The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
00:23:29 · Harry Stebbings, David Morehead
[00:23:29] S1: What's interesting for me is you analyze this situation and then you decide to act on it. Like this is very rare for an institution to normal. [00:23:39] S0: Sean and others have like told me that, but like that I don't actually understand, right? Because like software at that point is like on sale to the tune of like 50, 60% from like October '25. And if the thesis is software is going away, it's down 50, 60%, you call businesses and they say that's not true. You're like, I'll own that. [00:24:00] S1: I get you, but it's throwing the baby out with the bathwater. The trouble is I'm not sure what's the baby and I'm not sure what's the bathwater. And with the greatest of respects, I live in technology. [00:24:11] S0: And that's why we have managers like Sean. Right? So he's the expert. So I'm like, I'm gonna give you more money, but I want you to go through your list with me and tell me all those things that are least likely to be interdicted by AI, and then like own those. So I'm making a decision based on human behavior and how I know people make decisions, right? And I'm allocating based on that, But I'm relying on the manager to be expert in their individual field and give me the correct perspective and what's going on on the ground. [00:24:43] S1: But what's so interesting is most just delegate to managers and go, you're the experts. You delegate to them great. And then you go, I'm also gonna operate where I have decisions myself, and I'm gonna interject in those markets. It's different.
00:24:43 · Harry Stebbings, David Morehead
[00:24:43] S1: But what's so interesting is most just delegate to managers and go, you're the experts. You delegate to them great. And then you go, I'm also gonna operate where I have decisions myself, and I'm gonna interject in those markets. It's different. [00:24:57] S0: But I kinda think that that's our job. Right? I mean, like, my seat is like an allocator seat. My job is to allocate. To go back to the like the Buffett or Charlie example, right? They also are allocators and they're deciding who gets the incremental dollars. Do they send it to Burlington Northern or do they send it to their energy company? And depending on what the outlook is, what the CapEx requirements are, etcetera, they get budgets submitted to them and they may or may not allocate more of their cash pile to those companies. [00:25:29] S1: Quite a lot of LPs that I speak to say, I get the liquidity challenge of venture, and I get the time lags of venture being difficult. But I learn a lot from what happens in my venture portfolios in terms of AI penetration, new technologies, adoption cycles. Is your venture portfolio a learning academy for you or not?
00:25:29 · Harry Stebbings, David Morehead
[00:25:29] S1: Quite a lot of LPs that I speak to say, I get the liquidity challenge of venture, and I get the time lags of venture being difficult. But I learn a lot from what happens in my venture portfolios in terms of AI penetration, new technologies, adoption cycles. Is your venture portfolio a learning academy for you or not? [00:25:50] S0: Not for me. I would say it goes the other way. I actually learn a lot from the public side managers. What I find is that there's a lot of this spun up, like, oh my gosh. We're gonna have autonomous cars in, like, three years in 2016. Yeah. Right. Like, all the regulatory stuff that you have to go through so that you don't kill somebody. Yeah. We're ten years on, and what do we have? Like, 5,000 cars on the road? Like, please. So, like, I get sort of, like, the mental imagination that, you know, you can go, like, we could put something on the moon and we could mine the moon and whatever. Yeah. Okay. Like, get back to me in thirty years. [00:26:28] S1: Okay. But you're not worried then about the casinoization of public markets? [00:26:32] S0: No. The public markets are the big leagues. There's millions of people making decisions on dollars every single day for every single company. You know how things get valued on the private side? Of course you do. Three people get in a room and say, hey, I think the value is x. And they're like, I'll fund it at that. Great. And that resets the whole price.
00:26:32 · David Morehead, Harry Stebbings
[00:26:32] S0: No. The public markets are the big leagues. There's millions of people making decisions on dollars every single day for every single company. You know how things get valued on the private side? Of course you do. Three people get in a room and say, hey, I think the value is x. And they're like, I'll fund it at that. Great. And that resets the whole price. [00:26:50] S1: But I think public markets in many respects are as irrational as private markets are state. And you saw that. Dude, you saw that. Well, you saw that with the state. [00:26:59] S0: Can be irrational because they are governed by people. The difference is that there are tens of millions of people trading on that information, whereas on the private side, there's like three. [00:27:12] S1: And they decided, those tens of millions of people, that Elon Musk is a premium in himself, that SpaceX should be a $1,800,000,000,000 business. [00:27:23] S0: Yeah. That doesn't mean that they're right. It just means that it incorporates all available information, which does not happen on the private side. [00:27:30] S1: And so what you're saying is that the sheer scale of people voting in this buying decision means that it's a more legitimate price than private side. Just so I understand. [00:27:39] S0: Correct. I don't think there's any question about that. I literally have been in these conversations, right, where, like, three guys get together and are like, hey. I think it should be this. Like, on what? Right? And they're like, well, I'll give you $50,000,000 at that price. Okay. Fine. On the fact
00:27:39 · David Morehead, Harry Stebbings
[00:27:39] S0: Correct. I don't think there's any question about that. I literally have been in these conversations, right, where, like, three guys get together and are like, hey. I think it should be this. Like, on what? Right? And they're like, well, I'll give you $50,000,000 at that price. Okay. Fine. On the fact [00:27:56] S1: that I tried the product and I liked it, David, why you asking me such intellectual questions? Exactly. Right. Do you trust... And I I didn't mean that badly, like, do you trust the prices coming back from your managers? You know, we we will have our books, our portfolios for people listening and we mark them into different ways and We do.
00:28:15 · David Morehead
[00:28:15] S0: So that's one thing that the ladies have done extremely good job of recall again that I'm coming from the public side. So when you run trading books, everything has to be priced every day, right? So ostensibly, so you make better decisions because if you have things mismarked, then psychology works against you. Like if you say that this is worth $30,000,000 and it should be worth $10,000,000 and somebody offers you 20, then because you would ostensibly take a loss from 30 to 20, you're liable not to hit that even though it's a premium to the actual value. And so pricing is just a way to make sure that you are psychologically aligned to the reality of the market. And so one of the things that we really try to do is to make sure that our managers are not pushing valuations. We want valuations to be conservative rather than aggressive. And you can see that in sort of our return data in sort of like the six months, nine months prior to something being taken out. I think average gain on that is sort of like 60 to 90%. And I think from a market perspective, it's more like 30 to 50%, which would suggest that our marks, our managers' marks tend to be more conservative than others. So, you know, like I kind of sit on top of this thing and I kind of have to vouch for the valuations that we have as it relates to talking to the regents or administration. And I feel pretty comfortable that on the private side our our marks are actually more sane than on average.