The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
00:04:34 · Harry Stebbings, Venky Ganesan
[00:04:34] S1: Dude, you'll pass my test. Now I want to use this as a real learning discussion for me because I wanna build a firm like Manlow, and I wanna learn from the wisdom that you've had now seeing multiple different cycles. You just told me a story that I loved, and it was from two decades ago, holding a sudden stock. Can you tell me that story and your takeaway? [00:04:54] S0: Yeah, so a little bit of a past. Previously, I was at a firm called Globespan Capital Partners, we happened to be investors in a company called AVNX, which is nobody knows about this company, AVNX. I remember the stock symbol even now. I was an associate, did not have carry the fund. AVNX was a big winner, goes public. They gave the associates a chance to own shares of the IPO. So I bought some shares of the IPO. I remember putting the princely sum of $5,000 And at one point, AVONEX got up to 200,000. It was such a big push on my portfolio. And my wife was much smarter than me. She was my fiance then. We were getting married. She said, hey, why don't you sell some so that we can have something for a down payment for the house? And I was like, no, no, no. AVONEX is gonna go up. Optical components is a critical part of the Internet bubble. It's gonna go... We're gonna make a million dollars on it. And you know how the story ends, right? It drops 90%, and I think I sell it for around 8 to $9,000. So I call it the most important lesson I learned from a 90% loss, which is at some point, you should take some chips off the table.
00:05:53 · Harry Stebbings, Venky Ganesan
[00:05:53] S1: I'm not sure what to take from that because I know I remember having Jake Saper on from Emergence. And when he broke down Emergence's returns, basically, you just saw this one meteoric outlier that returned 90 to 90. Viva? Viva, yes, but it was actually Salesforce. Wow. And if they had have held it longer and longer, obviously, it would have been even more meteoric. And so I guess my question is, what should we take from that? Because we also see the dangers of selling too early. [00:06:21] S0: Agreed. I I think a lot of this advice depends on the context of who you are as a person and what your balance sheet is. At this point in Menlo's history, right, we are going broke. We are going for the grand slam home run because we have had home runs before. We have a history of putting it on the table. As a 24 year old with very little in your bank account, when you have that kind of, for me, AvanaX game changing money, it just makes economic sense to take some off the table. And so I do think, like, the advice is there's no one size fits all for these things.
00:06:21 · Venky Ganesan, Harry Stebbings
[00:06:21] S0: Agreed. I I think a lot of this advice depends on the context of who you are as a person and what your balance sheet is. At this point in Menlo's history, right, we are going broke. We are going for the grand slam home run because we have had home runs before. We have a history of putting it on the table. As a 24 year old with very little in your bank account, when you have that kind of, for me, AvanaX game changing money, it just makes economic sense to take some off the table. And so I do think, like, the advice is there's no one size fits all for these things. [00:06:52] S1: Did you say you're going for broke? All hands to the pump, we are going for this. Does anything change with that mindset internally? Like, is it more aggression? Is it more willingness to pay up? Is it more willingness to have less ownership? What changes with that? I think what we mean is we are going to fight and try to be in the defining AI companies of our era. We want to see everything. We want to win everything. Full stop. I wanna start with a concern, which is I didn't know what business we're in anymore. Vancher's not venture anymore. I had my team come to me and say, hey. We can't find anything under 100,000,000. And I said, wow. That's a lot of... That's a high price for a pre seeder or seed round. And they said, no. No. No, Harry. That's the size of the round. Thank you. This is not venture. What am I to do in this world? And can you invest without a billion dollar fund?
00:06:52 · Harry Stebbings, Venky Ganesan
[00:06:52] S1: Did you say you're going for broke? All hands to the pump, we are going for this. Does anything change with that mindset internally? Like, is it more aggression? Is it more willingness to pay up? Is it more willingness to have less ownership? What changes with that? I think what we mean is we are going to fight and try to be in the defining AI companies of our era. We want to see everything. We want to win everything. Full stop. I wanna start with a concern, which is I didn't know what business we're in anymore. Vancher's not venture anymore. I had my team come to me and say, hey. We can't find anything under 100,000,000. And I said, wow. That's a lot of... That's a high price for a pre seeder or seed round. And they said, no. No. No, Harry. That's the size of the round. Thank you. This is not venture. What am I to do in this world? And can you invest without a billion dollar fund? [00:07:41] S0: Venture has changed. But I also think that you can't take a snapshot in time and draw... A dot is not a line. And right now you're right. Every AI company wants to raise hundreds of millions of dollars. And I'm surprised they only said $100,000,000 because there are some neolabs who want to raise billions of dollars, They all have arguments for it. It is a very disorienting, confusing time. I will admit that. But I also think like these things change quickly. So so you you don't wanna necessarily draw your long term strategy with a snapshot in time.
00:07:41 · Venky Ganesan, Harry Stebbings
[00:07:41] S0: Venture has changed. But I also think that you can't take a snapshot in time and draw... A dot is not a line. And right now you're right. Every AI company wants to raise hundreds of millions of dollars. And I'm surprised they only said $100,000,000 because there are some neolabs who want to raise billions of dollars, They all have arguments for it. It is a very disorienting, confusing time. I will admit that. But I also think like these things change quickly. So so you you don't wanna necessarily draw your long term strategy with a snapshot in time. [00:08:12] S1: These things change quickly. Do you play the game on the field as Bill Gurley says? Or do you call time out and say, you know what? I learned from 2021. You know what I wish I'd
00:08:12 · Harry Stebbings, Venky Ganesan
[00:08:12] S1: These things change quickly. Do you play the game on the field as Bill Gurley says? Or do you call time out and say, you know what? I learned from 2021. You know what I wish I'd [00:08:23] S0: done in 2021? Less. This is a really hard conundrum for professional investors. You're referring to my tweets. Right? The Chuck Prince code is when the music is playing, you gotta dance. And as a professional investor, the danger of not dancing is that you do not know when this ends. Like, I'll give you a story. Like, there were a bunch of really smart venture firms during the .com boom that got in in 9394, made money, and decided to step out of the game in 9697. And when they stepped out of the game, they missed out on ninety seven, ninety eight, ninety nine, and the LPs were like, what happened? Like, we asked you. We invested in you because you're gonna be at the cutting edge. You stepped out. And they stepped back in 2000. So timing markets is really, really hard. I think you have to play the game. But I think you can play the game differently. You can choose to be more selective, and you can hopefully think about portfolio composition and position sizing as a way of mitigating what happens in the cycle turns. [00:09:21] S1: Portfolio composition and position sizing. What do we do with both of those in a market then like this? How do we change them?