation with Tim Harris, Founder & CEO @ Swift Navigation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “I think that's right. I think in many VC's minds, that's the plague. Can we throw a bunch of money at something and then hope that someone will buy it for the technology or for the ability to build technology? The problem with that thinking is that's really more of a lottery ticket. And that's hugely, it can be hugely capital intensive, right? And you really have to hit the market with perfect timing. Now, if you could build a business that is sustainable from a revenue standpoint and grow from a revenue standpoint in deep tech the same way that you would in any other business, you can still build that deep technology, which you have to figure it out in such a way that there are discrete saleable parts along the way”

    2017-09-01 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: What Is The Big Lie To Silicon Valley, Why Silicon Valley Is No Longer Optimised For Deep Tech Investing & Why AI Will Lead To More Business Model Innovation Than Technology Innovation with Tim Harris, Founder & CEO @ Swift Navigation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “This is where you need knowledge for deep technology. You need to understand what aspects of the bomb they're looking to come down. I think a lot of it tends to be external and dependent on startups. I see this a lot. Oh, there's a lot of companies innovating around X, Y, or Z. And those just take a really, really long time. If you can piggy to something a little more steady, Moore's law, or this is how Moore's law is perpetuated in solar panels or what have you, then it's a lot easier for me to believe. Or quite frankly, there is value to being first. And this is the market growth value. And if I believe that the company has enough market growth value, maybe it's a worthwhile investment as an investor, even if you know that it's not going to be sustainable down the road.”

    2017-09-01 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: What Is The Big Lie To Silicon Valley, Why Silicon Valley Is No Longer Optimised For Deep Tech Investing & Why AI Will Lead To More Business Model Innovation Than Technology Innovation with Tim Harris, Founder & CEO @ Swift Navigation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “Yeah, so I believe this big lie about unit economics changes is just as relevant in different types of industries, including deep tech. So the one that you see a lot in deep tech is, oh, don't worry. The ones the bomb cost comes down, this is going to be totally profitable. So people, the bomb cost, I should say, is the bill of materials, the cost that it takes you to build, let's say, a robot that does some sort of function. So if you have a robot, we'll just say that one that drives, right? We'll say, look, this car is going to make money as a ride-sharing service once the cost of the car comes down, because right now it costs us $3 million to build the car. But when it costs us a hundred grand, then the business model will make sense. And that's kind of the same lie, but not in, you know, the unit economics, but in the actual cost of the technology today versus where they see it going. Unfortunately, by the time you get there, the landscape has changed. Competitors have changed. Technology has changed.”

    2017-09-01 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: What Is The Big Lie To Silicon Valley, Why Silicon Valley Is No Longer Optimised For Deep Tech Investing & Why AI Will Lead To More Business Model Innovation Than Technology Innovation with Tim Harris, Founder & CEO @ Swift Navigation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “So at the end of the day, I think everyone's just going to keep accepting this big lie because as long as markets still appreciate size over return, they're going to continue to support these type of companies. And if you look at it proof as in the pudding, these are large massively valued companies. And I think that's what VCs are more concerned with than actual immediate unit economics or profitable businesses along the way.”

    2017-09-01 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: What Is The Big Lie To Silicon Valley, Why Silicon Valley Is No Longer Optimised For Deep Tech Investing & Why AI Will Lead To More Business Model Innovation Than Technology Innovation with Tim Harris, Founder & CEO @ Swift Navigation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  15. “Entirely, right? I think that for some reason or another, markets still really value size over they do profitability. So as a result, what you get is, oh yeah, we think it's going to work eventually in the future. So let's grow as much as possible. And that's what you tell them because they want to see things with massive, massive growth, right? So a good example of this is kind of the Uber and Lyft Wars and how they are playing out, where you had, look, the unit economics of this business work. They proved that. And then they've subsequently broke the unit economics entirely. I mean, it used to be incredibly easy to get Uber credit. At one point, I had hundreds of dollars of Uber credit. And that was all for growth. So user acquisition, city acquisition, et cetera. The problem is over time, you're in economics change on you. So as you move on, Lyft starts competing or there's five other types of companies that are competing or there's business model innovation or technology innovation that's now competing. So autonomous cars, Google's fleet of car sharing or so on. So now you're in a position where you foregone all of this profits and now you're in a position of defending your market.”

    2017-09-01 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: What Is The Big Lie To Silicon Valley, Why Silicon Valley Is No Longer Optimised For Deep Tech Investing & Why AI Will Lead To More Business Model Innovation Than Technology Innovation with Tim Harris, Founder & CEO @ Swift Navigation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  16. “Sure. So, you know, I think there's a big lie, although I'm not totally convinced that it's a bad lie. The big lie is fundamentally around unit economics. What I see out there in the market is people, they go out and they prove product market fit, right? They have a product or they have some business model innovation and it's going to work. The next question is then how big is the opportunity? How much money can you make off of it? So people go out there and they draw on the board, their unit economics. Hey, I can pay this much for a customer and I can sell them. I can make such and such profit. And this is where the lie happens. The lie is look, this is our unit economics and they're set for all time. And then they proceed to break their unit economics entirely and break all their math essentially for growth. This is the lie can be summed up as it's okay that we're losing money because we'll make it up in volume. Does that make sense?”

    2017-09-01 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: What Is The Big Lie To Silicon Valley, Why Silicon Valley Is No Longer Optimised For Deep Tech Investing & Why AI Will Lead To More Business Model Innovation Than Technology Innovation with Tim Harris, Founder & CEO @ Swift Navigation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  17. “I mean, I think you have to have someone with some understanding of the industry, right? Understanding not of all the details, but someone who will understand technology, people with engineering degrees or histories that they're in, and really who know the limitations of their knowledge, right? So there's always going to be an asymmetry of information between the entrepreneur and the investor. And that asymmetry is only larger when it extends to fairly technical aspects of the technology, right? So we actually look for investors who have that deep experience. And if you look at our investor base, our Series B was led by Forrest Basket and Greg Papadopoulos at NEA, and they're both former professors at Stanford and MIT and both former CTOs at large technology companies. So you find the right people who understand, even if they don't understand all the details enough that they can help you make the right decisions.”

    2017-09-01 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: What Is The Big Lie To Silicon Valley, Why Silicon Valley Is No Longer Optimised For Deep Tech Investing & Why AI Will Lead To More Business Model Innovation Than Technology Innovation with Tim Harris, Founder & CEO @ Swift Navigation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  18. “I agree with that and I disagree with that. I agree with that insofar as when I was pitching people and getting turned down, people told me, hey, I just don't invest in this space because I don't understand it. And I always respected that answer. But at the same time, if you don't understand something, that doesn't necessarily mean it's not a good play, right? And I think what you'll see is there are massive opportunities in Deep Tech, massive opportunities, right? Autonomous driving, AI, I mean, what we're doing, there's lots of different opportunities that are going to pay off huge. And I think that the right people need to be able to go after those opportunities. Where it's overinflated is where one area gets very sexy and then everyone moves into it. So I think a good example of this is LIDAR. There are so many LIDAR companies and more importantly, there's so many investors who don't really have the competency to understand which LIDAR innovations are meaningful and really what it even takes to make a LIDAR company successful, right? What actually it means? And, you know, not all of it is technology innovation. A lot of it is actually manufacturing innovation or manufacturing.”

    2017-09-01 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: What Is The Big Lie To Silicon Valley, Why Silicon Valley Is No Longer Optimised For Deep Tech Investing & Why AI Will Lead To More Business Model Innovation Than Technology Innovation with Tim Harris, Founder & CEO @ Swift Navigation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  19. “I'm not really sure that it needs to be changed. I think it's going to have its place in the Valley Deep Tech, but I'm not one of these flag holders for Deep Tech. I think that there are certain areas where it makes a lot of sense and there's certain areas where really it doesn't actually match the funding life cycles that fees are looking to do and the type of returns that they're looking to make. You know, what I would say is that what's important for this environment is people who really understand it. And I think there's increasingly less of those folks around as more people come from finance and more people come from business model innovation as opposed to the old big technology innovators.”

    2017-09-01 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: What Is The Big Lie To Silicon Valley, Why Silicon Valley Is No Longer Optimised For Deep Tech Investing & Why AI Will Lead To More Business Model Innovation Than Technology Innovation with Tim Harris, Founder & CEO @ Swift Navigation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  20. “Yeah, no, actually, I entirely agree with that. I can see why they do it. Unfortunately, there's a lot of really interesting things going on in Deep Tech. And I think a lot of them get underinvested in. A lot of them get overinvested in as a result as well. The areas that are hot, like AI and autonomous driving right now are some good examples. Although I would argue that AI is actually going to drive more business model innovation than it is actually technology innovation.”

    2017-09-01 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: What Is The Big Lie To Silicon Valley, Why Silicon Valley Is No Longer Optimised For Deep Tech Investing & Why AI Will Lead To More Business Model Innovation Than Technology Innovation with Tim Harris, Founder & CEO @ Swift Navigation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  21. “Definitely. So, I mean, Silicon Valley, it's in the name. It started out really addressing deep technology. So, semiconductor industry and other sorts of like really high and deep research and development projects, right? Unfortunately, when you look at what's happened over the last several years, or fortunately, depending on what you invest in, those really haven't been the winners for the VCs. So the venture capitalists have been investing in both a business model innovations as a distinction from technology innovations. And those are things like when you think about it, Uber isn't really a tech company, right? They build an app so they use technology. A lot of companies use technology, but their core innovation and value is actually around their business model innovation. So this is what I mean, that it's been kind of a slow shift and it's not entire, but a slow shift away from technology innovations to business innovation.”

    2017-09-01 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: What Is The Big Lie To Silicon Valley, Why Silicon Valley Is No Longer Optimised For Deep Tech Investing & Why AI Will Lead To More Business Model Innovation Than Technology Innovation with Tim Harris, Founder & CEO @ Swift Navigation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  22. “Sure, yeah. So Swift came out of an airborne wind turbine project. These are essentially large rigid wing kites that fly up a mile above the Earth, generating electricity in the sky, and then pushing it back down over a tether. So the concept here is to be able to generate electricity in remote locations, on the ocean, all sorts of other areas. And that company ultimately emerged with another company in the space, sold to Google. And we spun out the technology ahead of the Google acquisition. That was my co-founders, Colin and Fergus, who were the technologists there on the navigations and controls team. My background's a little bit different. I came out of finance and law and met them right after they spun it out and the two of us decided to take a swack at this thing.”

    2017-09-01 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: What Is The Big Lie To Silicon Valley, Why Silicon Valley Is No Longer Optimised For Deep Tech Investing & Why AI Will Lead To More Business Model Innovation Than Technology Innovation with Tim Harris, Founder & CEO @ Swift Navigation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source