YouSaid · the spoken record

Will Quist

lines on the record: 53
first: 2022-09-12
most recent: 2022-09-12
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Well, one got announced yesterday, which is Fair Square and Medicare. We got excited for a couple reasons. One, it was a founder who was just executing Reddit. It's been a space. So he's starting in Medicare brokerage with the idea that you can bring much more transparency and more 2022 buying experience and take a ton of market share in that way and a high operating leverage way and outside of a traditional call center brokerage. Yes, logically, is my mom going to buy Medicare different than my grandmother did? Absolutely. That hadn't been mixed up. And there were a few startups that went after it. And Daniel was just executing so we continued to pour money in. He just announced around from Linnen Chirag at define. What was really interesting to me is in digital care, everyone's going to have a digital care platform every demographic where you deal with a lot of your health issues there and then you bridge that with the offline world. I think the way to get there with seniors is to start what's the most common problem they all have making sure they transition to the right and right Medicare plan what got me to a yes was a guy delivering value executing in the markets who had a several s curves that I thought”
2022-09-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why 95% of Venture Capital is Not Really "Venture Capital" | The Five Core Levers Needed To Assess Risk and Price a Startup | The Future of Venture; Who Wins, Who Loses, What Happens to the Crossover Funds with Will Quist, Partner @ Slow Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, anyone outperforming, I mean, I think Sequoia does great, Andreessen does great, benchmarking their own way does great, Founders Fund does great. Like they've all made really great, I think, intentional branding choices.”
2022-09-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why 95% of Venture Capital is Not Really "Venture Capital" | The Five Core Levers Needed To Assess Risk and Price a Startup | The Future of Venture; Who Wins, Who Loses, What Happens to the Crossover Funds with Will Quist, Partner @ Slow Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Which has diminishing returns is probably not the highest operating leverage way versus getting brand and brand awareness right and going for more subjective soft ROI spend. I don't have any answer, but I've changed my mind and I'm fascinated by it.”
2022-09-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why 95% of Venture Capital is Not Really "Venture Capital" | The Five Core Levers Needed To Assess Risk and Price a Startup | The Future of Venture; Who Wins, Who Loses, What Happens to the Crossover Funds with Will Quist, Partner @ Slow Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Here's a good one. I've gotten really fascinated by branding. I think. So applying it to myself is interesting, right? Which is we went through a period, at least in my venture career, where everyone spent too much money on branding too early. There was, hey, we're going to seed round, we're going to take $350,000 and go work with someone on brand, brand identity, and a brand plan. So the hard pivot away from that was like, don't brand SEM, right? If you're going to spend marketing dollars, have it be performance oriented, lots of tough metrics, which made total sense to me. I think we've overrotated. I've changed my mind that branding is more important than I thought it was. And I've gotten really fascinated though about the right time to lean into branding. And I've changed my mind that it's really important. I've started sending more founders to meet with branding specialists, but I'm trying to really understand, I think there can be a magical moment, and it's different for each company. For me, it has a lot to do with value proposition because I think that's the core atomic unit of any great company. And I think there's a point at which you have enough case studies. You verified that you actually create a lot of value in the market and continuing to go through performance market.”
2022-09-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why 95% of Venture Capital is Not Really "Venture Capital" | The Five Core Levers Needed To Assess Risk and Price a Startup | The Future of Venture; Who Wins, Who Loses, What Happens to the Crossover Funds with Will Quist, Partner @ Slow Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I wish founders slowed down before they ran out the door and really understood where do they have unfair insights in the world? What's their theory on building a product with value? What's the right capitalization path? That's probably the biggest thing. Like venture to me, as I've made clear, is a very specific product. And I think a lot of folks seek it that don't necessarily need it or are not a fit for it. And so I wish there was just more of a universal understanding of what calls for venture and what doesn't. I think that would save a lot of time and heartbreak for all parties.”
2022-09-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why 95% of Venture Capital is Not Really "Venture Capital" | The Five Core Levers Needed To Assess Risk and Price a Startup | The Future of Venture; Who Wins, Who Loses, What Happens to the Crossover Funds with Will Quist, Partner @ Slow Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think they retrench probably at slightly smaller scale on the private side. The public book, I don't know. There aren't a lot of public books that have recovered from being down that far, but they're kind of an unprecedented institution in general. I think a lot of what they believed was right. I think they probably were putting out maybe too much capital or had too lucid filter. But this idea that companies very quickly become growth stage, right, where you can take the data and model it once you kind of feel comfortable about the standard deviation of outcomes, build a portfolio around it, I think is correct. And so I think it's probably a smaller quantum of capital, at least on an annual basis, but that the overall hypothesis was largely correct.”
2022-09-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why 95% of Venture Capital is Not Really "Venture Capital" | The Five Core Levers Needed To Assess Risk and Price a Startup | The Future of Venture; Who Wins, Who Loses, What Happens to the Crossover Funds with Will Quist, Partner @ Slow Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To me, I never worked with Bill Campbell. Mark was that into it back in the day, was a VC for a while, and now kind of plays the independent advisory role for founders, especially in fintech, understands organizational challenges. He has founder empathy, and he's got very independent tactical, logical advice across the spectrum of what a founder might encounter.”
2022-09-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why 95% of Venture Capital is Not Really "Venture Capital" | The Five Core Levers Needed To Assess Risk and Price a Startup | The Future of Venture; Who Wins, Who Loses, What Happens to the Crossover Funds with Will Quist, Partner @ Slow Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Professional way, it's a success equation by Mike Mebusian. Full stop. Everyone in Venture should read it. It changed how I operate day to day.”
2022-09-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why 95% of Venture Capital is Not Really "Venture Capital" | The Five Core Levers Needed To Assess Risk and Price a Startup | The Future of Venture; Who Wins, Who Loses, What Happens to the Crossover Funds with Will Quist, Partner @ Slow Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“100% right it's and again capital games look the same like you need to be the same way in certain bankers or private equities get on a plane at a”
2022-09-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why 95% of Venture Capital is Not Really "Venture Capital" | The Five Core Levers Needed To Assess Risk and Price a Startup | The Future of Venture; Who Wins, Who Loses, What Happens to the Crossover Funds with Will Quist, Partner @ Slow Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, I mean early on, I think we would have said multi-stage. I think the amount of human capital and what it means on a daily basis to be a competitive multi-stage firm is not what we do. It's not our strength. It's not our DNA.”
2022-09-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why 95% of Venture Capital is Not Really "Venture Capital" | The Five Core Levers Needed To Assess Risk and Price a Startup | The Future of Venture; Who Wins, Who Loses, What Happens to the Crossover Funds with Will Quist, Partner @ Slow Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Add a column to their business very intelligently or revisit a prior column and realize that the defensibility may be going away and they need to add to it. So I don't think that's who we'd want to be. I don't think we have the DNA to aspire to be that. But when you go, who do you admire and who do you learn from the most if you're not saying Sequoia, I'd have a long debate over a year.”
2022-09-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why 95% of Venture Capital is Not Really "Venture Capital" | The Five Core Levers Needed To Assess Risk and Price a Startup | The Future of Venture; Who Wins, Who Loses, What Happens to the Crossover Funds with Will Quist, Partner @ Slow Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I got really lucky. Don Valentine was a contemporary of my grandfather's and was a friend of his. And I got lucky to get a couple one-on-one sessions with Don Valentine back in the day. And it was clear from that get-go that they looked at it, they looked at this as a product and a business, right? That they came at this, that this wasn't a purely subjective artistic endeavor that was kind of up to your ability to read tarot cards, right? Like he understood from, if not the get-go very early on, that this was a business that you needed to ask those questions that we talked about earlier of yourself, come up with answers that are theories are real and execute on them. And so I think they've had that DNA from the get-go to really think about, is the arch of history in our favor? Do we need to create new product sets, right, that create absolute and relative value? Do we have a sense of what the market size is going to be? What are we betting on? Have we thought about how we continue to defend ourselves, take that view of their business and they do a great job of continuing to innovate at S curves, right? Back to great companies. They continue to.”
2022-09-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why 95% of Venture Capital is Not Really "Venture Capital" | The Five Core Levers Needed To Assess Risk and Price a Startup | The Future of Venture; Who Wins, Who Loses, What Happens to the Crossover Funds with Will Quist, Partner @ Slow Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Not even a tough question. I think it's a top two or three investment management firm in the world, and one of the most well run businesses that I can see. My five questions on enterprise value, like, is Arc of History in their favor? Absolutely. And it always has been. Will the world work in a way that's advantageous to them going forward? Absolutely.”
2022-09-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why 95% of Venture Capital is Not Really "Venture Capital" | The Five Core Levers Needed To Assess Risk and Price a Startup | The Future of Venture; Who Wins, Who Loses, What Happens to the Crossover Funds with Will Quist, Partner @ Slow Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This goes down to what's your opportunity cost, right? If you have limited partners who are supporting, this goes to your cost of a bullet, right? Back to cost of a bullet. If you're somebody that's confident in your cost in a bullet, then you'll use it in attractive situations, even though it may be in 10x and not 100x. And understand that. So I think that's one lens to bring to it is how expensive is this bullet, which is very manager specific. It's fund specific. It's firm specific, that answer. And I do think you can get disproportionately good at underwriting. Like I think in companies that are really important and high quality, now the question is, how good can you be at being honest with yourself and looking for those? You're almost always better off accumulating stock in those companies over the first eight years of their life than you are in any diversified venture portfolio. Right. So I would just posit that those are the two extremes. And I think it comes down to your own opportunity cost of capital and what skill set you think you've refined the most. I mean, this is something we've talked about in like one of the reasons I initially got involved in Slow back to I was good at things they weren't. I had spent my life at BCD, right? At that kind of later stage. And so it was this interesting lens to have somebody who was more comfortable underwriting that stage of asset.”
2022-09-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why 95% of Venture Capital is Not Really "Venture Capital" | The Five Core Levers Needed To Assess Risk and Price a Startup | The Future of Venture; Who Wins, Who Loses, What Happens to the Crossover Funds with Will Quist, Partner @ Slow Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, I understand the two camps who are like put low cost basis things in there, keep your absolute valuation low, add up the number of call options, don't do reserves. I understand that logic. I also think if you can get discipline about your underwriting, right, you may increase the overall capital you can return. And so”
2022-09-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why 95% of Venture Capital is Not Really "Venture Capital" | The Five Core Levers Needed To Assess Risk and Price a Startup | The Future of Venture; Who Wins, Who Loses, What Happens to the Crossover Funds with Will Quist, Partner @ Slow Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Starting from that mental position is like a really helpful way to start thinking about secondaries and liquidity, et cetera. That's been a key learning of mine in the last year. That's been really fun to backtest. And it changes how you view things.”
2022-09-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why 95% of Venture Capital is Not Really "Venture Capital" | The Five Core Levers Needed To Assess Risk and Price a Startup | The Future of Venture; Who Wins, Who Loses, What Happens to the Crossover Funds with Will Quist, Partner @ Slow Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think the other thing you can do is like at a certain point of fund return, you just sell secondaries, which is a great heuristic. It's served a lot of early stage investors really well, though I do think you may cut off the tail on some things that were obvious holds or things you would have still been. You know what I mean? If you go through this lens of, is the business generating answers that say this is going to continue to compound or has price gotten ahead of itself?”
2022-09-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why 95% of Venture Capital is Not Really "Venture Capital" | The Five Core Levers Needed To Assess Risk and Price a Startup | The Future of Venture; Who Wins, Who Loses, What Happens to the Crossover Funds with Will Quist, Partner @ Slow Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Literally, anyone who's gotten skin in the game in the last 10 years is like learning the same lesson you are just, I'm not sure it's ever healthy to be in hold mode. I don't think you should ever mentally be holding because one, selling is really hard. Selling is emotionally hard. It's intellectually hard and it's structurally hard in illiquid assets. So being in hold and then reacting is wildly difficult. We've kind of adopted this mindset of like, I think you either are a buyer. Now you may not have the capital or the right cost of capital, but I think you either see signals that tell you you would continue to accumulate or you should mentally be thinking about selling. And that doesn't mean you're selling tomorrow. That doesn't mean you sell three years from now, but you begin to build a mental framework of I've gone past the point where I'm comfortable adding, what would it take? How would I get out? What would my logic be? Again, I'm always looking for things you can do over a thousand hands of Blackjack. And so that's become a really interesting way for me to take action consistently.”
2022-09-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why 95% of Venture Capital is Not Really "Venture Capital" | The Five Core Levers Needed To Assess Risk and Price a Startup | The Future of Venture; Who Wins, Who Loses, What Happens to the Crossover Funds with Will Quist, Partner @ Slow Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When you're running a company, you need to understand the first time you do something needs to be done by the leader of the SEAL team. Doing it the next 10 times, the SEAL team needs to manage it, right? It's special forces managing special forces, but doing it time number 11 through 100 is when you want to bring the infantry in. You want to bring people who love, embrace, and have a depth in process, repetition, refining the standard deviations of outcomes in any given entity, et cetera. I think it's a really great awareness for where you are on a skill set. Do you have both skill sets? Do you love one skill set over the other? And then where are you as a company in terms of that repetition and what do you need to bring in?”
2022-09-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why 95% of Venture Capital is Not Really "Venture Capital" | The Five Core Levers Needed To Assess Risk and Price a Startup | The Future of Venture; Who Wins, Who Loses, What Happens to the Crossover Funds with Will Quist, Partner @ Slow Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This is the hard takeaway about price, right? Which is like, it matters till it doesn't. So I don't know that I have a good core learning that you can take and extrapolate and use over and over again.”
2022-09-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why 95% of Venture Capital is Not Really "Venture Capital" | The Five Core Levers Needed To Assess Risk and Price a Startup | The Future of Venture; Who Wins, Who Loses, What Happens to the Crossover Funds with Will Quist, Partner @ Slow Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A lot of people think venture is some art that is unrelated to what a great public equity manager does. And I think when you invert it, right, you think, what am I looking for? What are the characteristics? What are the questions I'm asking? It'll take you into much more interesting places consistently and give you a framework to double click, dig in, and process things. I think more consistently and bring some objectivity to the subjectivity.”
2022-09-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why 95% of Venture Capital is Not Really "Venture Capital" | The Five Core Levers Needed To Assess Risk and Price a Startup | The Future of Venture; Who Wins, Who Loses, What Happens to the Crossover Funds with Will Quist, Partner @ Slow Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I was lucky enough there's a company called LiveRamp that Aaron Hoffman founded that I was lucky enough to lead the Series B. This was at a time when ad tech related products were kind of written off as hard to differentiate, hard to find novelty, hard to find defensibility, and really dug in with Orin to understand the business and the potential. And we led the round. It very quickly was a 10 or 12 accident within two years on acquisition. And it kept swallowing the public business that it went into. And now is publicly traded at a couple billion dollar market cap. The learning was to not come to sweeping conclusions, to sift through the business and think through the problem they were proposing solving and how they were thinking about building a scalable unit to deliver value to their customers. So I think that was like the very tactical learning I took with me is to like really think through those, get to the customer who pays the defensibility dynamic. I don't think enough venture investors think of themselves as an investor first and then venture second. I don't think.”
2022-09-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why 95% of Venture Capital is Not Really "Venture Capital" | The Five Core Levers Needed To Assess Risk and Price a Startup | The Future of Venture; Who Wins, Who Loses, What Happens to the Crossover Funds with Will Quist, Partner @ Slow Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's so hard. It's all mistakes. Because when it wins, you don't look at your pricing and be like, oh, I really nailed it on pricing. The only time pricing really screws you up is when you stay disciplined and miss a dramatic winner. What's one of the biggest mistakes you can make as an early manager, right? It's like you put two million bucks to work at a seed price. Don't know what the stage is. You put $3 million to work for 10% or 15% ownership in something super risky. And then you put 100 grand into something at 150 posts. That's less risky. That's more of a portfolio management mistake. Like what I would say to you is maybe you got priced wrong, but what you really got wrong was allocation.”
2022-09-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why 95% of Venture Capital is Not Really "Venture Capital" | The Five Core Levers Needed To Assess Risk and Price a Startup | The Future of Venture; Who Wins, Who Loses, What Happens to the Crossover Funds with Will Quist, Partner @ Slow Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We've learned a lot and respect what Josh has built at first round a lot. So we're in the, there's enough risk in these things, in the upside of winning them is dramatic enough that we want to be collaborators.”
2022-09-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why 95% of Venture Capital is Not Really "Venture Capital" | The Five Core Levers Needed To Assess Risk and Price a Startup | The Future of Venture; Who Wins, Who Loses, What Happens to the Crossover Funds with Will Quist, Partner @ Slow Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That becomes Are you going to put 10 bets in the fund or are you going to put 50 in the seed fund? Now you can make a case for both.”
2022-09-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why 95% of Venture Capital is Not Really "Venture Capital" | The Five Core Levers Needed To Assess Risk and Price a Startup | The Future of Venture; Who Wins, Who Loses, What Happens to the Crossover Funds with Will Quist, Partner @ Slow Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Once there is a game plan, like you just want to do all of it. At the upper ends, when you have all the money and all the products and all the strategies and all the sectors, you don't really have a need to offlay risk or, right, the risk doesn't seem that high that you need to offlay it with another partnership and you don't run out of money yet taken to its extreme. There's no real incentive for collaboration.”
2022-09-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why 95% of Venture Capital is Not Really "Venture Capital" | The Five Core Levers Needed To Assess Risk and Price a Startup | The Future of Venture; Who Wins, Who Loses, What Happens to the Crossover Funds with Will Quist, Partner @ Slow Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I had a hard time, the transition to competing to win deals versus underwriting. There became a real premium on, hey, this is something everyone likes, and so I better set up my widget to go compete for that deal versus I've got three bullets to shoot. There's a hunting analogy I love, which was for years it was about elk hunting, right? You had expensive bullets, you'd go on a long walk through the woods, you'd learn over the years how to get signs of an elk had been here, you'd be really patient, you'd lay there, you'd call them, one would come, you'd make sure you had a clear shot so you didn't waste a bullet. And if you got it, you took down a lot of meat and you were fed for the year. As bullets became cheaper, the incentive became shoot at anything that moves because you'll get another bullet. So even if you get a squirrel, it's okay. And then it became such a relative game that everybody was hunting in packs and just trying to be in position to be the first to shoot at the thing moving.”
2022-09-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why 95% of Venture Capital is Not Really "Venture Capital" | The Five Core Levers Needed To Assess Risk and Price a Startup | The Future of Venture; Who Wins, Who Loses, What Happens to the Crossover Funds with Will Quist, Partner @ Slow Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't think they expect that. All capital games are the same. I think when you get to consensus like that, people are comfortable. And there's a playbook and people understand it. And again, I think a lot of what Tiger did was really rational. Like returns at scale start looking very similar. I think we get to a place on a $6 billion fund expecting 30 to 40 percent net IRRs isn't reasonable and I don't think LPs are doing that. I think they're looking going say, hey, we can say we have venture exposure or exposure to tech equities and 15 to 17% net on a $300 million commitment is meaningful. I think they're sensitive to the quantum of capital they're able to move on when it comes to IRR and I think that's more the math they're doing.”
2022-09-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why 95% of Venture Capital is Not Really "Venture Capital" | The Five Core Levers Needed To Assess Risk and Price a Startup | The Future of Venture; Who Wins, Who Loses, What Happens to the Crossover Funds with Will Quist, Partner @ Slow Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is the first time we're really seeing a zero sum type behavior in people that can absorb LP dollars in such masks? I don't disagree with you. I've probably had the same comment for a long time, but I think we're now in a different era.”
2022-09-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why 95% of Venture Capital is Not Really "Venture Capital" | The Five Core Levers Needed To Assess Risk and Price a Startup | The Future of Venture; Who Wins, Who Loses, What Happens to the Crossover Funds with Will Quist, Partner @ Slow Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You'll find capital gains they all end up looking alike. I just don't think so on the consensus new venture scale, it's instructive to look at what's happened in investment banking and private equity and hedge fund land. Like I think that's very instructive about where new venture is going. I think the pie gets bigger, but unfortunately it subsists less people. Goldman and Morgan are much more profitable than a lot of other investment banks. You'll see firms that have picked a quadrant and set up their organization and strategy work really well. The ones who are early and dedicated to that are going to do wonderfully in the new venture game. I think people who have been slow to react to that changing reality are going to have a harder time. And then I think you're going to have a handful of people who pick to play a more classic non-consensus game, some portion of them will do well and some portion will fail to be non-consensus and be right. But I think there's a large middle that I think we'll need to find a home or struggle to find edge and alpha in the market. Everything adventured is always capital by like when there's a massive shift.”
2022-09-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why 95% of Venture Capital is Not Really "Venture Capital" | The Five Core Levers Needed To Assess Risk and Price a Startup | The Future of Venture; Who Wins, Who Loses, What Happens to the Crossover Funds with Will Quist, Partner @ Slow Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, you don't need more lines in the portfolio, you need more aggregate optionality. So you can either get that by taking really things that if they are correct, right, can be massive economic wins, right? That's like one way to offset it. And the other is a more index portfolio.”
2022-09-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why 95% of Venture Capital is Not Really "Venture Capital" | The Five Core Levers Needed To Assess Risk and Price a Startup | The Future of Venture; Who Wins, Who Loses, What Happens to the Crossover Funds with Will Quist, Partner @ Slow Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I think everyone's loss rates are really hard to understand over the last three years given the amount of speculation in capital candidately. But yeah, your loss rate should be higher.”
2022-09-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why 95% of Venture Capital is Not Really "Venture Capital" | The Five Core Levers Needed To Assess Risk and Price a Startup | The Future of Venture; Who Wins, Who Loses, What Happens to the Crossover Funds with Will Quist, Partner @ Slow Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's a winner's edge, right? And I think that you can absolutely, by being correct on some novel but right proposition, you begin to understand how to approach and view the world and understand which of those kinds of propositions are more likely to be correct or not. You're operating off better information both that you're getting from the world as well as you've had in firsthand experience. So I absolutely think you can spot a lot of it in advance. So I actually those five questions I like to think about them as columns when I'm thinking about a company and go, great companies have multiple of those columns that you need to think through. And a lot of times having success on one of the columns actually gives you leg up for doing something for the second S being more true.”
2022-09-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why 95% of Venture Capital is Not Really "Venture Capital" | The Five Core Levers Needed To Assess Risk and Price a Startup | The Future of Venture; Who Wins, Who Loses, What Happens to the Crossover Funds with Will Quist, Partner @ Slow Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So back to the five questions I just laid out, what I do is I go through any problem they're thinking about solving or especially what they're going to go tackle on the money I'm investing and try to think about do I love their answers? And then how many of the answers most importantly are theoretical versus rooted in some first or third party data? Like one of the things that's just logical to me is having a novel theory and being correct, having one of them in your life is a low odds proposition. There just aren't that many. Having two isn't linear risk or the odds of being right on two vectors is exponentially lower. And I think that there's a point at which you're backing too many theoreticals and you can't put a price on it. It's NPV negative and it's not worth the risk.”
2022-09-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why 95% of Venture Capital is Not Really "Venture Capital" | The Five Core Levers Needed To Assess Risk and Price a Startup | The Future of Venture; Who Wins, Who Loses, What Happens to the Crossover Funds with Will Quist, Partner @ Slow Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You're going to line up. I'm going to have no sales and marketing costs. I'm going to be able to price that right at the line. And if it costs me five cents to produce that whole thing, I got to make 85 cents of market. Like that's magic. And so I do think Yventure is simple but complex is like I do think it's a big option tree, right? But I think at a root of a lot of problems are products that at a minimum have qualitative value propositions that are correlating with a lot of other factors in life. And that makes them really hard to sell. But there are some markets that I think at a minimum are really capital inefficient to go after and not worth it. And no matter how charismatic the founder is, they're swimming upstream hard.”
2022-09-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why 95% of Venture Capital is Not Really "Venture Capital" | The Five Core Levers Needed To Assess Risk and Price a Startup | The Future of Venture; Who Wins, Who Loses, What Happens to the Crossover Funds with Will Quist, Partner @ Slow Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But that means that I think we're saying the same thing. Sure. Are there some black swan things that can wipe out every investment? The answer is yes. Could you have understood long-term capital management getting blown up by the ruble was going to have an effect on fintech services businesses? No, but like it did. There's black swans. One of the things I've gotten really addicted to recently is the point of the industry and of investing in general is that somebody can manufacture out of thin air value in excess of what it costs them to produce. And the more you can quantify that and make it causal. If I'm like, hey, Harry, here's a dollar. I'm going to charge you 90 cents”
2022-09-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why 95% of Venture Capital is Not Really "Venture Capital" | The Five Core Levers Needed To Assess Risk and Price a Startup | The Future of Venture; Who Wins, Who Loses, What Happens to the Crossover Funds with Will Quist, Partner @ Slow Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My immediate reaction is I think you failed to create a product that has such easily identifiable value proposition that customers in a segment understood why you were giving them a dollar and charging them less than a dollar. You're giving them a dollar value and charging them less.”
2022-09-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why 95% of Venture Capital is Not Really "Venture Capital" | The Five Core Levers Needed To Assess Risk and Price a Startup | The Future of Venture; Who Wins, Who Loses, What Happens to the Crossover Funds with Will Quist, Partner @ Slow Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You ask the same questions. The nuance is what answers make you most comfortable in pricing it over the rest of the market. There's really four states of answers to any of these questions. There is statistically relevant longitudinal first party data from the company. There is a depth of third-party data that's highly relevant that you can't debate. There is anecdotal first-party data from the company, right? Early signal. And then there's hypotheses or theories. All these questions exist in one of those four states. To cut to the chase, the job of the venture asset class, even new venture, is you're betting on theories. You want to come in when there's a highly credible theory that you have more conviction in than somebody else on at least one of those levers. You want to finance the company to go around the experiment, the more you're financing people to take hypotheses and turn them into first-party data, the discount rate of the enterprise value, that's the biggest tick you can get.”
2022-09-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why 95% of Venture Capital is Not Really "Venture Capital" | The Five Core Levers Needed To Assess Risk and Price a Startup | The Future of Venture; Who Wins, Who Loses, What Happens to the Crossover Funds with Will Quist, Partner @ Slow Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“100%. Charlie Munger is one of my religious figures. I think universal principles are universal. You know what I mean? When you find truth, it carries across the spectrum. And so I was like, I wonder if all the reading I've done about him and his process, I wonder if I can find a similar vein to how I think the best VCs think. Because if you can tie those two together, you probably have found some universal principles of investing. I kind of landed on the fact that we're all trying to bet on what the value over X period of a company is going to be, right, and how we should price it today. That's the job. There's like five levers that in my mind that go into that is the arc of history bending this company's way. You know what I mean? Like for the next five, ten years.”
2022-09-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why 95% of Venture Capital is Not Really "Venture Capital" | The Five Core Levers Needed To Assess Risk and Price a Startup | The Future of Venture; Who Wins, Who Loses, What Happens to the Crossover Funds with Will Quist, Partner @ Slow Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So that's the first place as a manager that you need to step off of. I think we're in the bucket of. No, truthfully, I think we would say we concede the consensus game at the earliest stages. We think our job is to go a click out further on a belief system than in other people. And I think that's a lot of the point of venture classic is to go out for defensible reasons to yourself, a click farther out the believability curve”
2022-09-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why 95% of Venture Capital is Not Really "Venture Capital" | The Five Core Levers Needed To Assess Risk and Price a Startup | The Future of Venture; Who Wins, Who Loses, What Happens to the Crossover Funds with Will Quist, Partner @ Slow Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The capital game I described is like you want to play the consensus game. You believe the consensus game of a certain kind of entrepreneur in a certain kind of product category in a certain kind of market is where returns are going to be generated.”
2022-09-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why 95% of Venture Capital is Not Really "Venture Capital" | The Five Core Levers Needed To Assess Risk and Price a Startup | The Future of Venture; Who Wins, Who Loses, What Happens to the Crossover Funds with Will Quist, Partner @ Slow Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, they don't worry about the loss of capital. And I do think the conflict is real. I think all the players are getting so big. It only takes two at a table. And if Sequoia's got a better widget in that moment, you win if you're not conflicting. And I always joke, like I've gone through this with some investment bankers with companies that have novel business model, right? How do you describe them to the street or novel stories? They end up almost all saying the same thing because their game is relative, right? They don't want to be the one who comes in with underwriting advice that's novel and could be wrong. It's the correct thing to say. It could go poorly. And so they all kind of say versions of what each other says because to win the next 10 deals, you don't want to be the one who did something that was intellectually correct but worked out poorly. And so I think you end up with the same dynamic inherently at really big, massive firms.”
2022-09-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why 95% of Venture Capital is Not Really "Venture Capital" | The Five Core Levers Needed To Assess Risk and Price a Startup | The Future of Venture; Who Wins, Who Loses, What Happens to the Crossover Funds with Will Quist, Partner @ Slow Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think there's a real incentive when you're operating at scale to not back novelty. You don't want to conflict yourself out of categories, right? Doing a $3 million seed check, even if category is 50-50 and conflicting out of a $300 to $500 million AUM opportunity down the line is really hard to do. And being wrong and looking silly has a penalty.”
2022-09-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why 95% of Venture Capital is Not Really "Venture Capital" | The Five Core Levers Needed To Assess Risk and Price a Startup | The Future of Venture; Who Wins, Who Loses, What Happens to the Crossover Funds with Will Quist, Partner @ Slow Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Kind of organized on the axis of are you more zero sum or you more collaborator on kind of the x axis and the y axis is are you a generalist doing all the things all the time or are you a specialist as soon as you have that kind of consensus dynamic you need to sprint to one of those strategies and you need to build your organization and asset base accordingly and so what happens in those consensus games is you're looking for less rebels and you're looking for people who fit the organization and can run the playbook that you've laid out”
2022-09-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why 95% of Venture Capital is Not Really "Venture Capital" | The Five Core Levers Needed To Assess Risk and Price a Startup | The Future of Venture; Who Wins, Who Loses, What Happens to the Crossover Funds with Will Quist, Partner @ Slow Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Started as a it's all investment banking was the first thing I would say but I found parallels that go beyond that when I look at whether it's investment banking mutual funds hedge funds private equity and now venture they've all followed a very similar curve where early on in the assets class lifestyle or business model lifestyle it subscale and it's volatile. There's no consensus way of how do you make money every year. Nobody knows, right? There's no formula yet. And there's not enough scale where people it's worth going zero sum. You need collaborators. Early on in Venture, nobody had enough money. There was small partnerships who all collaborated and got along really well because like no single firm could raise enough money. And it was still unclear exactly how the formula would play out. So there was a non-zero sum dynamic when it was subscale, volatile, and without a consensus path forward. I think what happens is soon as there is some consensus amongst the players and there's enough scale to warrant zero sum type behavior, you kind of have the same things happen. If you look at the other industries,”
2022-09-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why 95% of Venture Capital is Not Really "Venture Capital" | The Five Core Levers Needed To Assess Risk and Price a Startup | The Future of Venture; Who Wins, Who Loses, What Happens to the Crossover Funds with Will Quist, Partner @ Slow Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think there's always been a lack of rebels. Again, I think this is a proportionality question. We probably put out the same amount of rebels, but the amount of firms branding themselves as venture capitalists have grown so dramatically. So that would probably be my first reaction is like, inherently, there aren't that many rebels in society. There aren't that many people who think left instead of right. And I think when you look at what folks scaling need, it makes sense that they would attract people that are less down the rebellious curve. I've been talking about for a while that all capital games end up looking the same.”
2022-09-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why 95% of Venture Capital is Not Really "Venture Capital" | The Five Core Levers Needed To Assess Risk and Price a Startup | The Future of Venture; Who Wins, Who Loses, What Happens to the Crossover Funds with Will Quist, Partner @ Slow Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What gets hard is thinking through the risks and rewards of any given experiment a company is going to run, which is composed of a number of different levers trying to understand, and they're almost always contextual. So it's a simple mental formula. I think having the art and science and the discipline to run through it to ask the right questions, how do you weigh a really strong value prop in the product versus a small market versus a founder without a background in the space? That's hard. The equation is simple, but understanding how to balance those factors and when to make a bet is hard.”
2022-09-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why 95% of Venture Capital is Not Really "Venture Capital" | The Five Core Levers Needed To Assess Risk and Price a Startup | The Future of Venture; Who Wins, Who Loses, What Happens to the Crossover Funds with Will Quist, Partner @ Slow Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Provocative statement tick I think there's like new Coke and Coke Classic. We have new Venture and Venture Classic. I find I only believe the point of venture capital is to allow a founder to run an experiment against a hypothesis that is knowable, testable, where a true answer dramatically changes the enterprise value of the company. If you look over history, that's when it's performed best. And that's really how it works. The scale of it is using a little bit of money to do something that delivers a ton of value over a long period of term. There's a real equity efficiency. That's where the scale comes from. So start from that being the definition of it.”
2022-09-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why 95% of Venture Capital is Not Really "Venture Capital" | The Five Core Levers Needed To Assess Risk and Price a Startup | The Future of Venture; Who Wins, Who Loses, What Happens to the Crossover Funds with Will Quist, Partner @ Slow Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Long story short, I jumped on there. We'll grew that to a couple billion of AUM. And it ended being the best thing that could happen in my career. There was no deal we could reject, no sector, no deal too big or small. It was like a crash course in understanding the realities of venture. With a lot of seniority, because we were building. So by the time I got to my early 30s, I had a track record. I had a lot of context. I'd built. I'd raised up money from LPs. And so I said I think I can do this on my own if I don't do it now. I'm never going to do it. Just as I was setting off to do that, the slow guys who were close friends of mine were taking what they'd done with their personal capital and wanted to launch a long-term venture fund with outside capital. I would say I knew what they didn't and they knew what I didn't. It was a perfect match. You mentioned there though kind of the confluence of a couple of different things, public and private and kind of what industry foresaw in terms of where we were going as an industry. I don't normally start with what the fuck is venture capital. As you know, when you listen to the show, but I think this is a really good place for us to start because you've said before 95% of venture capital isn't actually venture capital.”
2022-09-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why 95% of Venture Capital is Not Really "Venture Capital" | The Five Core Levers Needed To Assess Risk and Price a Startup | The Future of Venture; Who Wins, Who Loses, What Happens to the Crossover Funds with Will Quist, Partner @ Slow Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I just fell in love with hearing the story, having to make a decision, putting it on a list, and ending up having to narrow it down to the top 100, publish it, and then write up the top 10. It was awesome. In that process, I was like, oh, I get it now. This is amazing. So after that, I was like, I want to go pick companies, put money behind it, and be involved in this. But I had to take a long route. From there, I go, how do you get in if you're not technical through the finance angle? The key catalyst was going to industry ventures. So when I was interviewing out of banking, I ended up talking to a bunch of traditional venture funds. I wasn't really a fit as we discussed given my background and found these three partners who had gotten together and were convinced the private markets had changed forever. Again, this was a debate in 0607 where companies stay private longer with the public markets open up. And they said, it's changed. It's going to create all kinds of problems, needs for capital that don't exist throughout the secondary market, later stage market for LPs, raised a hundred million dollar fund. And it was me and Joey from Allbirds, who was a good friend of mine from college. We were the first to associates.”
2022-09-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why 95% of Venture Capital is Not Really "Venture Capital" | The Five Core Levers Needed To Assess Risk and Price a Startup | The Future of Venture; Who Wins, Who Loses, What Happens to the Crossover Funds with Will Quist, Partner @ Slow Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source