The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
00:02:52 · Harry Stebbings
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00:04:31 · Harry Stebbings, Brendan Foody
[00:04:31] S2: You have now arrived at your destination. Brandon, dude, I've been so looking forward to this. I just had the best chat to Victor who gave me the best intel, so you should be really quite nervous at this point. But thank you for joining me. [00:04:43] S0: Thank you for having me on. I'm I'm not sure what to expect with that, but I'm excited to jump in. [00:04:49] S2: I think mothers are the most important things in the world. And Victor told me that I had to start with your ability to sell early and why your mother was nervous about it. Can we just start there?
00:05:01 · Brendan Foody
[00:05:01] S0: Absolutely. So I had a dozen different side hustles when I was growing up selling things in one form or another. But one of my favorites is that in eighth grade, I love selling donuts where I saw that Safeway was selling donuts for $5 a dozen. And so I would buy Safeway donuts, I would bike to my middle school and sell them for $2 each. And I saw it was working. So I wanted to scale it up. So I asked my mom to drive me to Safeway, she said that she didn't want any giveaways. So she would charge me $20 to drive me in her minivan to Safeway buy 10 dozen donuts, go to my middle school sell them for $2 each. I had all sorts of things happen where competition popped up selling Chuck's donuts, which if people aren't familiar, has like a $1 cost basis, but they're higher quality donuts. And so I dropped my prices to $1 for two weeks to run them out of business because I knew that middle schoolers would care more about price as the comparative advantage. I had my principal called me into their office to try to shut down my donut stand, saying that, you know, I wasn't allowed to sell food on school campus. And so I moved my donut stand 20 feet over off of school campus so that they couldn't police me, so to speak. And tying back to your question, Harry, after my mom saw all of this when I was in eighth grade, she was very nervous that I would start selling drugs, right? Because it's like, you know, small jump from donuts to drugs. And so she insisted that while I'm not Catholic, I should go to Catholic high school to make sure that I stayed in touch with my values and and met my cofounders there. So I guess she was right all along.
00:06:38 · Harry Stebbings, Harry Stebbings, Brendan Foody
[00:06:38] S2: Was that actually why she sent you [00:06:40] S1: to Catholic high school? Because she [00:06:41] S2: wanted you on the straight and narrow? [00:06:43] S0: That was exactly why. Because I'd gone to public school through eighth grade. My siblings had all gone to public school all the way till college. But the the primary motivation was that she didn't want me to get into trouble. [00:06:53] S2: As a principal, you're just... You're the child that just pisses you off no end, aren't you? [00:06:57] S1: You're like the no [00:06:58] S2: adult who, like, moves [00:06:59] S1: it just outside the boundaries. Can I ask, Brendan, did you always know you'd be successful? And what I mean by that [00:07:04] S2: is very specifically, when I interview the best founders, they have a duality, which is they have this superiority complex. They think that they are better than everyone. They don't admit it because it sounds dickish, but they do. And then they have this inferiority complex where they are not happy with their current state, and they wanna do more and more and more. Do you have that? [00:07:24] S0: I would say that I definitely had grand ambitions growing up of all the things that I wanted to do, but I don't think it was nearly at the scale of what we're doing today nor how fast it would happen because those two dimensions are nearly impossible to predict. I was definitely ambitious. I I don't think that I had a a perfect sense for what that would look like, though.
00:07:24 · Brendan Foody, Harry Stebbings
[00:07:24] S0: I would say that I definitely had grand ambitions growing up of all the things that I wanted to do, but I don't think it was nearly at the scale of what we're doing today nor how fast it would happen because those two dimensions are nearly impossible to predict. I was definitely ambitious. I I don't think that I had a a perfect sense for what that would look like, though. [00:07:48] S2: Veta told me about your not wanting to go to college. Before we dive into Mako and the market itself, because there's so much for us to unpack, I'd just love to understand how you thought about college, not wanting to go, and how it informs how you advise other young people on college.
00:07:48 · Harry Stebbings, Brendan Foody
[00:07:48] S2: Veta told me about your not wanting to go to college. Before we dive into Mako and the market itself, because there's so much for us to unpack, I'd just love to understand how you thought about college, not wanting to go, and how it informs how you advise other young people on college. [00:08:03] S0: I'll start with the other story that I like to tell around my side hustle in high school, which tees up why I didn't want to go to college. But I initially was reselling sneakers as a lot of people my age would do in that generation. And I realized that all of these sneaker resellers were eligible for AWS credits, but they weren't claiming the AWS startup promotions. And they were instead just paying big AWS bills. And so I started a consulting agency where I would help the sneaker resellers create websites for their startups, them apply to get credits. And some of those became actually like venture scale companies. And I made hundreds of 1000s of dollars when I was in high school. And so when I, you know, was starting to think about whether I wanted to go to college, I was thinking, why would I go to college to get some job and like a Fang company or in consulting or whatever it is where I'm making way less money, I would love to just like, go full time on the things that I love doing. And so I had a big argument with my parents about whether or not I should go to college. And eventually I appeased them and applied to colleges like ten days before the application was due.