The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
00:41:45 · Harry Stebbings, Scott Wilson
[00:41:45] S1: It's a bit of a blunt question, but you've had such a meteor... Like, $11,000,000,000 is an incredible capital accrual value appreciation for for WashU, and it's it's an amazing journey. You could do anything now, Scott. You could have every trillionaire, billionaire in the world pay you an exorbitant amount of money to join you on their superyacht and run their family office. Yeah. With respect, why [00:42:09] S0: why do It actually lies a lot. So in the nine years I've been here, we started roughly say eight... We've generated $17,000,000,000 profits on that original 8,000,000,000, and we've paid out roughly 5,000,000,000 to the university. [00:42:21] S1: I I mean, that's just showing off, Scott. Okay? But you but you could. And, obviously, WashU is an incredible institution, amazing, but, like, humans are humans. Yep. Why do you stay in? [00:42:33] S0: I'm super happy here. I've got a great board, a great administration, a great team, you know, and, I make plenty. I'm well compensated. So it's a great place to be. And I, yeah, I obviously had opportunities to go elsewhere, but I'm I'm very happy at WashU. If you if you spent time with my board and and the chancellor of the university, like, this is a great place to work. And, you know, I think, maybe more than half of your your fulfillment and enjoyment coming to work every day is who you get to work with. And, you know, from that standpoint, I'm just super fortunate. And you've spent time with my team. Like, that's... It's a really great team.
00:42:33 · Scott Wilson, Harry Stebbings
[00:42:33] S0: I'm super happy here. I've got a great board, a great administration, a great team, you know, and, I make plenty. I'm well compensated. So it's a great place to be. And I, yeah, I obviously had opportunities to go elsewhere, but I'm I'm very happy at WashU. If you if you spent time with my board and and the chancellor of the university, like, this is a great place to work. And, you know, I think, maybe more than half of your your fulfillment and enjoyment coming to work every day is who you get to work with. And, you know, from that standpoint, I'm just super fortunate. And you've spent time with my team. Like, that's... It's a really great team. [00:43:10] S1: I know I have. They're amazing. Listen. I think before we do a quick fire, you learn from sometimes mistakes. We've talked about the amazing successes. When you reflect back on the $11,000,000,000 that we've added, what did you not do in that journey that you wish you had done? Be it renewables, be it more in privates, you name it. What did you not do that you wish you had done?
00:43:10 · Harry Stebbings, Scott Wilson
[00:43:10] S1: I know I have. They're amazing. Listen. I think before we do a quick fire, you learn from sometimes mistakes. We've talked about the amazing successes. When you reflect back on the $11,000,000,000 that we've added, what did you not do in that journey that you wish you had done? Be it renewables, be it more in privates, you name it. What did you not do that you wish you had done? [00:43:30] S0: Yeah. I I think our biggest mistake was not adding to our winners just because whether you, like, get frame of reference bias, oh, we invested in this company at 2,000,000,000, and now it's 5,000,000,000, so we didn't add to it. And, obviously, like, you know, the position was twice the size at that point. But, you know, we we had times where we could have invested in stuff that I think was still probably our highest conviction investment and we didn't do it either because, you know, it had grown in the portfolio or the price had just gone up and and that was a that was my mistake, and it's cost us billions of dollars. So that... That's probably the biggest learning over that time frame. [00:44:05] S1: What did you do that you wish you hadn't done on the flip side?
00:44:05 · Harry Stebbings, Scott Wilson
[00:44:05] S1: What did you do that you wish you hadn't done on the flip side? [00:44:08] S0: Oh, well, I mean, there's a there's a lot. There's a lot of individual funds I wish we hadn't done. Obviously we've made tons of mistakes on the co investment. You know, it's an eighty twenty rule where 20% of your investments have generated 80% plus of the profits. We're not quite that bad, but, but yeah, we've made tons of mistakes. You know, we've added capital to companies that, you know, probably we should have let die, but we thought there was still a chance they could recover. We've made every investing mistake you could you could think of. [00:44:36] S1: Is there one that really stands out?
00:44:36 · Harry Stebbings, Scott Wilson
[00:44:36] S1: Is there one that really stands out? [00:44:38] S0: Yeah. I mean, our biggest mistake we had put in like mid twenty twenty, we had put a huge, a huge packet of kind of LP interest into the secondary market. And the markets had this huge run at the end of twenty twenty going into 2021. And we decided to hold off because we knew that all those companies were gonna have just massive write ups in the December quarter. So we were waiting for the first quarter to basically, you know, maximize the value on the secondary sale of those assets. And then, you know, that was a short term bubble in venture markets. So like we were just essentially being greedy and we had the chance to sell it really good prices and we we didn't take it, you know, pretty much by the, like, I think it was probably mid twenty twenty one. And so that 2021 period, we we were, up, I think 65% and and obviously wrote a bunch of that back down over the subsequent years. But we had a chance to get out of a bunch of that stuff at really good prices and we didn't do it. [00:45:33] S1: And so you wish you'd done it, essentially? [00:45:34] S0: For sure. Yeah. I mean, we were probably taking, like, $80.90 cents on the dollar, but we we were pretty sure that the bubble wasn't gonna last forever. And, and so we should take chips off the table. [00:45:44] S1: One of my dearest friends who's a very successful ambassador told me, you must be be fearful when others are greedy and greedy when others are fearful. And it sounds so obvious. Actually, very difficult in hindsight.
00:45:44 · Harry Stebbings, Scott Wilson
[00:45:44] S1: One of my dearest friends who's a very successful ambassador told me, you must be be fearful when others are greedy and greedy when others are fearful. And it sounds so obvious. Actually, very difficult in hindsight. [00:45:57] S0: Yeah. I think we needed another three months or something. And those... I was a big secondary sale. [00:46:03] S1: Do you care about Europe? I had David Moorhead on from Baylor. He was... I mean, he laughed at me, in all honesty, when I said about Europe. Do you care? [00:46:12] S0: Yeah. It's mostly, like, idiosyncratic ideas, but we like Europe, and we found lots of interesting stuff to do in Europe. And it's a super interesting market now. We're we're recently investing in a fintech company in Spain. [00:46:25] S1: And Sorry. Wait. Wait. Wait. Pause, Scott. Europeans don't invest in fintech companies in Spain. Yeah. What what what the... What's you doing investing in a fintech company in Spain?