YouSaid · the spoken record

Tyler Willis

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28
first
2016-02-17
most recent
2016-02-17
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1
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podcast

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  1. “Yeah, I think, by the way, from an industry perspective, I think every industry over the next 20 years, tech is coming all year base belong to us and all those things. In this particular area, it was an underserved market. Not even tech companies weren't doing it, but big CPG companies weren't doing it. These massive companies that just frankly work building products with women in mind and weren't building products with people of color in mind. And so it's just this kind of crazy to me that that whole exists. their mistake is my opportunity. And so I was like really happy to invest in a company. I think the team's great. I think the product's great. I think the mission is great. Very early and not really a tech enabled product, but an area where, you know, I just think it was something that had to exist.”

    2016-02-17 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Tyler Willis on How To Be Innovative With Customer Acquisition and The Future Of Innovation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “Yeah, it was YC a couple batches ago. The company is run by an absolutely incredible founder, one of those people who I met and just said Holy smokes, like you're going to figure everything out. She's just incredible. So I think a lot of it was like, I believe in this person. Again, even if you don't know it all today, you're going to figure it out soon. Probably at a higher rate of learning than the vast majority of your peers. So I just got really, I think the founder is incredible. I think the mission of the company is great. I think you're actually seeing a lot of people, you know, I think you're seeing a lot of underserved markets finally getting served. Walker& Co. creating razor blades and shaving equipment and now clippers and these types of things.”

    2016-02-17 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Tyler Willis on How To Be Innovative With Customer Acquisition and The Future Of Innovation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “One recent investment that I made that I'm very excited about is a company called L. This is L.com. And they make sexual health products. They make right now condoms that are designed with women in mind.”

    2016-02-17 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Tyler Willis on How To Be Innovative With Customer Acquisition and The Future Of Innovation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “So there's a ton of them, but probably the one that I'm most infatuated with right now, which is much more interesting, I guess, is Omni, which is basically store your stuff. So you hit a button and they come pick up your things. And then when you want your things back, you hit a button and they come back. And I think the concept of that company is deceptively simple. The execution is actually very hard and the team there is doing a fantastic job with it. And the vision with where they want to go, I think is brilliant.”

    2016-02-17 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Tyler Willis on How To Be Innovative With Customer Acquisition and The Future Of Innovation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “I really like the information. I think the information is slept on a lot more than it should be. They do a killer job of reporting. It's absolutely fantastic.”

    2016-02-17 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Tyler Willis on How To Be Innovative With Customer Acquisition and The Future Of Innovation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “Maybe a deal a year or two deals a year or something like that. It has a ton of conviction and has spotted some really great companies. So those guys are all jumped to mind. There are more, but I could sit here and ramble for 50 or 100 minutes.”

    2016-02-17 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Tyler Willis on How To Be Innovative With Customer Acquisition and The Future Of Innovation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “I really like Naval. I think Naval has done an absolutely impeccable job of investing in tons of companies at once. And I think built an incredible portfolio and believes in founders early. And I think Naval's just an incredible investor. I have a lot of respect for Sam Altman, both as an individual investor in the direction that he's taken Y Combinator. I think that's been not without its bumps and detractors and haters. I think he's on basis done a lot of really good things and made a lot of really good moves. And as a personal investor, obviously he was very successful as well. Gust High at Trinity is a guy that I've developed a lot of respect for over the last five years and is maybe not as well known a name as the other guys. And maybe almost the opposite in terms of pace from Naval much more like a traditional VC.”

    2016-02-17 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Tyler Willis on How To Be Innovative With Customer Acquisition and The Future Of Innovation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “My favorite book is in terms of frequent reference is probably Innovators Dilemma. Yeah, I think it's just a fantastic book. In terms of kind of my more personal life, East of Eden is probably one of the most impactful books I read when I was like 18 or 19. This was like a big concept of having choice over how your life unfolds, I think, is a big theme, an important theme in Spandex, a great writer. I'm looking at my bookcase right now and like foundation by Asimov jumps out and Accelerando by Strauss jumps out much other ones.”

    2016-02-17 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Tyler Willis on How To Be Innovative With Customer Acquisition and The Future Of Innovation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “They don't see the fact that, hey, somebody's inventing a better form of nuclear reactor, right? They don't see that because they're blinded by the increase in noise. So I think there's the same point of, you know, we've got this massive trend that is pushing towards increased innovation, but we don't believe it because the stories we hear on a day-to-day basis are about the person who undeservingly got $10 million for their stupid idea or who launched this thing that is so dumb or so addictive or so painful or whatever else.”

    2016-02-17 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Tyler Willis on How To Be Innovative With Customer Acquisition and The Future Of Innovation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “And so you get a lot more people tackling problems. But the problem is there's a lot of signal and noise rises equally and there's always been 95% noise and 5% signal. It's 10 years ago, 15 companies a year mattered, the famous kind of VC quote of there's only 15 important companies founded every year. And the vast majority of the rest of them were failures or not important or not interesting. And so in innovation, I think you're seeing the same thing where yeah, you may get five more world-changing companies, which is in fact the most amazing thing we could possibly ask for. It's a huge win. But we got a thousand X the number of stupid photo sharing apps or kind of stupid gimmicky kind of toy looking things. And that just everybody sees the gimmicky stuff. And the press focuses on that and everybody looks at it and goes, oh, yo, yo is so stupid, right?”

    2016-02-17 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Tyler Willis on How To Be Innovative With Customer Acquisition and The Future Of Innovation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “Telling everyone how bad everything is and highlighting the worst possible thing. So you get this kind of sunlight paradox, which is the way you cure darkness is by shining light on it. But by shining light on it, you show everyone that the world is dark and people get very scared and very nervous. So I think this is actually a broad thing that's happening across our world where we hear more bad things day to day. So we think the world's going to hell, but the world's actually getting better. And the reason part of the reason is at least because we're facing those issues. I think that applies in a very kind of microcosm way in investing as well and in innovation more specifically because you get this massive push of people over the last 15 or 20 years into entrepreneurship. You get a huge influx of people in tech in the US. You get huge creation of innovation economies and 50 to 100 cities all across the world. You get this massive push towards entrepreneurship.”

    2016-02-17 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Tyler Willis on How To Be Innovative With Customer Acquisition and The Future Of Innovation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “Yeah, so I have a theory. I don't know if somebody else is, probably somebody smarter than me has written an academic paper about this, but I have a general theory that the world is getting better. I'm optimistic by nature. And if you look at the data, our world and data and all those sources, you can see crime rates are massively down. Poverty is way down, et cetera, et cetera. Part of the reason all those things are moving in the right direction is because society is focusing on solving those problems more directly. And we have things like the 24-hour news cycle that highlights these things and makes them such a huge issue and gets people riled up and then the people kind of push government or companies or whatever else to fix it. So you're ending up with, you know, again, much more attention focused on fixing humanity's big problems, which is fantastic. But the problem is the way that we get that attention focused on the problem is by scaring everyone.”

    2016-02-17 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Tyler Willis on How To Be Innovative With Customer Acquisition and The Future Of Innovation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “This is very common. Because you're not going to see the big benefits of it for 10 or 15 or 20 years. So I think the advice is directionally accurate, even if it's scary. I think he's probably more right than wrong.”

    2016-02-17 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Tyler Willis on How To Be Innovative With Customer Acquisition and The Future Of Innovation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “Yeah, there's a few things, one of which is probably it's good to start slow. If you think of this as a 20-year game that you're in, the first couple of years are business school. And the third or fourth year is when you start actually having some of the lessons. So I think go slow early on. Find mentors you can learn from. So one of the things that I did when I started investing is I interviewed dozens of people that were successful angel investors privately. Like I reached out and said, hey, can I pick your brain or I caught them at an event? You know, I was like the annoying guy that, you know, grabbed them after they were on stage and said, hey, I need five minutes of your time, like walk me through some stuff. And so I think the more you can do that, the better.”

    2016-02-17 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Tyler Willis on How To Be Innovative With Customer Acquisition and The Future Of Innovation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  15. “Most of the people that don't have domain expertise fail, but also most of the people fail. So most of the people that do have domain expertise fail too. So what you're looking for is outliers. So I try really hard not to take a hard stance on any one of these this or that areas because frankly, the vast majority of people in both camps are going to fail and what you're looking for is the real winner, the one person in either camp that's going to be successful.”

    2016-02-17 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Tyler Willis on How To Be Innovative With Customer Acquisition and The Future Of Innovation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  16. “I think it's a false dichotomy. So I think that there are incredibly talented people that have domain expertise and there are people that have domain expertise that just would be abject failures as entrepreneurs or that maybe have learned all the wrong lessons and are unwilling to kind of push the envelope. Similarly, I've seen a lot of 20-year-olds come in and tackle some deep enterprise problem and just be completely flabbergasted at how to do it and take way too long to get to market because they don't have any experience of what it's like to work in an enterprise. And so that's a really big downside. At the same point, Aaron Levy didn't know anything about the enterprise before he started Box. And that worked out brilliantly well. So I think as an investor, your job is to avoid taking a hard stance on anything that is potentially more noise than signal because what you're looking for outliers. So Aaron Levy is an outlier.”

    2016-02-17 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Tyler Willis on How To Be Innovative With Customer Acquisition and The Future Of Innovation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  17. “Behind that is, I think it's very hard to kind of hang on and steer one of those rocket ships if you're not really flexible in that way.”

    2016-02-17 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Tyler Willis on How To Be Innovative With Customer Acquisition and The Future Of Innovation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  18. “I do have a founder type that I invest in. I want to invest in people who are uniquely insightful in the market that they're in. So they're discovering something that is just new that the world doesn't know before, at least that I didn't know before. I tend to like people that are very smart, so I have a bit of a bias for, I don't know if there's like an effect for it in Silicon Valley or an archetype for it in Silicon Valley, but I tend to have a bias for people when I sit down and go, holy cow, that person is just very, very high IQ and very, very high octane in terms of his thinking, his or her thinking. And so that's an area where I honestly missed some good investments because of that, because maybe there's somebody who just kind of understands their industry and is just going to kind of grind it out and maybe isn't the flashiest or the, doesn't appear to be the smartest person in the room. But I just have a really big bias for people that I think are just high octane. I think the reason.”

    2016-02-17 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Tyler Willis on How To Be Innovative With Customer Acquisition and The Future Of Innovation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  19. “But it's instead something where the founder is obsessed with growth or a big part of the team is obsessed with growth. And then the second part is there's systems that you can put in place to kind of help with the process of discovering what works faster, optimizing for getting experiments out the door the same way you have kind of MVPs in product. You can do MVPs in growth experiments where you can say, hey, we've got this really great idea for something that would take us eight weeks to build. And then three weeks to deploy, can we do a version of that that only takes a week and see if it actually resonates with customers? And so a lot of times it's just really unglamorous grinding type work. I think a lot of growth people are also kind of like poker people, right? They're just kind of grinding it out waiting for the right hand to hit and nine hands they play are bad, but as long as the tenth hand is good, it all works out.”

    2016-02-17 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Tyler Willis on How To Be Innovative With Customer Acquisition and The Future Of Innovation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  20. “Yeah, that's really kind of her to say. I would say it actually isn't secret sauce here. I would say generally customer acquisition problems tend to be about really being able to sit down and think about a single problem with a massive amount of focus and then just to run lots and lots of experiments. So what I find is people that do a very good job of customer acquisition or growth tend to be the ones that are just focusing a huge percentage of the company on customer acquisition or growth. They tend to be the people who are having lots and lots of ideas and then are using a lightweight process to make sure that they're prioritizing those ideas correctly. So I would say the biggest area to focus on is just making sure that it's like in the core DNA of the company. It's something that it's not something where you go, I'm going to hire a growth hacker and they can figure it out.”

    2016-02-17 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Tyler Willis on How To Be Innovative With Customer Acquisition and The Future Of Innovation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  21. “Before I invest, I'm happy with them, but the other thing I want to keep in mind is that Zuckerberg didn't look like the Zuckerberg of today in 2000.”

    2016-02-17 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Tyler Willis on How To Be Innovative With Customer Acquisition and The Future Of Innovation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  22. “I think this has changed as I've gone through investing. I now think there are a lot of things that can't really be tweaked by the investor. I view my role is to be as supportive as I possibly can and to give advice and feedback. But ultimately, it's the entrepreneur that does 99.9999999999999% of the work. Now, if you're able to provide even just 0.0001% of value to Uber, that's a very valuable contribution and you get compensated for it in the stock that you've bought. So I think angel investors in DCs can be very important, can be very valuable. But I don't think they do much of the work. And I really don't think they can save a ship from going off the wrong course, especially not angel investors when you're not on the board and you're not looking at management inside of the company. So I have to really believe in the person.”

    2016-02-17 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Tyler Willis on How To Be Innovative With Customer Acquisition and The Future Of Innovation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  23. “Yeah, I'm more focused on taking a seat on the rocket ship. That said, generally, valuation doesn't play a role in my consideration in terms of do I feel like I'm getting a deal or not? Because value investing doesn't work in private company markets. Where it does play a role is that I try to identify opportunities that have a lot of appreciation potential. So, you know, if you expect that a lot of the investments you make are going to fail, the other ones have to really make up for that loss and then some, right? You know, the rule of thumb here is you want to have at least a 10x path to for the winners. And I think that's actually low, especially at the seed stage. I think the seed stage, I really look for something that I expect could be explosive. I like the way Sam Waltman put it, which is the best investors in the world of their money most of the time and very”

    2016-02-17 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Tyler Willis on How To Be Innovative With Customer Acquisition and The Future Of Innovation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  24. “Which today is considered a discount. So I've got a really broad, diverse portfolio. However, I do think that many people can be very successful with a very verticalized and specialized portfolio. So I think it's just a style question.”

    2016-02-17 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Tyler Willis on How To Be Innovative With Customer Acquisition and The Future Of Innovation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  25. “Personally, I prefer the portfolio. I think especially as you're learning something new and I expect to be in this game both as an entrepreneur and an investor for many more decades. So particularly as you're learning, I think there's a lot of value in having a diverse base to learn from. I also think that if one of the core competencies you have is embedding in good people, you may not always have a chance to bet in a great person in a seed round, but that great person that you see at the Series C or Series D even might just be an obvious bet, right? So there have been investments I've made that are very, very high valuations and there are investments that I've made that have been what is considered now to be an incredible discount by Silicon Valley terms. No product, no founding team track record, all of that stuff. It's a sub $3 million valuation or something.”

    2016-02-17 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Tyler Willis on How To Be Innovative With Customer Acquisition and The Future Of Innovation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  26. “Shop ad is dominating the Shopify ecosystem. So it turned out I got very lucky in year one. And that let me kind of keep doing it. So I kept investing a little bit more of my money and then also got some friends and family together and a couple small LPs, got my own little small angel fund put together”

    2016-02-17 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Tyler Willis on How To Be Innovative With Customer Acquisition and The Future Of Innovation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  27. “In one basket when it comes to angel investing, is kind of universally thought of as a bad idea. And even though that investment went on to do pretty well, raised two up rounds now, a series A and a series B from both from top five Silicon Valley VCs, that was obviously not clear, obvious in the early days. And so I realized I had to build this portfolio. So over the next year, I invested in Patreon, which helps creators earn like millions of dollars a month from donations from their fans. LoungeBuddy, which helps people find airport lounges and read reviews about them, and then now even lets casual travelers book day passes to airport lounges and shopped, which has become a huge force in the Shopify ecosystem. The three of them have gone on to be really successful. Patreon raised a big A round from Index and LoungeBuddy raised their A from Founders Fund. And Shopify's like dominating the, or Shopify.”

    2016-02-17 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Tyler Willis on How To Be Innovative With Customer Acquisition and The Future Of Innovation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  28. “Sure. So I've been interested in investing for a long time. It had kind of a happy coincidence of things happen. The first company that I was on the founding team of got acquired by Oracle. And right around that same time, a friend was raising a really small seed round. Honestly, just to kind of prove out a concept that he had in the computer vision space, not even like a normal investment for me today is definitely really deep tech, very early pre-product, pre-market, pre-traction. I mean, really just a guy with an idea and a little bit of a team. But I just believed in founder. I loved entrepreneur. I wanted to work with him. I still want to work with him. He's still a very close friend. And I just got really excited about the prospect of the idea in the market if it works. So I did a small seed investment in that company and realized pretty quickly after that fact that I should probably build a portfolio. The kind of idea of having all your eggs.”

    2016-02-17 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Tyler Willis on How To Be Innovative With Customer Acquisition and The Future Of Innovation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source