YouSaid · the spoken record

Wayne Chang

lines on the record: 30
first: 2017-09-08
most recent: 2017-09-08
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

“Yeah, Slow Ventures did it too. Dave Morin and the folks over there, they backed it after. But yeah, it's such a great shirt company. And they just focus on men at the moment.”
2017-09-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How To Run The Perfect Fundraising Process, Why Time Kills All Deals & Why You Have To Get VCs Out Of The Board Room with Wayne Chang, Serial Entrepreneur & Angel Investor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's a company out here in LA, he was originally from Boston, and his name's Will Selinski. He did a company called, he's doing a company called Pistol Lake. Pistol Lake is a man's wear t-shirt, apparel type of company, which sounds like, oh, there must be a minute of them. The reason why I invested is they invented this type of fabric. It's called Uday. And I was like, okay, this is just another fabric. Who cares? I'm actually wearing it right now. It is the softest shirt down. I've worn from Gap all the way up the line, all the way across. This is, it's the”
2017-09-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How To Run The Perfect Fundraising Process, Why Time Kills All Deals & Why You Have To Get VCs Out Of The Board Room with Wayne Chang, Serial Entrepreneur & Angel Investor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Where do you see yourself in five years? I never plan out. So I can never answer that question because I don't live my life that way. I don't live my life in a very predetermined path. I think that does myself a disservice. I make the best decision I can based on the current information that I have. And I constantly update that information through the things I read, the people I interact with, the opportunities I see. So in five years, I hope to be obviously in a better position happier with life, more established in the fields I care about. Those are things that are important to me. And the only hope that I have is that I'm able to make the best decisions right now that can help me do that even faster”
2017-09-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How To Run The Perfect Fundraising Process, Why Time Kills All Deals & Why You Have To Get VCs Out Of The Board Room with Wayne Chang, Serial Entrepreneur & Angel Investor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I remember being on the other side where I have an idea and I need the capital. And so for me, at my life, someone told me once, there are three great stages. First stage is learn. Second stage is earn, and third stage is return. And so I'm very, very fortunate that I reached the third stage and I just turned 34. And so my thinking now is, can I return what I've learned and earned to the next generation of entrepreneurs? And so through angel investing and through advisorships and mentorships and belonging to different startup groups, it allows me to pursue my passion, which is startups and innovation, that allows me to do it in a more macro way. It allows me to be part of so many other journeys, not just the one I built for myself, but allows me to be part of their dreams and their journeys. And that is really humbling. And it's also really thrilling at the same time.”
2017-09-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How To Run The Perfect Fundraising Process, Why Time Kills All Deals & Why You Have To Get VCs Out Of The Board Room with Wayne Chang, Serial Entrepreneur & Angel Investor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I like reading hacker news. I like reading slash dot and I like opening up Twitter and that allows me to get a pretty wide range of exposure to different news.”
2017-09-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How To Run The Perfect Fundraising Process, Why Time Kills All Deals & Why You Have To Get VCs Out Of The Board Room with Wayne Chang, Serial Entrepreneur & Angel Investor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That they perceived it. So I accepted that and I did a commencement speech more for them in the cultural norms that I grew up in.”
2017-09-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How To Run The Perfect Fundraising Process, Why Time Kills All Deals & Why You Have To Get VCs Out Of The Board Room with Wayne Chang, Serial Entrepreneur & Angel Investor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And he said the Board of Trustees has anomalied you to receive a PhD, a doctorate of celebrity. I said, I didn't know what to say. So I accepted it. And then a couple months later, the chancellor called and said, hey, Wayne, would you be our commencement speaker? And I'm like, okay, yeah, sure. How many are on the panel? And they said, no, no, it's just you. I'm like, oh, okay, sure, happy to do it. I've never been to graduation before. I didn't even know what a consumer speaker was. So after I hung up the phone, I had to Google. I'm like, what is a commencement speaker? And I see all these great speeches and my speech was about, you know, two, three weeks away. So I still did it. We did it in front of, it was like 33,000 people. And the main point of that was there was no financial gain. There was nothing that was career related or pro-career propelling in doing it. It was able to look at my family and just have that sense of achieved the career highlight in the way.”
2017-09-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How To Run The Perfect Fundraising Process, Why Time Kills All Deals & Why You Have To Get VCs Out Of The Board Room with Wayne Chang, Serial Entrepreneur & Angel Investor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Ultimate for me in career wasn't actually anything accomplished in career. It was what the foundation was built on. So 10 years ago, a little over 10 years ago, I dropped out of UMass Amherst. It was a school I went to. I only applied to that school after I was accepted to the Air Force and decided I didn't want to go do the Air Force. So I applied to one school late and I got in and I ended up TAing or helping the computer science classes, decided not to do that because I'm there to learn. I'm not there to teach. So I switched that focuses. Then I left UMass Amherst to pursue a startup. My family didn't really understand that being an Asian family. It's all about academics and achievements in that area. And so for a very long time, I felt this huge chip on my shoulder. But 10 years after I dropped out, last year, I got a call and it was from the UMass Amherst Dean for business.”
2017-09-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How To Run The Perfect Fundraising Process, Why Time Kills All Deals & Why You Have To Get VCs Out Of The Board Room with Wayne Chang, Serial Entrepreneur & Angel Investor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“For me, it's the value of money. And I say that value of time and money. Growing up with my surroundings, I was doing extremely, extremely poor. So I valued money and what that meant to me extremely highly. And now I'm on the other side of it and I realize that time is actually the thing that I value the most now in youth, time, youth and health. And where I had it in abundance before when I was much younger, I discounted it. You don't know about air until you don't have it anymore. So in that sense, I didn't know about my youth, my health, all that kind of things until I'm getting older and older. I don't believe now that money or things should be valued as highly as they are in society. And right now, splitting my time in LA, I see more drastically in this community over here.”
2017-09-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How To Run The Perfect Fundraising Process, Why Time Kills All Deals & Why You Have To Get VCs Out Of The Board Room with Wayne Chang, Serial Entrepreneur & Angel Investor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Ender's game, once you pick it up and you read the first couple chapters, you'll finish it probably in one or two sittings. It is phenomenal. The movie doesn't do it justice. Don't watch the movie. The book is, think of it as a Disney book or a Harry Potter book, but for adults. It's a military strategies, technology. It's futuristic. It's amazing. It really ignites the entrepreneur me when you're thinking about it. It talks about problem solving. It talks about persevering and surviving. It is such a great book.”
2017-09-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How To Run The Perfect Fundraising Process, Why Time Kills All Deals & Why You Have To Get VCs Out Of The Board Room with Wayne Chang, Serial Entrepreneur & Angel Investor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Warm intro, it's been talked about in the industry a lot. In the VC industry or in the angel investment industry and entrepreneur industry, the warm intro is the currency that is needed in order to get some of the tension, right? It's an attention currency, but it's very”
2017-09-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How To Run The Perfect Fundraising Process, Why Time Kills All Deals & Why You Have To Get VCs Out Of The Board Room with Wayne Chang, Serial Entrepreneur & Angel Investor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Do I think that it is worth it to speak to associates? It depends on the associate, obviously on the hierarchy thing of things. You want to talk to the directors or the decision makers, the managing partners. Would I speak to an associate just alone right now? If it's at a social event, I would just because it's a social event or some industry event. If it's an associate reaching out saying they want to talk and learn more about it, when I hear that, what I'm hearing is they're just trying to pump as much information out of you and put into a database somewhere and send it to partners. And those type of meetings are, number one, is just so time expensive because that means at that time I'm dedicating my entire half hour block on one hour block to that associate and there's no real benefit or more gain from that. It's just the associate trying to fill a database that he was assigned. I would not do that. And if a partner doesn't have time to meet with me, then it's really not.”
2017-09-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How To Run The Perfect Fundraising Process, Why Time Kills All Deals & Why You Have To Get VCs Out Of The Board Room with Wayne Chang, Serial Entrepreneur & Angel Investor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“By alluding to others that you're speaking to by talking to some of the associates who are doing the actual due diligence on companies”
2017-09-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How To Run The Perfect Fundraising Process, Why Time Kills All Deals & Why You Have To Get VCs Out Of The Board Room with Wayne Chang, Serial Entrepreneur & Angel Investor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Give them time to meet with their partners to negotiate the term sheet, and you have to create all these different things. So the signals you want to tell them are speaking to other great VCs, you're oversubscribed, which is one of the greatest keywords that VCs and investors will want to hear because now activates that FOMO sense. You want to just create this huge perception of a hot deal, a buzz around your company.”
2017-09-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How To Run The Perfect Fundraising Process, Why Time Kills All Deals & Why You Have To Get VCs Out Of The Board Room with Wayne Chang, Serial Entrepreneur & Angel Investor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When I hear that from entrepreneurs, what I hear is they didn't position or pitch themselves right. They gave the VCs too much time. Again, the whole theme of this, time kills all deals. The more time that VC has, the more time that a potential vendor or partner has, the worse off you are, the less likelihood of a deal completion. To speed it up, the way I like to think about it, it's, you know, it's sort of like dating in a way, right? You can't be too clingy, you can't be too approachable, you can't be too desperate. And so a lot of founders, a lot of entrepreneurs, they approach it saying, you know, look at me, look at me, look at me. I want all your attention. I'm so desperate. Whereas in the VC game, the best deals that they like to get into are the ones that are competitive. They got into a deal that, you know, they're competing VC firm or colleague in the industry couldn't get into. So the game that sees it up really quickly is to create an environment where they are chasing you, where they are the ones trying to get you.”
2017-09-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How To Run The Perfect Fundraising Process, Why Time Kills All Deals & Why You Have To Get VCs Out Of The Board Room with Wayne Chang, Serial Entrepreneur & Angel Investor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Not that high if you really think about it. They're evaluating your idea for us. They're saying it's a great market opportunity. Okay, great. It is. The next thing is, can you do what you say you're able to do? Can you do that? Can you execute on it? And then the third one is, do you have great people around you that are supporting you? That's basically it. Those are the foundational pillars of a great pitch. And if you're able to nail that, then it's really your game. You're able to now choose which VCs you want to accept money from. Right now, we're in such a bull period. There's so much capital out there. People want the greatest return on that capital. They're going to try to get you to accept it. So it's really entrepreneurial's market at the moment.”
2017-09-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How To Run The Perfect Fundraising Process, Why Time Kills All Deals & Why You Have To Get VCs Out Of The Board Room with Wayne Chang, Serial Entrepreneur & Angel Investor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Now, so one of the things is you never try, you never reveal who you're talking to to the others because BCs will always try to backchannel each other. So as entrepreneur raising, I believe you should never reveal while you're fundraising who else you're fundraising from. That's only to your detriment. You can mention that. You can allude to it, but you can tell them, hey, I'm talking to other great BCs that are a top tier VC right now. They're super interested in it. But for us, we're trying to figure out who the best partner is at the table. One of the things that entrepreneurs should definitely try to remember is you're not selling your idea to them. You need to get them to sell their dollars to you. VCs are in the business of trying to get their capital and their money accepted by great entrepreneurs. So you need to position yourself as a great entrepreneur, as a founder that can actually get stuff done. And the funny thing is the bar on that is actually”
2017-09-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How To Run The Perfect Fundraising Process, Why Time Kills All Deals & Why You Have To Get VCs Out Of The Board Room with Wayne Chang, Serial Entrepreneur & Angel Investor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, I mean, never lie in this business, it's all about reputation of reputation management. I would much rather pay and do something to repair a reputation than not. How do you put it around together as quick as possible? The key there is, one, if you can try to make it super competitive and bring out the competitiveness of the others, then that's one of the greatest drivers for motivation for them.”
2017-09-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How To Run The Perfect Fundraising Process, Why Time Kills All Deals & Why You Have To Get VCs Out Of The Board Room with Wayne Chang, Serial Entrepreneur & Angel Investor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think visually it might be dying, but I think ego is so much ingrained as part of human nature that I think that would never go away. It might be mass. I still know a lot of these that have mega-powered ego trips.”
2017-09-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How To Run The Perfect Fundraising Process, Why Time Kills All Deals & Why You Have To Get VCs Out Of The Board Room with Wayne Chang, Serial Entrepreneur & Angel Investor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so why should they avoid the boardroom? So, think about it, right? You're a big hotshot VC running $100 million fund or a billion dollar fund and you're in the boardroom and you have meetings lined up. So you're lined up, you're ninth.”
2017-09-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How To Run The Perfect Fundraising Process, Why Time Kills All Deals & Why You Have To Get VCs Out Of The Board Room with Wayne Chang, Serial Entrepreneur & Angel Investor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, yeah. I mean, that fits in. I 100% agree. There was this great, great quote where the key to success in startups is not to simply succeed, it's just to not die. And so that's exactly the same thinking where that's why I optimize with the recruiters before, because if you drag out the building, the composition of your team, you're incurring the burn every day, no matter what. So why don't you bring the team forward so that way you have cost savings, right? Because like the rent cost, if you have a rent cost of five people in here, you only have you and your co-founder, you still pay the same rent as if you have five people. So why don't you bring those five on board as well? There's a lot of savings that way. Time to me is definitely the enemy of founders and startups. So anything you can do in the fastest way possible should promote more growth and more success.”
2017-09-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How To Run The Perfect Fundraising Process, Why Time Kills All Deals & Why You Have To Get VCs Out Of The Board Room with Wayne Chang, Serial Entrepreneur & Angel Investor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To me the very next day and say, Wayne, thank you for the middle check yesterday. I've spent it all. However, I now have 30 million customers and six acquisition offers, right? That's on one extreme. What would be the worst for me is to hear six years from now, Samuel Printer comes back, hey Wayne, thanks for the million dollar check. I was able to make it last for six years. That to me is the worst type of entrepreneur because they're more focused on the money that they raise in preserving that than they are about creating value than they are about building things fast in quality and gaining customers and gaining traction.”
2017-09-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How To Run The Perfect Fundraising Process, Why Time Kills All Deals & Why You Have To Get VCs Out Of The Board Room with Wayne Chang, Serial Entrepreneur & Angel Investor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That you have to raise if you focus so much on kind of being that first mover does it not mean that you have to dilute yourself significantly and raise significantly more than the traditional seed No, it doesn't mean that at all actually it just means that you need to raise whatever amount that's in your mind that you can say hey if I raise this I don't need to think about speed or quality and that could change based on the industry you're in so if you're in you know heavy industrial metals you might need higher raises to talk about factories and workers and headcount things like that if you're in software it might mean that you know you need to bring on better team you can afford a more senior person forward a design team things that could make the user experience that much better as an angel and as someone that you know has invested in a bunch i would rather prefer writing a million dollar check to an entrepreneur and then having that person”
2017-09-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How To Run The Perfect Fundraising Process, Why Time Kills All Deals & Why You Have To Get VCs Out Of The Board Room with Wayne Chang, Serial Entrepreneur & Angel Investor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so Delta Wow, great, great question. So, this comes more into product and design and founder perspective. So a really, really great way of just thinking about it is on one extreme side of the spectrum, you have a problem, right? And the problem is you need to collect a name, an email address, and maybe a password as a signup form. Generally, you can visualize that in your head right now, three, three fields. You filled out a million times before. But now let's explode that a little bit. Now you need to collect the work email, the work phone number, the home address, the work address, social security number, maybe different payment methods, all these different fields, all these different data points that you collect from the person. That's where the breakdown occurs.”
2017-09-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How To Run The Perfect Fundraising Process, Why Time Kills All Deals & Why You Have To Get VCs Out Of The Board Room with Wayne Chang, Serial Entrepreneur & Angel Investor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Great question. Before we brought the recruit in house, we actually farmed out a bunch of different recruiting agencies. And the driver initially was financial. Why are we paying over $100,000 in recruiting fees when we could use that towards a recruiter in-house? And so we looked around based on the recruiters that we were working with and we found one, her name is Katie that just meshed really well with the team, had really great positive energy. And she went on to lead a huge part of Twitter's recruiting organization after the acquisition.”
2017-09-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How To Run The Perfect Fundraising Process, Why Time Kills All Deals & Why You Have To Get VCs Out Of The Board Room with Wayne Chang, Serial Entrepreneur & Angel Investor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Recruiting efforts early on so that every day that went by, the fruit of these hires of these team members was compounded.”
2017-09-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How To Run The Perfect Fundraising Process, Why Time Kills All Deals & Why You Have To Get VCs Out Of The Board Room with Wayne Chang, Serial Entrepreneur & Angel Investor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so that is the trick. So, the trick is if you hire a team really fast, is there the social bonding? Is there the social threading? Is there that culture there? So that's one of the greatest challenges with this approach is now then the founders that needs to focus on the culture, which they should do anyways. And so the majority of the time we spend when it comes to team composition was the team bonding element, because we knew that by putting together a team so quickly, very senior team so quickly, it was really important to build a trust, really important to build the relationship between the team members. So the way we did that was we go out a lot. So we do it over so we do it socially over drinks, or we go on ops, you know, retreats. We went to stow a bunch of different times. And this really built a team, a cohesive team. And that was one of the driving points that allowed us to have the success that we did in such a short amount of time was because we front-loaded the”
2017-09-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How To Run The Perfect Fundraising Process, Why Time Kills All Deals & Why You Have To Get VCs Out Of The Board Room with Wayne Chang, Serial Entrepreneur & Angel Investor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“More about the design, the philosophy behind it, the culture. All these things that we couldn't have the middle space to do we now do and we did. And the second thing is because there's a full-time person with a recruiter that's able to help assemble the team and we now spend much less time only the very tail end of the whole process, you know, interviewing them and bringing them on board. This meant that by the time that we were four months old, we had the start of DNA profile of a startup that's about two years old.”
2017-09-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How To Run The Perfect Fundraising Process, Why Time Kills All Deals & Why You Have To Get VCs Out Of The Board Room with Wayne Chang, Serial Entrepreneur & Angel Investor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so to back up from there, my favorite thing I believe in is the enemy of founders and startups is time. And so what does that mean? That means every day that goes by, you're becoming old news, every day that goes by, your burn rate just goes up, no matter what happens, if you accomplish everything today or nothing today, you will still have to burn the capital that you raised. So with recruiters, what I hear a lot with other founders is that they would spend 40 to sixty percent of their time just trying to recruit the team, trying to look through the resumes, go on Craigslist, things like that. And when you really look at it, is that the most efficient way to use the founders time? And so Jeff and I, we hired a recruiter really, really early on. And what this meant for us is that it accomplished multiple things. One, it allowed us to free the mental capacity to think more about the product, to think more about customers.”
2017-09-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How To Run The Perfect Fundraising Process, Why Time Kills All Deals & Why You Have To Get VCs Out Of The Board Room with Wayne Chang, Serial Entrepreneur & Angel Investor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Quick, quick story, huh? I started coding when I was seven and then I created my first software. It was basically like spacing baters on the Apple IIE. And then when I was 11 years old, I started my first company. And that became a top 300 site at the time. And between that, then and now, I started a bunch of different companies, some funded, some not, some got really big. My last one was Crash Lytics, which after 11 months when we launched, it got acquired and rests his history with that one. That took over mobile development tools. So we were the number one SDK. I think we still are outside of Apple and Google.”
2017-09-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How To Run The Perfect Fundraising Process, Why Time Kills All Deals & Why You Have To Get VCs Out Of The Board Room with Wayne Chang, Serial Entrepreneur & Angel Investor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source