I've probably made about 75 investments over the course of my career. So we are editors, not writers. One of the first consumer specialists in the industry. You know, if you think about like what it takes to be a good investor, this poor pastor at the job, you've got to figure out what's your way to win. Some of the time you will win there. And maybe on the road, you lose more. I think the reality is that an investor or a board member can really only change the
course of the company by maybe 30%. And I think the right founders can make it 30 times difference. Every successful company will give a good reference for all of their investors because it's easy to be a supportive investor when the company is doing well. You can't be assigned as a mentor and have to choose each other. Is there one pitch that really stood out with you and proved to be the great success that you know?
Snap was an interesting one because the prevailing wisdom at the time was that there would never be another social media template. You have to make their lives easier. Otherwise, it's not worth it. The mistakes that I regret the most as an investor, when something was working and I convinced myself that it wouldn't work in the future and it just kept working. Become an expert, identify a firm that values that expertise, and then demonstrate that expertise
in a way that is costly. Telling good from great just takes reps. And there's no price for second place. Our guest today is a legendary investor whose influence has profoundly shaped how we live, connect, and engage with the world. Jeremy Liu, Medias List investor from Lightspeed Venture Partners, has led movements through his transformative investments, inspiring a new generation of founders and investors to think bigger and aim higher.
From a firm which reimagined the way that we approach personal finance to Giphy, a cultural staple in digital expression, Jeremy's investments have fundamentally changed consumer behavior. As the first investor in Snapchat, he didn't just back a product. He helps pioneer a platform that transforms communication and storytelling for billions of users worldwide. Jeremy's vision and strategic mentorship have made him a guiding force in Silicon Valley,
where he continues to identify paradigm shifting opportunities and support founders who redefine our daily lives. As Jeremy is no longer actively investing with Lightspeed, it is even more rare that he is on here today sharing his unique insights and wisdom that he's gained along his iconic journey as an investor and consumer at Lightspeed. He shares his wisdom on how to not only make it in the investing world, but how to find unicorn and
decacorn level companies like Snap. He also goes into insights on how to start your career today in venture capital, the specific steps that you can take to join this notoriously competitive industry. It has been such an honor and pleasure to sit down with one of my mentors and icons. And I'm sure you will enjoy this remarkable guest. Jeremy Liu. Hi, everyone. I'm so excited to welcome the most iconic guest. Jeremy Liu to the podcast.
He has been a great inspiration for me for many years. I've been a big fan of his work, his investing career, the way that he's paved the way for a whole generation of investors and founders and the work that he's been doing across the world. His multiple investments, his iconic career at Lightspeed. And now that he has retired, we would love to sit down with him and chat with him about his iconic legacy that he's left behind and learn about his journey as well as his wisdom gained along the way.
So we're so excited to welcome this brilliant guest on our podcast. Thank you so much for being here. Oh, you're going to make you blush. Jeremy, I have followed your career at Lightspeed and it has been the inspiration and playbook for so many aspiring founders and entrepreneurs to learn from the lessons that you have gained and the wisdom that you were able to acquire along your journey. You have been our most requested and most anticipated guest in our community.
Jeremy, you have been known to be this iconic investor at Lightspeed and a real trailblazer for Asian American community. Can you walk us through your journey of how it all began, your roots in Australia? Sure. Yeah. So I grew up in Perth, out on the West Coast in Australia. And it's a place where I'm really focused around mining and agriculture. So if you want to work beyond that, then you have to figure out a way to get out of there.
I ended up studying mathematics and linguistics. And I joined McKinsey when I graduated from university. I had initially thought that I would have a career as a mathematician. And when I realized how good actual mathematicians were, I requested that I had to go find something where, ah, which goes better suited. And so I went into business. And so I joined McKinsey. I spent a year in the Sydney office. And then when Mandela was elected in South Africa, McKinsey opened an office out there.
And I was looking for people to stop it with. And so I volunteered and spent a year in South Africa as well. One of my bosses at McKinsey had, ah, was an American guy, had been seconded to the Sydney office. And in 95, he left the firm to start an internet company called CitySearch. It was a first-generation city guide business, similar to Yelp, but without the user-generated content. I didn't know anything about the internet, but I thought it was a great boss.
And so when he said he was leaving, I called him and said, hey, do I come? And he said yes. And that's what led me to come to the US and start working in tech. And so I went through 96, 97, worked in a variety of roles of the company because it was the late 90s. We, at one point, were going to merge CitySearch with a company called Zip2, which was Elon Musk's first company. And unfortunately, that deal fell apart because Charles Kahn, who was a CEO of CitySearch, was going to be the chairman of the company.
And Elon was going to be the CEO of the NERSH company. And they both thought that they were going to be running the company. And when they realized that they didn't have a common understanding about who was actually going to run the company, that deal ended up falling apart. So I ended up going to business school, went to Stanford, got an MBA. And while I was there, CitySearch merged with Ticketmaster Online, went public, and became part of what's now the IAC group of companies.
It was called USA Networks at the time. What I realized was that, you know, we used to call it new media back in the late 90s. The internet was new media, and it was a hard way to find revenue. And so I figured it might be interesting to go work for an old media company, official media company like yours. USA Networks, see what they were doing, how they were doing it, and maybe there were ways that we could bring some of that back.
So I spent my summer business school doing strategic planning at USA Networks, working for Dara Khosrowshahi, who's now the CEO of Uber. When I graduated, I went back to work for him as VP of strategic planning. So USA Networks IAC was run by this guy, Baradilla, at the time. And for him, strategic planning mostly meant what company should I buy next? So we worked on the acquisition of Expedia, of Patels.com. We bought in Ticketmaster, City Search, Match, sold USA Networks, Bravo, Sci-Fi Channel, TV Studios, and movie studios.
It was that transition from USA Networks to IAC. And so that was an incredible experience to sort of be involved in a lot of this deal structuring and sit back from the table while the big boys were negotiating these deals. I learned a lot from just being in the room. All of these companies that IAC applied ended up mostly reporting to the president of IAC, a guy called John Miller. In 2002, he left IAC to become CEO of AOL.
And I ended up going with him and was his chief of stock at SPP of corporate development. Was in that role for a couple of years. If you remember the bubble burst in 2000 and there was real questions about whether consumer internet could be a sustainable industry. Revenues peaked and started coming down. And for AOL, which had built its business on the dial-up internet and combined the access with the AOL service and content, broadband had really started to take off.
And it was unclear whether or not we could maintain that business. Actually, it was clear that we could not maintain that business. We couldn't maintain the bundle. But we didn't know whether or not you could build the business just on online advertising. Because advertising impeached in 2000 and it was down in 2001. It was down again in 2002, 2003, 2004. So it felt like a big risk to try to unbundle our AOL and move into an advertising business.
But we had bought Netscape back in 99. And so I dropped into a general manager role at Netscape. And the key job was to figure out could you build an online advertising business could actually grow again. But we didn't want to take that risk with the brand that was on their side of the building. We did it first with Netscape. And for a couple of years, I ran that business. We gathered enough confidence that that was possible.
And that's what led to AOL changing its core business away from the time to internet access and into more going to advertise and perfect business model. And then around 2005, one of my business school classmates called me. He joined a venture capital firm right out of the business school and had asked me if I got a thought about venture capital. And I wasn't really aware of what venture capital was. But when he explained to me that like, you know, you could actually make a living by spending time with entrepreneurs and helping them build the future.
I was like, wow, this sounds like the most amazing job ever. And that led me to join Lightspeed in 2006. And I've been there ever since. Thank you for walking us through that timeline. The common theme among each of these experiences was that you were able to find really great mentors, people who were exceptional leaders to follow, learn from along the way. Can you tell us a little bit about the difference between a really great mentor, someone that you really wanted to follow and you knew that they could take you to amazing places, teach you things versus just an extremely successful professional?
Yeah, I think, you know, a mentor-mentee relationship goes both ways. You can't be assigned, kind of have to choose each other. And so there's this sort of element where the mentor actually cares enough about you and your development as a human, as a professional, that they actually want to spend time that they don't have to making you better. So they'll bring you into meetings that you don't need to be in so you can see what's going on.
They'll give you projects or responsibilities that are maybe a little bit beyond your capabilities to see how you can stretch into them. And they will, like, actually pay some attention to your development in some of those ways. That can't be assigned, right? It's got to be worth it for them, too. And so that's the mentee's responsibility to, like, make sure that you are going above and beyond what your quote-unquote job description is to make life easier for them so that they want you to be around.
Yeah, absolutely. That's a really great breakdown of how it needs to be a reciprocal relationship on both ways. And there are lots of really great professionals who are really good at their job, but occasionally you run across these people who just have this sort of upward momentum in their careers. It's just so clear, not just to you, but to everybody. And the great thing about being in their orbit, whether it's a mentor or someone like Cassidy, is that you can kind of slipstream behind them so that as they, like, go through this incredible, like, arc of their own career, you can just sort of, like, ride right behind them.
And you can get pulled along, inside them, and pull along higher and faster than they can be able to do what you're at. It's also like a testament to them seeing themselves in you or them seeing the potential in you for them to want to take you along with them in the journey. When you were growing as a chief staff, there must have been something that they saw in you. Yeah, and it's because you make their lives easier, right? That really has to be the thing, is that, you know, because, like, for them to put the effort into making you better, you have to make their lives easier. Otherwise, it's not worth it.
Yeah. Do you have any strategic tips that someone can employ when they find somebody they really want to ride that wave with? How should they begin thinking about building that relationship within the workplace? And then let's say there's somebody who is maybe even outside their industry? And begin that mentoring relationship. If it's someone that you don't have any, like, interaction with, it's quite difficult. It doesn't have to be your boss. As long as it's somebody you interact with, that's in the orbit people that you hook with, and they might be your boss, they might be your boss's boss, they might be your boss's peer, they might be your boss's boss's peer.
As long as you interact with them from time to time, there is an opportunity to build a relationship with them. And the key thing is, like, how do you make their lives easier? Right? So this is beyond, like, I'm just going to do my job well. It's like a little bit of proactively thinking about, okay, what do they need? You know, they mentioned this thing, you know, they asked this question, and it was just a throwaway question, and no one really is an actual, I know, I'll take it as an actual.
Let me go to the phone, they're like, oh, I wonder, you know, how good Chinese AI L&B companies are compared to the US ones? Like, yeah, that's a really good question. No one actually takes an extra action item. You can decide, I'll take that as an action item. Let me go, actually, do some research, find the answer, put it together in a really easy way, and then either send it to them, or sit down with them and say, hey, you know, I remember you asked this question, I was interested too, so I pulled this information together.
And if you do that a few times, people are like, oh, that person makes my life easier. Like, huh, I would like my life to be easier, so I would like that person to be around me more. And that's one way you can start that relationship. You've worked for these exceptional leaders prior to your career at Lightspeed, and then during your job at Lightspeed, it was back touring and really nurturing these great leaders, entrepreneurs.
Can you tell us about the common qualities that you found in exceptional leaders and ones that would take their business to the next level? You know, I think there are just so many ways to be successful. It's not like there's one common way that, like, all leaders share these three traits. You know, there's no buzz of the news article about it. Like, the thing is, every job, every role has a set of characteristics that are important for success.
And you can be terrible at everything else, as long as you're great at those few things. Sure. And so that, I think, is the, like, it is about being spiky, not about being well-rounded, at least in the environments that I've been in, right? And again, like, you know, like, maybe there's a part to be well-rounded and be great as well, right? But, like, because there are many ways to be successful. I think the one, maybe there is a commonality.
Like, commonality is that they are thinking forward, this sort of idea of strategic versus tactical. But also, but, you know, again, I would say, like, that has been a characteristic of the industries that I've worked in. And there are probably lots of examples of super tactical people who have been very successful because there are lots of different ways to be successful. So it's really, it's a matching problem. Yeah.
Right? It's like, what is your personality? My personality is a little bit more strategically, but that's tactical, a little bit less operational. And so I match well with people who are also like that because that's where, you know, their spike and my spike align. And so I can learn the most from them and I can be called along and make slipstream in the best way. And that aligns with industries like venture capital or like startups where, you know, it is less about, like, let's be 1% better today.
And more about, like, what's the big idea or is the future? Can you walk us through your early career at Light to Speed, how you developed your investment thesis? Yeah. Yeah. So, you know, when I was first looking into getting an adventure, a few firms that I was talking to, I decided I wanted to be the Bay Area. So I deprioritized the Boston opportunities. And there was really two really high firms that I was, like, excited about.
I remember having this dinner with the partners at one of those that I was talking to. And, you know, what they talked about was this culture of, like, you know, you pay your dues, right? Like, if you're the new guy, you pay your dues. And so there was this sort of rainmaker at the firm. And he was very clearly the person that made the best investments at the firm, but he'd also made. So let's go to bedposts because that's the nature of the business.
And so, like, the new folks, everyone who had joined had taken off of this guy's plate, some of the lesser performing investments. And that freed up his time to spend more time looking for the next great investment. And I was like, yeah, that makes sense, right? Like, you know, you've got to make sure, like, I get that. You know, at the beginning, you're a role player. And, like, there's a star. And you've got to make sure the star gets the most played time.
Yeah, past the guy that's going to score the most points. You know, and everyone else had done it. I'm not special. Like, I'll pay my dues. I don't think that I should, like, get past on that. So, yeah, I'll take some of the deals that are not as well performing off of his plate. And, like, that seems like a pretty good strategy. But then I had a conversation with the Lightspeed guys, and they actually had a very different theme of the world.
They think, and I would agree, that success in venture capital is path dependent. Once you start getting some success, you get more success. More about when you associate with some good companies, new entrepreneurs want your investment a little bit more. And so their perspective was, we're going to double team any new investments that you make. And if they're going well, stay on. You should stay on now. And we'll sort of heal away.
But if they're not going well, then, you know, we've all had success to careers. We've all got good companies that we're associated with. So it doesn't hurt us to have to deal with a company that isn't doing as well. But if you're at the beginning of your career, it hurts you a lot to have to deal with these companies that are not doing well. So if companies are doing well, you stay with them. If companies aren't doing well, you peel off and we'll clean them up.
And then you get set up on this sort of path where you're associated with your companies early. And again, if you believe that success is path dependent, then that's a better setup. And it was really interesting to see the two different approaches, both of which, by the way, are completely valid approaches. And like, I'm not, the other firm is an extremely successful edge capital firm. So it's not like their strategy is a bad strategy.
It's just that one of them appeals to me more than the other. And that's why I ended up at Lightspeed. Because I think, you know, like making sure you have the right cultural fit, like your values and sales, the values of the firm, is what's going to allow you to be happy and successful over the longer term. So that's what led me to Lightspeed in the first place. Back in 2006, when I joined, it was a very different environment.
Because I was the first consumer specialist investor at Lightspeed and one of the first consumer specialists in the industry. Because up until that point, everyone was a generalist. You know, people did enterprise software. They did infrastructure. They did consumer. They did everything. And so my advantage was that I actually had a depth of understanding of the consumer net that went back to 1995, which meant, you know, by 2006, a decade of experience, which was about as much experience as you could actually have in the consumer net.
It sounds funny to say that I was a specialist of the consumer net because, you know, today, like, that's a gigantic field. And now you're a specialist in social media, you're a specialist in AI, you're a specialist in marketplaces, you know, whatever it is. But at that time, it was enough to be a specialist in that that entrepreneurs could tell the difference. They really could recognize that I understood better than a generalist venture capitalist how their business was going to get built, what were the most important metrics, where they should be spending their time, you know, things that had worked and not worked in the past.
That was my start. Helped me differentiate myself because that is the challenge. When you start out of venture capital is how do you win competitive deals? And when you're new to the industry and all of the other people who are interested in being a steal from other firms have decades of experience and a whole list of successful companies who you don't, like, how do you get someone to choose you? And you have to have something that the others don't.
And you won't win every time, but sometimes you win because people will be like, oh, yeah, like, sure. He doesn't have, you know, 10 years of business of venture capital. He doesn't have, he hasn't taken any companies public before, but he seems to understand my business better than the other folks. And so I'd rather work with that guy. How did you demonstrate that you had this really keen understanding of the industry in ways that differentiate you from your other peers?
Obviously, you had been one of the first consumer investors overall and the only one at Lightspeed. Can you tell us about how you built that trust with the founders? You don't build that trust before the investor. That trust gets built over time and it specifically gets built in difficult situations. And so you don't have any before an investment. You can't just say, hey, here's what I've done. Like, you know, look how smart I am because I was at this company.
The way that I think you differentiate on specific domain knowledge is through the questions you ask and through the, you know, suggestions you make and on so forth. During the diligence process, sometimes the suggestions that you make, they are able to tell how knowledgeable you are. And sometimes that's what they're looking for. Right. But sometimes it's not what they're looking for. Like sometimes they're like, hey, you know, like I'm the expert on this.
I don't need another expert on my business because like no one will know better than me, which is true. So it doesn't matter how well you understand the business. What matters is it depends on what they're looking for and what you can bring. And again, it becomes a matching problem, not a sorting problem. I think one of your extraordinary talents is the fact that you can spot an emerging trend at the same time that the technology that enables that trend, how you acquire that skill.
There's that famous William Gibson quote, the future already exists, it's just unevenly distributed. Well, and I think that the people who are creating that future that's unevenly distributed are the entrepreneurs. And it's our job as venture capitalists to recognize that when they are telling that story. So we are, and it is not writers. You know, when an entrepreneur comes in to tell their story about the future, there would be typically four things as a consumer investor that I look for.
The first is, can this become part of pop culture? Can you imagine that someday in the future, you know, on a Saturday night live, cold open, like someone references this company or this product. And it's like everybody, even if you don't use the product, like you understand what it means. It's like you get punched, punch point. That's a taste type question, right? But there are some indications you can look for. So, for example, yearly adopters of a lot of pop culture tend to be young women.
And so you can look for, like, is this a product that, you know, is largely used by young women, even though it doesn't need to be. So if you're looking at a skincare foundation brand, like maybe it's all young women, but like that's aimed at young women. So like that doesn't tell you that much. But if you're looking at, you know, a social media company, like there's no reason why it should be used by young women in particular.
Like it could be used by anybody. But if it skews heavily toward young women, that is an indication that maybe there is a better opportunity. It could become part of pop culture at the time. So that's one. The second question that I would ask is, does this build new habits? And you can look to that in the existing user base. So a habit is a decision that you made unconsciously. And depending on the product, the cycle of that decision can be different.
Up to the commerce business, like I don't make a decision about what brand of toothpaste I buy. I always buy the same one. But I only buy toothpaste once every couple of months. Right. So the cycle of that situation is long. If it's a messaging app, you know, if I see a little, you know, unread, then I'm going to open it. And that's a decision that I made consciously. But that's one that I make several times a day. Metric to look for to see if those habits are being formed.
But that is essentially a measure of engagement and attention. The third question is, is there a scalable where people wait for this thing to grow? And sometimes that can be through marketing. Sometimes it could be through word of mouth. Sometimes it could be through social media. Sometimes it could be through like physical world, I guess, virality, where you see someone doing something. Like the first time you saw someone on a bird scooter, you were like, what's that?
Right. And so there's a lot of different ways things can grow. And the question is like, does this one have a scalable or beautiful one? And then the fourth one, which is probably the most important one, is like, does the founder have a unique insight that explains all the rest of it? And there's two parts that are important to that. The first is that it's an insight. Like it has to be something that is like non-obvious and true.
And the second one is it has to be unique. So, you know, oh, this is growing because AI is not a unique insight. Right. But, you know, something about recognizing that I'll give you an example. When we invested in Giphy, Alex Chung, the founder of Giphy, said nowadays we're most communicating through text. Text has become a far more common mode of communication than post or face to face. And he said that you lose a lot of context and emotion through text-based communication.
And we've always been trying to find ways to supplement that. And, you know, back in the earliest days of Usenet, that was things like emoticons. Like these, you know, ASCII-based characters that you would try to like do in Smiley text order. And then they became emojis. Right. But the challenge with an emoji is that it's a fixed alphabet. And so if you want to say, I love you, that means something different to your wife, to your son and to your best friend.
Right. And so like hot eyes emoji to each of those is starts to feel kind of weird in some instances. Right. But the great thing about this shared vocabulary of film and television that Giphy draw from is that you can actually differentiate the I love you to your wife, to your son and to your best friend with different clips from different movies or different TV shows. And so that was why Gips were really trending up through like the mid 2000s, because it allowed for this emotion and context in text-based communication, which had become the norm that was missing.
And that was like, oh, like I didn't understand that. He understood that my job as an editor was to recognize that he had written the great American novel. He had made this incredible insight. And he showed that in this case, you know, Gips would clearly become a part of pop culture that were widely used by young women and young people at that time. And they had a scalable, people way to grow. Because when you receive one, you're like, huh, first time you received a gift in, you know, an iMessage or something like, how did you do that?
How can I do that? Where are these? Where can I find more? Right. Like there's a very scalable, people way to grow. And it created new habits because once you started receiving them, you wanted to send them. And so that was a good example of all of those things. I love that story. It's such a good playbook that you outlined for us in terms of how you think of an investment. The four different levers to consider is being a great investor is something that is essentially innate or something that can be taught or learned through discipline.
I think like everything else, there's elements of both. You can't teach curiosity like that, I think, is something that's innate. And if you're not curious, it's hard to become a great investor. I think work ethic is also pretty innate. And, you know, if you think about like what it takes to be a good investor, there's poor parts of the job. Like there's awesome good deals. There's telling you good from great. There's winning competitive deals and there's helping the companies after you invest.
And sourcing good deals at the end of the day is about, it's a little bit like getting a sales job. Like more activity brings more top of funnel, more top of funnel brings more bottom of funnel. Yeah. And so that is about look ethic. You just have to go out and like meet a lot of companies. If you're just sitting there waiting for companies to come to you, you're not going to, there's a selection bias there. I think that you can, people talk about networks as being like, oh, here you can deal flow.
And I think they're really important. But the thing is all networks are finite. You know, if you work the Coinbase and you've got a great networks with the Coinbase folks, but there's only so many people that work the Coinbase. And so over time, you will eventually reach the end of network. Right. And so then you always, so it may be that you can push off the look part for some period of time. But like if you want to have longevity in the business, you just have to go meet more people.
And there's lots of ways to do that and depends on your personality. Right. You can use different tactics for that. You know, it might be that you like to go to demo days where it might be that you obsessively read the tech press and reach out to every company. And that sounds interesting. Or it might be that like you are, you know, you tend to get obsessive about research. You like, like go down these rabbit holes for new areas.
And through the research, you turn up companies that are interesting to you. And so you do outreach to them. So there's lots of different ways, but they all come down to a lot of activity. Yeah. So I think those two are elements that are somewhat innate. And then the second part of being successful is this telling good from great. Telling good from bad isn't that hard. Right. If you're smart enough, if you're curious enough, if you're empathetic enough, if you're quantitative enough, you can tell good from back.
And all of those things, I think like, you know, it's hard to become more quantitative. There's some degree that you can move up and down, but like a lot of that stuff is innate. Telling good from great just takes reps. Like if we were looking to invest in one in a thousand company, you better have met thousands of companies to be able to know what a one in a thousand company looks like. If you've only met 10 companies, all you can say is that this is the best company I've ever seen.
It's top 10%. If you met a hundred companies, this is the best company I've ever seen. It's top 1%. But on the up you've met thousands of companies, can you say this company's top 0.1%? And those are the ones that drive all of the returns. There is no substitute. You can't just read a bunch of blogs or listen to a bunch of podcasts and like get good at telling what a top 0.1% company is. You have to run the miles. You have to do the reps.
You have to go meet those companies yourself and develop that sense. So that's the second piece of it. Then the third piece is winning competitive deals. And we talked a little bit about this before, right? You've got to figure out what's your way to win. And it's not that you're going to win every single time. No one wins every single time. But you've got to believe that you're going to win some of the time. And you've got to win some of the time against the best because if your taste is good, then you are competing against other good firms to win that deal.
And so I kind of like to think about it as like, do you know what your home ground advantage is? Your home ground advantage means that some of the time you will win there. And maybe on the road, you lose more, right? So like you want to play at home or you want to play on the road. But as long as you know what your home ground advantage is, you can make sure that you play more at home than you do on the road. And if you don't know what that is, then you're probably losing ordeals than you should.
And that home ground advantage to be anything. It could be like Coinbase. So like maybe like people who work at Coinbase, they know you, they trust you. Even if some amazing venture capitalist shows up that has great track record, they don't know them, but they know you and they trust you. And so you win. So it could be in network deals. It could be domain expertise. So for me, that was what it was in the beginning.
It was that, you know, I could demonstrate that I understood consumer deals better than these generalists and people like, oh, I'd kind of like to have someone who really understands about business on my board. And as mentors become more specialized, you have to become more specialized too. Like if you want to be a domain expert, it can't be on consumer and needs to be like much, much more narrow. At least to start off with.
I know the time we can grow it out, but like you've got to start with something more narrow. It could be geography, right? And it could be that you really understand the dynamics of Latin America better than a generalist VC that's flying in from the U.S. It could be that you speak Spanish, right? So you can speak to the entrepreneur in their native language. And that makes it just easy to communicate instead of them having to like think then translate before they talk to their investor.
But there has to be something that would cause someone to say, I would rather have you as my investor than all these other really impressive, innovative options that I have. And like once you understand what that is, then you want to spend all your time there. And that home ground advantage will eventually grow. So I know you interviewed Nicole Quinn, one of my partners at Lightspeed recently. So when she started, she had joined us from Morgan Stanley, where she had done equity capital markets and equity research.
And she focused on a lot of CPG and luxury. And so she understood brands in a way that I think most people in venture capital do not. And so if you look at like a lot of e-commerce businesses, most venture capitalists will look at that as a lifetime value, the customer acquisition cost arbitrage. And like if the LTV to CAC ratio was sufficiently high, then this is a good business. And if it's not that high, then I'm not that excited.
So that's a quantitative view of e-commerce, and that's a perfectly good view of e-commerce. And Nicole can do that as well with anybody. But what she could also bring was this view of brand creation. And most e-commerce founders think of what they're building as brands. So she was able to differentiate herself from the beginning in that way. So the very first deal that she won at Lightspeed was Gwyneth Paltrow's company, Goop.
And I can guarantee you that Gwyneth Paltrow does not think about Goop as an LCB CAC arbitrage. She thinks about it as a brand. And so she appreciated that Nicole was thinking about her business in the same way that she thought about her business. And that appealed to her. She chose Nicole to lead her round of investment. And what that did was allowed Nicole to expand her areas of expertise, her home-gribe advantage,
to now include how a celebrity-led or an influencer-led business could be built. Yeah. And so then when Lady Gaga comes along and she is building house brands, Nicole is able to win that because she has perspective on how to build influencer-led brands already. And then when Cameo comes along and they're building a marketplace around influencers, Nicole is able to win that deal because she brings this multiple influencer,
multiple celebrity-led perspective for how to build business. And now she knows something about marketplaces. So then she can go on and win marketplace deals. So her home-gribe advantage is expanding as her portfolio expands. But it had to start with a place where she was special, where she was different, where she was differentiated from everybody else. I think everybody needs to get very clear about what that is for them when they sought out.
Otherwise, they just end up chasing. Every deal comes along and losing. And there's no prize for second place. Nicole, like you mentioned, has been the pioneer of monetizing your personal brand. One of the best pieces of wisdom I received was from you in terms of how to grow that home-grown advantage into your brand. Differentiate that. Be well-known for that. It doesn't matter how good you are at that. But people also have to know that that is your strength to differentiate yourself through
having a unique point of view, whether it is through a written platform or through hosting events or through, you know, podcasts or whatever it is. So it really encouraged and inspired me to start thinking about how to showcase that home-grown advantage. It's to be authentic if you don't know what it is. Yeah. Or it can't just be aspirational. It can't be like, you know, well, I'm going to win because I'm an expert in crypto.
But you're not an expert in crypto. Yeah. Well, that's a problem, right? You have to become an expert in crypto or whatever it is you want to be. By the way, that's hard because now, you know, like if you're getting into crypto now, well, you know, there'd be people who have been in crypto for 15 years at this point. So like, are you an expert compared to those people? Maybe not. Sure. Right. So like, it's one of these things where you have to be really honest with yourself about
like, is this actually, this might be aspirationally what I would like to think is my advantage, but is it actually an advantage? Well, and outside objective to believe that about me relative to the others. Yeah. So important. And I love that you talk so much about how to win the deal as well. It's the combination of the home-grown advantage and the track record. And... Well, a track record can be part of your home-grown advantage.
And so like today, if I was still investing, part of what would be my advantage is I can point to, you know, 18 years of, you know, venture capital experience and multiple decade corns and all this sort of stuff. And people would be like, oh yeah, I'd love to have that guy around. But I didn't have that when I started. I have it now. So that's the thing is your home-grown advantage changes and grows over time, but you can't
jump to the top of the stairs. You've got to take it one step at a time. From a founder's perspective, you've obviously seen many successful companies. What do you think it is about successful founders? Do you also think it's innate or that their skills that make them so successful are owned through discipline and practice? I think it has to start with something innate. So, you know, this question of like, what does it take to be successful in a business?
So a great example is, you know, social media. So Evan at Snapchat, his superpower is 100% around product and understanding the consumer. Max Levchin at a firm, that's a lending and payments business. And so, you know, the superpower there needs to be around the machine learning to do best in class underwriting. And that's where he has a large strength. You have to be great at the thing that matters the most in the business that you've chosen.
And I think that is innate. And then you can learn to be good at all the rest of it. Max is now running an organization with, you know, thousands of employees. And he's learned to become a good people manager where they have Amazon as a partner. They have Shopify as a partner. They have Walmart as a partner. So he has learned to become really good at business development. Yeah. And striking deals. So there's an element where you can learn.
Yeah. Right. You have been one of the first investors with Snap when cultivating the relationship. And there's promising company that you're wanting to obviously win a deal. Other than the track record, the home run advantage, some of the key things that you did to differentiate yourself to win the deal. Snap was an interesting one because the prevailing wisdom at the time was that, I mean, there would never be another social media tender.
Yeah. Instagram was around the table and there was no rooms writing the arse. And so there was real negativity in that category. We happened to meet them at a time when they were seeing extraordinary growth. 50% DAU to MAU ratios. So daily active users to monthly active users. So very good. That's a really good metric. 50% D30 retention. So people were still using the product 30 days upwards on around 50,000 active users.
So like a statistically significant set of users. And growing at about 50% a month, it was like an extraordinary set of metrics. 50-50, 50-50. Great. You're like, I'll steal that I made too. And, you know, he was running. Like he couldn't keep the costs on his credit card at Eeyore. Again, you look at these questions like, could this become part of pop culture? You know, it was a messaging app. Heavily skewed towards young women.
And it was changing people's behaviors. The way that we found out about it was because one of my partners, Barry Eggers, he's a very involved dad. And he noticed if his daughter had changed the way she was taking selfies. Like he tried to look as pretty as possible. Selfie to, you know, making these weird faces and so forth. It was like, what's going on? So like it was changing behavior. And so that's like, you know, all indications it could come part of pop culture.
It was, it clearly had a scalable, repeatable way to grow. The growth rate was shown that to be the case. But the fact that people were sending it to each other and like it was spreading through genuble with mouth. The only way you could add a friend to Snapchat at that time was still literally like, there were no invite codes. You had to like actually type someone's username in. It was driving new habits, right? When people were getting these messages, they were immediately responding.
And then Evan had a unique insight. And what he talked about, and we all know this now, right? So this is like, this is no longer a unique insight. But at the time it was a unique insight. Yeah. And he said, Facebook, Instagram, they've sort of become like the journal of record for your life. Yeah. And because they were the journal of record, it was creating this performance anxiety for people. It's like, is this cool enough?
Do I look cool enough? Do I look popular enough? Do I look successful enough to put this on Instagram, to put this on Facebook? And because of that performance anxiety, it was causing people to post less. And he said, and obviously, you know, all of our communication has shifted to digital, right? So he said, look, the way that you build friendships and relationships with people is not just when you see the top 10 set of their life.
It's when you see the full 360. Not just when they're happy and excited and proud, but when they're anxious and angry and sad and nervous and proud and happy and excited. All of them, right? All of it, all 360. He said, by making the messages disappear, we are reducing that performance anxiety to allow. And by creating culture where you can be silly and goofy and all of these things, you do get that full 360. And he said that, you know, he made this great analogy.
He said, look, if you meet your friend and you're just talking and hanging out, and at the end of it, your friend says, oh, by the way, I recorded this. I hope you don't mind. You'd be like, what? What are you talking about? Really said, but that has become the fall of our digital communications. Everything is recorded. Everything is permanent, right? So like, that is not the way humans will buy it, right? And it's had all these sort of deleterious impacts.
So like, if I have a, if you're friends, and if I have a fight with you or the text, and we say mean things to each other, because we're angry, the next time we open that message thread, the first thing we see are these mean things that we said to each other, right? Whereas if we had a fight in real life, and I say mean things to you, say mean things to me, next time we see each other, we can both pretend that didn't happen, right?
But there's no way to pretend it didn't happen when you're like, opening the message thread, staring right in your face, right? So we talked about why disappearing messages made so much sense to, not as a new way for people to communicate, but because it was actually the original way that people communicated, and how like the recording that is default in digital communications had changed the way we communicated, and then changed the way you relate to each other because of that.
That was an incredibly unique insight. And so when he was explaining all this, we were like, oh, we would love to help you with your server cost problem. And that's what led to the C in Vaspard in the first place. But I think this was a case where we weren't convinced about the rightness of the pervading wisdom that like social media is dead. We just said, okay, like, could this become part of pop culture? Is it creating new habits?
Does this get a little bit of a way to grow? And does the founder have unique insight? All these things are true. Maybe social media is dead. Maybe it's not. Who knows? But this was promise. And I will say that like the mistakes that I regret the most as an investor, when something was working, and I convinced myself that it would work in the future, and it just kept working. You know, this is an example where if we said, yeah, like, this is great, but social media
is dead. So obviously this can't keep going. We would have been wrong. And we wouldn't have invested. And I think that there were other investors who came to that conclusion. And eventually they changed their minds and they wanted to invest in the company. But we were lucky. And then we caught them at a time when we were open-minded about that. And they were on an incredible growth there. And to be fair, like, Evan and Bobby are an incredible pair of founders who, you know,
we were very lucky and grateful to be along for that ride. And to get it so early and have the foresight. Like, as a consumer investor, you're almost sort of an anthropologist and sociologist studying the trends, studying what's going on. You step away from the current way of how things are doing, and you can absorb what's happening among young women, among other groups. That's such a unique perspective to have is that you're reading the temperature of the
culture at all times. I think that's a great observation. I think that it is super tempting to think you know what's going on. And that prevents you from just observing, which is what an anthropologist should do, draw their conclusions from the behavior versus imposing a pattern on the behavior. At the time that we made the investment at Snapchat, a lot of the industry and a lot of other investors held the view that, you know, disappearative messages must be to sexting.
Like, what other purpose could it be for? And, you know, if you're a middle-aged male venture capitalist, then that might actually be the use case to some free messages. But we said, okay, well, let's test that. Let's see if that's true. We can't see the images. Neither can Snapchat. That's part of the whole end-to-end encryption is that, like, they can't see what the images are. But what they did was they said, well, let's take a look at when snaps are sent.
And I can't remember the exact. Something like 80 or 85% of the snaps were being sent between 8 a.m. and 8 a.m. It's hard to imagine that people are sexting at school. Right. But during the school day, it's hard to imagine that that is the primary use case, right? Like, was there some sexting? I'm sure there was. But 85% of the messages, 85% of the snaps were being sent during the school day. That tells you that's not the primary use case.
When you're joining a company early on at the seed stage and help it grow, how that initial relationship with the founder involves. And maybe in the beginning, it's more different skills that you're using from your investor toolkit. And then what it looks like as they're going public. Hi, everyone. I'm so excited to welcome this extremely distinguished guest, ecosystem builder, and head of community in San Francisco, Christopher Floyd.
He runs one of my favorite organizations in San Francisco, Founders Bay, along with Marianne Becker. And here to talk to us a little bit about all the amazing things and how you guys can be involved in person through different conferences, events, and get connected. Christopher, so can you tell us a little bit more? First of all, thank you so much for having me. It's a pleasure to be here and I love what you're doing.
Founders Bay, it's awesome. So we're based in San Francisco. We're a community of getting close to 80,000 members. That's huge, guys. You have to be a part of it. Yes, you have to be a part of it. So we're based in San Francisco, but our members are spread across the country, across the globe. We have a very high concentration of folks that are based here in the city. We do events constantly. We do large events, you know, 2,000 plus people.
We also do smaller events. Basically, what we're trying to do is connect founders, investors, operators, and even just tech enthusiasts to each other and give them an avenue to share ideas, collaborate, and kind of expand their networks. At founderspay.com. Thank you. I'm a perfectionist and I often don't feel like these videos meet my standards. And for me, that's where Be Creatives comes in. I sent them my raw, imperfect footage and they worked their magic.
They helped me clean up the audio, video quality, fix the lighting, and helped me make everything look more professional and polished. Now, no matter where I'm recording, I know my content is going to be in good hands. It's been a game changer and one of the best decisions I made for this podcast. Be Creatives and I have partnered for a special discount of $150 off per month for the Icons community. Please click the link here to sign up.
When you're joining a company early on at the seed stage and help it grow, how that initial relationship with the founder evolves and maybe in the beginning, it's more different skills that you're using from your investor toolkit and then what it looks like as they're going public. I think the reality is that an investor or a board member can really only change the course of the company by maybe 30% positive or 30% negative, right?
Obviously, 30% positive is better than 30% negative, but that's the range of impact that you can have. I think the right executive team can make it three times difference and I think the right founders can make it 30 times difference. So that's the relative order of magnitude. And so to a large extent, you are investing behind founders because you believe in those founders and you trust their judgment and you trust their vision of the future.
And that is why you want to get behind them. It's not to tell them what to do. It's because you believe in what they think they will do. Yeah. And then you've got this 30%, you know, like maybe he's like, hey, as you get to this scale, it might be a good idea to think about bringing on board a full-time VP finance because you might need to add some controls, you know, or as you get to this number of employees, maybe
we start to need to go to institute a more like formal HR system because like you don't actually know every individual person well enough to be able to assign them the right roles as you get past 25 or 50 people or whatever it is. So you can like, you can do some things and like maybe that's positive 30%, maybe that's negative 30%. Yeah. Like, but that's in the, in the scope. In the earliest stages, if it's genuinely just two founders, you are a third person helping
them ideate. You aren't adding from two to three. You're not adding 50% on brain power because you're only there part of the time. You don't have business as well as they do. But like you're adding something as the business grows and they add more to the executive team and so forth. The relative additional insight you can bring is it's going to become smaller and smaller because they got more brains around the table.
They understand the business better than you do and so on and so forth. And so like it shifts from being helpful at the extreme end, like at a public company, it's governance and oversight, severance responsibilities. It's definitely not like helping them with strategy or like pointing out ways that they can make product improvements and things like that. You've seen obviously so many, so many deals. Is there a one hitch that you heard initially that really stood out with you and, and proved
to be the great success that you knew in your intuition? I've probably made about 75 investments over the course of the, my career. I didn't make any of them because I was like lukewarm. Like I was excited about all of them, right? Otherwise I wouldn't make the investment. Sure. But they didn't all work out the same way. Snapchatted a firm, both returned billion dollars and most of them, more than half, probably 60% lost money off.
But I was enthusiastic about all of them at the investment. There's luck in this business, right? For sure there's luck in this business. If you're going to do early state investing, it is not possible to only invest in good companies. Yeah, of course. You will, you, you will have some that don't work out and you'll have some that work out well and you'll have some that work out incredibly well. So I, I'm not sure that there's a, like, it's like, oh, I knew a lot.
I thought I knew a lot for all of them. And yet so many of them did not. Another incredible skill that you have is being able to cultivate relationships. Obviously you were saying trust is, that is not, that has to be earned over time after the investment is made, but to have that initial really great connection to secure the meeting, to win the deal. Can you tell us a little bit about the story of Honest Company? Yeah.
So Jessica Alba is, you know, the face and the co-founder of Honest Company, but we actually met Honest Company through a co-founder, Brian Lee. And I met Brian Lee through his first company, a company called Shoe Dazzle that he was working with Kim Kardashian. And that was his second company because his first company was LegalZoot, which he was a co-founder there. So he's a prolific serial entrepreneur. And right now I sit on the board of his current company, which is called Arena Club, which he
works with their cheetah. Our relationship with Honest Company really started with Brian as just this extraordinary repeat entrepreneur, just incredible ideation. He really understands how to work with influencers and celebrities to bring their, to match their areas of expertise and passion with a brand and product. Because I think that's that authenticity, that connection is what is necessary for influencer and celebrity-led brands.
They need to believe in the product. They need to be expert in it. They need to be credible in it to their audience. All those things have to align. You can't take a celebrity and a product stifle together for the best. Like it really does have to be that authentic alignment. And for Jessica, she had been so vocal as a new mom around the need for natural toxic chemical-free baby products, skincare products and so forth, that when she went outside of
brand in that direction, it was a very understandable and natural extension of her advocacy work that her audience understood it and embraced it immediately. And that's what allowed it to be so resonant. And then in terms of winning that deal, obviously you had the relationship with her co-founder. What kinds of questions were the kinds of conversations that you had to instill the confidence that you're going to not only take care of their brand, but help them realize surgery?
I think trust is earned and you should as always not a good outcome for us as an investor. And we were co-investors there with some other firms. And I think coming out of that, Brian said, hey, you know, this is a tough situation. Lost money to these guys. But Lightspeed were a great team to work with. Even when the chips were down, even when they lost the money, they didn't lose their cool. They didn't get angry. They were supported even at the end when there was nothing in it for them.
You know? Yeah. So we built trust with him and he built trust with me, Jessica. And so like being able to say, listen, these are guys that I have lived a very difficult situation with them. And they were good, supported investors through the end when there was nothing in it for them. I mean, that was a large part of why Jessica Bapak chose to work with us again. And I think this is one of the interesting things, which is like trust is built in difficult
situations. Difficult situations tend to be like, not always. Sometimes you collateral in, but oftentimes lead to bad outcomes. There's this old age, you left capital that you build your returns from the success of your reputation between the companies that don't work out. That's the trust piece, right? The way that you behave with the companies that don't work out can help you win the next deal. Because those people are going to be references.
And like every successful company will give a good reference for all of their investors. Because it's easy to be a supportive investor when the company is doing well. If you get good references from companies that aren't doing well, that I think is a real differentiator. Because not everybody is supportive and helpful and kind when things don't go well. You can turn these, from necessarily failures, but these things that didn't work out.
And you can leverage them to position you. That makes it sound more Machiavellian. And I think it is. It's difficult times for a very character. I think it's a little bit of like, you know, so it's not like, oh, like, I'm going to be nice to you because you're going to say nice things to my next investment. It's like, now it sounds really self-aggressive. This is who I am. Yeah. Right? And that is who that person is.
And that is who that person is. And the way they behave exposes character. And the references are trying to get a real read on character. And that's why entrepreneurs should always do reference checks on their potential investors and they shouldn't just do the references that were provided. They shouldn't just do the references for these successful companies that in doubt initiated. They should do reference checks on the companies that don't work out as well.
Because most companies will go through tough times. Exactly. Right? Even successful ones will go through tough times. What keeps you so centered and keeping your inner peace? Because the job of being a venture capitalist can be lots of ups and downs. Very stressful. How do you maintain your inner peace and staying true to me more? Despite going through challenges, very high highs as well. If you've been an operator, your instinct is to take responsibility for every problem.
If you've been a good operator, it's like, where is the problem? Let me fix it. Like, it's not my job. Let me fix it anyway. What is the biggest impediment success in this company? I will go figure that out. That is the full market grade operators. And as a venture capitalist, you have to realize that you actually don't have the ability to do that. So like I said before, an investor maybe can change the trajectory of a company by 30%.
That's just 30 times for the founder. Totally. And so when you internalize that, that you can't really change the answer. It's someone else who can. Then your decision was made a long time ago. That's actually what allows you to have a singular peace. Because I'm not that much in control. Plus 30% is better than minus 30%. Right? But at the end of the day, problem is the responsibility of the founder, the CEO, and there he's 15 and
they will fix it, that they're dragging the bus, your passenger out the bus. And there is nothing more irritating than trying to drive and having someone in the back seat telling you to check your mirror before you change lanes. And like, are you sure you're in the center? Are you going a little too fast? It's like, oh my gosh, like get out of my car. Do you have any internal practices that help keep you from losing your cool or staying present?
Whether it's daily things that you do. I'm just curious to learn a little bit more about how you take care of your mental space. My work club is ramped down significantly. And that has allowed me to find new hobbies. I train every day. My mental state and my space now is very different than when I was working full time. And I don't think that that balance is easy. If you want to be great at your job, you actually have to dedicate yourself to that job.
And it's have a family. And then like you get to a family work. There's not a lot of time for hobbies. There's not a lot of time for training. There's not a lot of time for a lot of this other stuff. And so I think that a lot of my happy mental state today is a function of the fact that I had a lot more free time to spend on things that I like to do. If you were to start your career today in Roger Powell as an assessor,
Can you tell us three non-negotiable steps that you would take to position yourself to get into the best VC firm? So I think the first thing I would do is I would try to figure out what's my new ground bench. Yeah. And if I didn't have one, most straightforward way to do that is to just start to learn about the topic. Probably not a topic that's big today. It's hard to become an expert at SaaS today. It's even hard to become an expert in AI today.
Right. It's not impossible because, you know, like many of the experts in AI really started becoming experts two years ago. So they've got a two-year head start. So like, it's not impossible. There's a lot of people who are spending a lot of time on AI. So it's hard to become one of the 50 most knowledgeable people of AI in the world right now. But there are probably areas where you could. And, you know, because I've been down in the industry for a while, I don't have specific
suggestions about where. The question is, go find the areas that are urging where there aren't very many experts. Become one of those experts. And that's one way. Another way is to say, okay, geographic focus. 15 years ago, if you spoke fluent Mandarin and you'd move to China, you could become one of the leading edge venture capitalists focused on China. If you'd done that eight years ago in Southeast Asia, you'd be one of the leading venture
chapters there. Like today, maybe it's Middle East, North Africa, or maybe it's Sub-Sahara Africa, or I don't know. But like another, geography is another way that you could differentiate yourself. Having some reason to be differentiated. And it's not enough just to say, oh, I like fintech. I'll be a fintech investor. Like you actually have to go do that work, become an expert, know more than most. So that would be the first.
And if I were, you were saying if I was trying to get into the industry. So then once I developed some area of expertise, I would then find a firm that was interested in that area. And I would reach out to them. Not with a like, hey, you know, you went to Orton. I went to Orton. Could we do an international interview? Here are three companies that I think are really interesting. And this is why, like, write a memo that it's to this idea of like, how can you make
someone's life easier? Right. I'm going to like write you with three investment recommendations. First, I'm going to demonstrate that I'm different from everyone else because I actually did work. Yeah. Right. Which most people didn't. And secondly, if I'm good, I'll demonstrate that that work was high quality and insightful. Right. And maybe, you know, of those three, maybe they're aware of two of them, already think
one is interesting. Maybe think the other one isn't interesting, but can appreciate that you actually had some good insights and like, maybe they have something to share with you for why, like, it's actually not as interesting as you think, but like, good job. Yeah. And then said it was totally new and on their radar. I'm like, wow, like, I want to hear more about that one. So that would be the second thing that I would do.
So it was like, become an expert, identify a firm that values that expertise, and then like demonstrate that expertise in a way that is costly, costly in time and effort. To show that you put in the commitment, the work, and what kind of investor. The commitment, the work, and the insight. You actually demonstrate all those things. And maybe you're not as good as you think. Right. Which is good information too. Maybe it says that like, either I need to approve or I should be doing something else.
Yeah. Right. If you write three investment modes that you think are your best possible work, all right, you genuinely believe they're good ideas, and you think that you have really put your best effort into it, and they're no good. Yeah. Maybe you should do something else. Right. That's a big test. It's a good, it's good to know. From a founder's side, there's going to be all these founders that want to pitch to a company like Lightspeed, want to get into the room of a tier one firm.
How should they go about setting that up, positioning themselves to get that first meeting, especially if they don't have any connections or resources? A lot of folks think that a pitch deck should explain the business so that you really understand it. That's the goal of the whole investment process. That first pitch, the email, the only role of that email is to get a meeting. It's not to explain the business. The role of the first meetings is not to explain the business, it's to get a second meeting.
The role of the second meeting is not to explain the business, it's to get a third meeting. And over the course of a series of meetings, you want to explain your business. So I think that is really the key, is like, you can't jump to the top of the stairs, you've got to take it one step at a time. So what is the purpose of that initial email? It's to be interesting enough to get a meeting, not to explain the whole business.
Just lead on the things that would cause someone to be like, huh, okay, I'd like to hear more. And to jump on that call. Do you think that it's the best thing to do is to lead with the impressive numbers and show the traction thing you have? It's to lead with whatever you think can get the best, can get the meeting. If you have impressive numbers and traction, fantastic. That can do it. If it's a relationship you have that will get you the meeting, like an introduction,
like an introduction, lead with that. If it's your amazing background, lead with that. If it's a truly innovative idea in a gigantic market, but you don't have traction yet, lead with that. But whatever it is that you think is going to pique someone's interest to be like, huh, it's not a formula is what I'm saying. It's like, it's like, it's each, each person in a different situation, you got to find that thing that will cause them to be like, I would like to meet you and learn more.
And then in terms of when they get that meeting and they're sitting in front of someone, the caliber investor that you are, any tips on pitch rate? So again, like the goal is to get a second meeting. You don't have to explain the whole business. Obviously it's a meeting at this point. So like, you know, you're getting going to have quite, and I would say like, be prepared for a lot of Q and A. No more than 10 to 12 slides and lots of back and forth engagement.
More of a conversation. Well, you should have a deck that you're going to take people through. It's not like, Hey, I sent you the deck. What would you like to talk about? No. And like lots of question and answer all the way through. Want to pivot a little bit and to talk about how we can as, you know, collectively venture capital community and whether it's for founders, investors, how we can get more Asian Americans
in particular involved with investing, involved in the founder side of things, because I think there's still not enough representation of Asian Americans in the founder or investor. space. And this is something that I know that we've talked about and we've been very involved with. And as an advocate, even being on this podcast, how we can work towards creating more of that push, more of that equity. 20 years ago, you didn't see that many Indian American entrepreneurs.
So a lot of IIT grads coming and working in various tech companies. And then you started to see some of those folks strike out and start companies. And then as a response to that, you started to see more IIT grads and Indian American venture capitalists so that those firms could tap into these pools of entrepreneurs. With consumer tech, there's become more consumer than tech of the time. And as they become more about pop culture, you started to see more female entrepreneurs because
a lot of the women are close to the pop culture consumer trends. And then you started to see more female venture capitalists because the firms wanted to be able to tag into these networks and pools of entrepreneurs. And so I think it all starts with the entrepreneur pool. And then the venture capital pool will start to reflect the entrepreneur pool more over time because they want the access to these pools of entrepreneurs, to these networks.
That's the way that the venture composition will change. In terms of how to see more Asian and Asian American entrepreneurs, I don't have a fantastic set of recommendations there. I think that you mentioned before, I think representation does help, right? To the extent that you see other people who look like you, who have some backgrounds to you being successful, it makes you think, well, maybe I could do that too. And we are starting to see how we've got Asian American CEOs and leaders for some of the most
important companies in the world, whether it be NVIDIA or whether it be AMD, whether it be Zoom, whether it be, you know, we have lots and lots of be fan pools at this point. And so I think it's very hard to imagine what you haven't seen, right? But at this point, I think we've seen enough Asian American and Asian CEO founders that it's easier and easier for a young Asian or Asian American engineer, product manager, sales leader,
or whatever say, oh, if they can do that, maybe I can do that. It's really great to hear, especially from East Asian countries. I really wanted to thank you for being that representation and encouraging and inspiring a full generation and investors and entrepreneurs and seeing all of your successes and not through anything like boldly that you're proclaiming, but just being able to see. Well, thank you. You're very kind.
I mean, it is. I was just trying to be good at my job. You know, it's really all we can try to do. Now that you have retired, what is next for you? Just trying to be a better husband and father than I have been for the last 15 years when I was working way too much and traveling, you know, three weeks a month and just trying to be present a little bit more and around. Unfortunately, my kids are an age now and they're teens where I think when they were younger,
like they loved having, you know, me be around and I wasn't around. And now that they're some majors, like I knock on the door, it's like, hi, they're like, go away. So I might have missed my window a little bit there, but, you know, doing the best that I can. But I have hobbies for the first time since college, which has been great. I've been studying Tai Chi for a couple of years and that's been really interesting.
I've been doing a contemporary dance for about a year and that's been a new thing for me and pretty fun. I've tried a bunch of other stuff that I, you know, I tried to learn Chinese and I sort of gave up on that. Like there's like a whole bunch of things that I've tried that I didn't want to stick with, but some things that I've tried that I've enjoyed, you know, and continue to do. It's nice to have, you know, the space to have some interest beyond work.
I think it's amazing that you're focusing this chapter on taking care of yourself, the way you've taken care of so many entrepreneurs and your family investors. So it really is like it to see your dance moves. Yeah. I'm not sure that I'm excited for anyone to see my dance moves. Is it like hip hop or? No, it's more like contemporary dance. And I like, I guess, you know, as a VC, I'm used to being the dumbest person in the room,
like having the entrepreneur explain things to me. So like, I'm very comfortable being the worst person in any room. But it's been fun to learn new things. Yeah. My parents also in their retirement have taken up dance classes and it's been futuristic. Finally, wanted to ask you what you want your legacy to be. I really, I don't think about my career in terms of a legacy. I guess at some level, it's, you know, hopefully the people that I've worked with think well
of me and will go on and do great things and hopefully mentor another generation of people who are going to continue to do that. And speaking with Nicole and the Dean for Oz, they all came to light speed because of you and still feeling very much your spirit and the wisdom that you've left with those. It's very clear that they're part of your legacy. And all of the investors, entrepreneurs, we've all just been so touched by all the work that you're doing.
I feel like we're standing on the shoulders of giants. Thank you for everything that you have instilled in all of us. And we're so excited to be able to share your story with all of the listeners. Great. Well, thank you so much for being here. It's fun to see you get your realize.
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