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Bill Gurley and Chetan Puttagunta – An Update on Consumer & Enterprise Venture Capital
Bill Gurley and Chetan Puttagunta – An Update on Consumer & Enterprise Venture Capital

Bill Gurley and Chetan Puttagunta – An Update on Consumer & Enterprise Venture Capital

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Bill Gurley, Chetan Puttagunta, Patrick O'Shaughnessy
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Mar 13, 2020
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Episode Transcript
0:00
This episode is brought to you by coif in I've become very interested in the best software tools and investing and when I asked Twitter for the best Bloomberg alternative the overwhelming winner was an excellent new product called Coy - it's a web-based platform that lets you analyze stocks ETFs mutual funds and other asset classes in one place. I've been using it every day to track what's going on in the market and I think if you try it you will too - has a ton of high quality data powerful functionality and a clean interface. The best part is that it's free. You can sign up at www.koozai.com. That's
0:30
KO Wi-Fi n.com. Hello and welcome everyone. I'm Patrick O'Shaughnessy. And this is invest like the best this show is an open-ended exploration of markets ideas methods stories and of strategies that will help you better invest both your time and your money you can learn more and stay up-to-date and investor Field Guide.com
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Patrick
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O'Shaughnessy is the CEO of O'Shaughnessy Asset Management.
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All opinions expressed by Patrick and podcast guests are solely their own opinions and do not reflect the opinion of O'Shaughnessy Asset Management. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon as a basis for investment decisions
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clients of O'Shaughnessy Asset Management, May maintain positions
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in the Securities discussed in this podcast.
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My guests today are Bill
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girly and Chase in Punta both Partners at Benchmark Capital. We review the early stage investing world in the face of
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Iris in a very timely conversation which is one that will remain valuable. Once this crisis is done. We discuss Enterprise and consumer investing funding and growth and the entrepreneurial spirit in the face of a crisis, please enjoy. Okay, Jason and Bill. Thanks for doing this with me on very short notice a lot going on this week. We got a lot to talk about. So we will Dive Right In I would love to hear the perspective of both of you just where we sit here on on March 12th, which is Thursday evening. Just kind of get your temperature on.
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You're talking to portfolio companies what you're seeing and sort of the Venture ecosystem. That might help those listening Jason. Maybe we'll start with you. It's
2:07
a pretty unique time. I think if you just look at how we're recording this podcast, all three of us are in our own rooms and you know, there's reason for folks around the world be concerned to be taking precautions. And at the same time if you go back to the business World, our portfolio companies are advice to take the nest.
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repercussions and and adjust work as they need to and take the necessary steps to protect their employees and protect the overall company and once you go through that initial adjustment period the spirit in the energy of these entrepreneurs sort of comes back because you're able to refocus that energy that that anxiety and then you start talking to your customers and they say to have a
3:00
Up to do and as a trusted vendor you have a job to do for them and then and then things start to sort of roll back into place. And I think if you go back and step back and it all comes down to the health of the company and the position you've put the company in if you can be conservative on cash if you can be pragmatic in these times and continue to execute as we've seen over and over in the history of downturns, and I know Patrick you've studied them.
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That companies that stay disciplined and continue to execute through them come out the other side much stronger it in a position to really take advantage of my current market dynamics that then end up thriving and building an incredible amount of
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value Bill. How about you? I know you've been through this before. Yeah, that's I mean, unfortunately I'm old enough where I've been through this twice before in 2001 and then in 2008-2009 around the mortgage crisis and when you're in the depths
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Of it, it certainly feels like oh my God. This is the worst thing that's ever happened. There's never been anything like this before, you know, and you know, the truth of the matter is there hasn't been something exactly like this but there's been something kind of like this where where the financial Market shut down and you know, it does create a lot of anxiety for people and there are startups that are more kind of on the tip of the spear. I think some of the travel stuff people can look at the data and
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See they're going to have to live with the top line getting hit pretty severely even if it's just for a short window, but that's not something anyone had any of their scenario analysis. And so for those businesses, I think some of the stuff take turns talking about they might have to move a little more swiftly a little more quickly and might have to make some harder decisions if your top line is being impacted. I think there are a few companies that might be in the middle of a financing which
4:59
Be kind of difficult because especially if it's later stage and the people that are doing the Investments take a lot of their leads from the public markets and if the cops are down 40% it's hard for them to be certain about where to land on a price and that kind of thing. And so those entrepreneurs will have to make a decision which is are they willing to maybe take a Discounter haircut or whatever has to happen in order to get that done or do they want to manage the current cash they have and try and get
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It to the other side of this we don't know exactly at this point in time with that window. Looks like following on On One Thing Jason said, which is the companies that I've always felt had the best in these kind of find a silver lining in all this are the ones that are started about those times company started in A1 or O8. It's actually a really interesting to start something in a trough because then as your business starts to mature and you really get into revenue and customs
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Where's all the sudden you're riding a wave of expansion and inevitably these kind of downturns create things like layoffs and whatnot. So your competition for human capital gets a little bit easier and things like that. So one we made a point no eight of letting everyone know that Benchmark was open for business and we focused almost exclusively on early stage investing and so if there are entrepreneurs out there that are worried that that Venture Capital firms are
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Just scared to death and are afraid to write checks. If you got something early come see us because we believe that entrepreneur isn't doesn't sleep and that it happens at all points in the cycle. And we've seen historically the companies built in these types of environments actually stand the test of time and do really well bill. Can you talk about the specific experience maybe a no.9 since more people will have lived through that then lived through the tech wreck in a one about the kinds of entrepreneurs that tend to rise to the top and a period
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Like this relative to a you know, say a year ago more benign market and whether or not the entrepreneurs starting businesses now are of a different character and also contribute to those positive outcomes. Not just the writing the future wave, but the very type of people prone to start a business in this environment. Yeah. I think what we've seen is first of all, I have this theme that I've now seen so many times which is Silicon Valley takes on risk very slowly and accumulates over time and then when we hit these resets risk goes
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Soft very quickly. So you have 10 years of increasing risk, and then risk is off. And in those periods where the risk-seeking gets high Capital gets easy. I think people who otherwise might have stayed in a job in banking or consulting or whatever they become entrepreneurs because it looks easy and I think you actually that entire time that risk is increasing the quality of your
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John entrepreneurs is getting funded is actually going down and what happens when risk goes off is the only people that are less starting the companies are the ones that are choosing it innately as the way of life they want to have and not just because they think they can get a quick buck. And so I do find you typically have deal flow go down, but deal quality go up immediately after one of these reset k, then you follow the public market players in the sort of enterprise.
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Ecosystem. Sometimes it seems like as closely as You Follow the private markets you have a deep sense of what's going on there. How would you describe the interaction between say the private businesses that you're interested in and fund and sit on the board of versus the the reactivity of the big public players anything interesting to note there that might be an advantage for earlier stage
8:50
companies. Yeah. I think one of the things that early stage companies have an advantage in these particular times is that they're able to engage with their end customers.
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Whirs it have meaningful conversations around business value so much more clearly because if you are competing against a an incumbent that is a public company that is under tremendous pressure to hit quotas or whatever. It is the conversations quickly move to a sales-oriented conversation. Whereas if you're a startup you all of a sudden have the ability to engage customers exactly along those business value propositions. So if you're a company that can help
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Help your end customers save money. For example, that becomes a more pointed discussion. Now, if you're able to help your end customer increase revenue, for example, that becomes a more pointed conversation now, so if you look at much like will build just talked about the entrepreneurs that started for example enterprise software companies in oh 809 or built really big enterprise software companies through that period of time and you see what they've done like they started vast.
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Of customer conversations that actually help them run circles around the incumbent players at that time. And so you see these companies that we're targeting high-end customers are high in Enterprise customers sign 50 customers in o9 because their value proposition became very very clear and they went and attacked the market in a very disciplined fashion mainly because everything became a constrained environment and so things become sharper.
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The Things become more pointed and you get a real big Advantage especially as larger organizations have to move swiftly and are in a more reactive fashion and that's when as an early stage entrepreneur you can start playing a bit more offense.
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How would you guys distinguish between how this crisis impacts Enterprise versus consumer businesses broadly speaking Chase and I know you focus on you look at everything but with a deep expertise in Enterprise and Bill may be more of a
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Analysts, do you think there are key differences for how these businesses are running themselves what looks attractive from a Greenfield investing standpoint say it series a where you guys are often investing. What are the key considerations of differences between Enterprise and consumer a good friend of mine the other day said so a phrase that I thought was interesting. I'm sure he didn't make it up that money never sleeps and he was referring to how quickly wall Street's and zoom up and certain Airline stocks down and whilst
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treats sorting this out already. And so you you know, even though the broader markets have been hit, you know, you can see the reaction to I think consumer stocks is more egregious than then you get in the Enterprise and I think it just makes sense. If you're going to take 45 days off as a company. Are you going to reset all your SAS contracts? Probably not if this becomes extremely prolong that could start to happen as I mentioned at the beginning some of these consumer companies say you have a
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We'll focus or what not a top-line transactional model can get hit pretty quickly. And that's a more severe situation that might require more brisk action which could include layoffs that kind of thing. And so we'll have to see if that happens in the next 30 or 45 days to those companies that have that type of
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situation on the Enterprise side. I would say that the observation, you know, my observations from oh 809 on the Enterprise side is that
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At the obvious things that most companies expect Enterprise sales Cycles take longer. They get extended. There is a modest effect to Renewal rates primarily because of what Bill said, which is that are you going to go replace your stack because of a macro environment very very quickly usually unlikely. So there's modest impact to Renewal rates. But what happened to no 809 for enterprise software companies, is that cash Cycles changed specifically
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dsos as it related to receivables like cash collection cycle is just change mainly because Patrick, you know this really well is that as liquidity in the system becomes a little bit tighter the money flow throughout the system just gets a little bit tighter and so companies that are able to continue to ride with their customers and allow them a bit more generosity in terms of payment terms and be sort of true Partners in terms of that then get
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awarded coming out of this time. And so it's just mentally preparing for sort of those kinds of model situations and the in the gyrations in the business motions that I think can help. You just mentally prepare for the conversations. Your customers are going to want to have with you if you're an Enterprise software company, but at the same time as you're having these conversations your then also able to engage these customers more deeply about exactly what their business.
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Cases are the minute. Somebody says Hey, like I'm going to need an extension on this invoice. You can then dive in unlike. Well what's going on in the business today? Like is it a revenue problem? Is it a cost problem? Is it a conversion problem? What is it? And so it's a time when entrepreneurs can really start to be creative about how to engage customers in a deeper value proposition oriented way and be more leaning forward in terms of
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engaging their customers. And so I think it's these unique times that allow entrepreneurs to really sort of be very creative and establishing customer relationships. And so to use a cliched term, which is just like not to let a crisis simply go to waste and take advantage of the moment in time
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anything else that you would recommend early stage companies think about doing differently in a period like this apart from obviously being aggressive trying to lay out a value proposition in very specific terms. Is there anything
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else that they need to consider maybe how they think about burn rate or cash or head count or the pace at which they're trying to grow that you think leads to better outcomes at the end of the day when you are a private company cash is King and when you have prolonged periods of expansion and good times as we have you get further and further away from that mindset and you don't think about it as much and so all the sudden, you know, it can become really focusing when
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you realize that the key thing you have to do is keep your company in business through periods like this and that can lead to some hard decision making certainly it's not a time for aggressive expansion without really thinking through all of the elements. It's probably a good time to refocus and really know what your company's one or two priorities are and not think about the other three or four things you could be doing. There's a chance that certain companies have to make layoff decisions. They're very very
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Difficult to make I've been through them numbers of times and it's horrible thing to have to live through one piece of advice though is never do a 5 or 10% lay off because it doesn't create any meaningful gain yet you go through all the excruciating cultural pain. And so if you get to a point where you have to do that, I think Swift and doing it at a level where you're actually going to buy yourself months and months of cash Runway is a critical thing.
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To Think Through. Is there anything else bill in addition to that not doing the the death by a Thousand Cuts and this could be any kind of spending cut or anything else anything else like that that you would offer as advice having seen companies go through hard times not necessarily just in a crisis, but but maybe even more generally it's always good to do scenario modeling. And so if this ends up being six months instead of two months, have you modeled out what that means? And do you have a plan for when that looks like it's going to be true so that you
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And it's always better to make those decisions calmly and then with plenty of forethought than to be forced into critically difficult decisions very quickly. And so I've always encouraged in moments of uncertainty even normal times, but build a model for multiple scenarios and have an action plan for each of those scenarios and that way you can be in a better position to deal with the information that becomes apparent, you know over time.
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And I think challenging the drivers and understanding the drivers of your business are particularly important in times like this. There are sort of like business as usual assumptions that most of us make and say okay in sort of like an autopilot sense go to the next step and make extrapolations out of those assumptions. And so examining the core drivers of a business and understanding what if these assumptions change slightly. How does that Ripple through the business itself? And how are we equipped to handle it? And so it's
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Just sort of taking the time as we've all changed our work habits and have gone to thinking about teamwork differently. It's also a good time to step back and rethink the business nature of these startups and I understand what are the core drivers here how might those change over the next couple months and how could the company adjust in a case where those assumptions start to change for the Core
18:22
Business Jason? Could you describe the work that you were doing in the last downturn in O8 what it was specifically in sort of what?
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Lessons you bring Forward Thinking back on that time.
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Yeah, I mean I was primarily working on restructuring at a time when the financial crisis was going on and I had two clients that I was working with one was a semiconductor crew equipment company and one was a hardware company that also had a software business and the primary thing that that happened in both cases was that the data that was coming at them was so surprising from the beginning that it was always assumed by the
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Teams that things would return to normal and things just took a little bit longer to return to normal then was assumed in all of their models and all their scenarios and the scenarios never pushed it far enough out to what actually ended up happening in reality. And so things much like well how Bill talked about which is that risk tends to come off very very quickly but tends to return very incrementally and very slowly and that pace of that return.
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It is quite unpredictable and it can also come in fits and starts and I think one of the things that we often forget is that when the market bottomed in March of 2009 the wide prevailing wisdom was that there was going to be a double bottom recovery and so as wrist slowly came back on towards the second half March 2009, and we wanted to April 2009. There was an assumption that around the summer time that there was going to be sort of another dip to retest.
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The lows and so risk was coming on but was coming on very very slowly because everybody was sort of hesitating and guarding against another turn and another retest of that bottom. And so so that's the unpredictability of what happens as things start to recover and start to normalize is that there's that piece that comes back it could be a lot slower and take a lot longer than than
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anticipated. Could you talk Bill a bit about the
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Dynamics inside of the Venture ecosystem and how they might be different in this period for very early stage or maybe series a business versus very late stage private businesses that may be were on their way to going public. I'm thinking most acutely of a company. I'm sure that's been heavily impacted like Airbnb maybe that one's to idiosyncratic to explore but generally the differences between what you see in late stage companies versus the earlier stage ones that are still private. I already mentioned it but a lot of the late stage investors are crossover investors and so they are
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Really managing a large portfolio of public stocks in addition to their private ones. And so when the cops comparables come down 30 or 40 percent in a public market they know it because they've got another issue in their public fondant. So that's going to affect how they think about private and part of this expansion phase that we've had for the last 10 years. Some entrepreneurs have opted into this mindset that people call SPL or stay private longer.
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It's times like this where that strategy I think gets exposed as a fraud that it was precisely because private company capitalization charts. Don't go down very well. They're designed to really only go up and when you start doing down rounds, there's there's anti-dilution protections that kick in and and they're things that I won't go into all the details but it gets super complex and one of the things that the IPO does is unlocked.
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All that complexity and converts everyone to Common and it turns out that surviving down periods is a lot easier as a public company than a private company because you've converted all that away. And even the greatest Fang stocks of all time. If you go back through their histories have had moments like this where they go down forty fifty percent and it's not the end of the world and so oddly it's easier as a public company than a late-stage private company to go through these types of periods. So
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It'll be interesting to see you may have some companies caught in a situation where based on the comparables that are out there in the public markets their last round looks really really high relative to anything they could affect today and if they run out of money as a private company with that being true, it can be tricky. Some people come in with things like converts and whatnot. Now wrote a whole blog post about this called on the road to recap if anyone cares to go deep.
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On that subject Caitlin before we hit record you were talking about some of the potential benefits of being small through a period like this. Can you expand on that idea?
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Yeah, essentially that just comes down to Numbers. If you're a billion-dollar top-line company and you're looking at sort of like a 10% hit that is a significant impact if you're a today sitting at about a million dollar run rate and you're looking at 10 percent hit it's much more manageable today. And so if you just are able to in those early startup
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Rio's really understand what a potential turn rate or potential increases customer payment delays or anything like that you're able to quantify it and realize that can be contained and then move past it very quickly and use that as an opportunity to really restructure your customer relationships. So the customers that were never really fully bought into what you were doing never fully engaged in to in a what you were doing and they're sort of the Lost leader customers that are taking over.
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Company's resources and not exactly using the product is intended. It's probably a good time to sort of cut there and then really double down on the customers that are investing deeply in your solution making your product a core part of their business and then coming out of it. This is how you see those really great in Enterprise software net retention rates that sort of explode in the early days. So like in the early days, you can see companies that go from like a nine million dollar Revenue to like 30 million dollars of
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New purely driven by expansion rates their customer base doesn't really get much bigger and that often happens by using crisis times to build deeper relationships get more Corley integrated into your customers workflow.
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I also think if in the past three or four years, I think there's been this pressure around things like you'll hear about MVP for a minimal viable product and like people have just been racing to get these companies going as fast as possible.
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I think now with this type of environment you can take a deep breath when you're in that stage of say two to five employees where you got a lot of people working for Sweat Equity take the time to get the product right and the product Market fit right and take a little bit longer there and feel a little less of this kind of need to move fast kind of thing. And I think it'll pay off in the long run. Is there anything that you've seen talking to existing portfolio companies this week or recently that you think is interesting?
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Testing or relevant that's bubbled to the
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surface. You know, I think everybody is figuring out companies that are based in California. Most of them have moved to working remotely most employees have now switched and team members have switched to working from home and really understanding sort of like how to collaborate and get work done in these new modes, especially in companies that are like four or five people that are used to coming together on a daily basis all of a sudden the new work habits start coming together and it's always a really good reminder.
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Under that working remotely is not at all about the software tools that you use but rather about the culture that you've instituted as a company and we've talked about this before Patrick, which is that the main thing that happens when you start moving to a remote culture is that asynchronous communication becomes Paramount and so companies like elastic who have been remote from day one have learned. Well before all these remote software tools were available that writing things down such that.
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Your team's can consume sort of the day's activities asynchronously become extraordinarily important the level of transparency that you're able to communicate with the day-to-day activities throughout the team become way more important and so communication and how you're sort of Distributing the days goals in the days kpis throughout the company changes. And so those are the things that like Bill said, it's part of the re-examination of like how you're going about doing your business and it's okay.
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take a bit more time to step back and reconsider all of this and just go a bit slower and use this time to your advantage to go slow frankly to eventually go
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fast Bill any any anecdotes from this cute period now or from the past of portfolio companies doing something interesting I'd start just by saying this notion of being able to make sure that you're fully funded and to adjust your expense rate to a level to where you
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Hive can be really valuable in the long run. We had a case with Open Table, you know one where there were two other Venture back competitors. And ironically I don't even remember their names right now, but they both went bankrupt so they did not do what I just said we were able to get lean and mean and thread the needle and as a result, you know, I think there were Network effects, but nowhere in the history of OpenTable success story. Does anyone read two companies?
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Out of business, but that's what happened. And so there's a there's a scenario we're being prudent through one of these types of periods actually led to quite a bit of reward any other anecdotes from the past bill worth sharing. Yeah. I have a great one. And this one's just sometimes constraints lead to creativity. You know, that was a famous phrase that jobs used to use inside of apple and the same thing is true in a business and I remember for many years Bob Kegel and I used to check in
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With Tony hsieh we never did Zappos, but we always love meeting with him and one day he was telling me you know about the business and I asked him what his days payable were to the shoe vendors and I don't remember the exact number but he said something like 90 and having worked with Nordstrom at nordstrom.com. I knew the industry standard was like half that like 45 and I said how in the world did you accomplish that and he said I just called him on said if they didn't move to 90 we were going
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A business and so there's a would everyone else would have assumed was a hard constraint but he pushed the edge, you know in the tough period and enabled quite a bit of cash flow and inventory for his company and doing so so you never know what you might be able to pull off and if you ask the right hard question, I love the idea that thing's weird things happen in this period good and bad and you should be thinking about ways to affect.
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Those in your favor inside of a company. I love that. It's a great story Jason any other thoughts on best practices or kind of what you've seen from the best remote companies I think writing things down, you know more asynchronous written Communications a great starting point elastic you've been involved with for a long time and is natively this way any other best practices you be willing to share on remote work that might be helpful to people out there that aren't used to doing
29:53
that. I think that organization and how you think about the company itself and how its
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I used also changes if you're used to just working all in one location and you have created an environment where folks just talk to each other and that's how tasks get done organizing around that starts becoming a much more organized and systematic thing that you have to do consciously and it's not something that can just say, okay. Hey, let's all jump into a meeting and talk about it because that's not necessarily what happens when everybody is
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Working remotely and so organization of the team itself become something that requires more effort and requires it to be naturally more systemic. So in Agile development there lots of practices about doing daily stand-ups. There's like in scrum. There's like very specific techniques about how to do that. And those are all done in this construct of like everybody being around each other but all of a sudden if everybody's separate or remote or everybody's in multiple time zones all that means is that
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It as you plan a week out you kind of have to put the plans in place on Monday morning. So that the entire team can plan every single day around those pre-planned organized activities. And so it just takes a bit more conscious effort to go around and understand really how your team gets a test done and then being very conscious about planning those things in a very methodical fashion. So that that information gets disseminated across your team and they know exactly when I'm going to
31:29
we check in and all of that and so, you know, it just takes a couple of weeks to adjust but once you start to get into the flow with that new mode of working things start to become quite natural
31:39
Jason, I know you don't like this question, but I'm gonna ask it anyway, and it's a thematic question which is is there anything going on maybe that you have been watching trends that you have been watching that could be a bottom-up observed Trend as well an interesting company coming across your desk that you think is maybe now even more interesting so obviously work from home startups might be an obvious example
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Zoom, you know if you look at Zoom stock in the public markets, it's been an unbelievable story in this one month period I'm amazed. It's still working. We're using it here right now. So kudos to them any themes that really have your attention bottom up or top down either one of you.
32:13
Yeah, I would say that the things that are very Capital efficient that then don't require a lot of resources to get up and running and have sort of natural values really fast time to Value inside of companies start.
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Becoming even more important today. So things that are easy to install and get going very quickly. For example things that once installed very quickly make the customer quite productive. And so this is where all the Investments That in product that these companies have made start to pay off really really well and especially as everybody starts moving remotely those that have invested really well in online distribution, for example, especially in Enterprise software.
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Do really well, so I had a board meeting of one of my companies that have heavily invested over the years on online distribution. And if you look at their sort of like last two weeks of sales data, it'd be very hard to infer that anything else was going on. Anything was going on in the macro world because so much of how they think about sales is hitting customers as they're ready to purchase. And so that in the way they've been able to do that is by investing heavily on product over a number of years and so it's those products.
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Investments it's those efficiencies and it's the times that you've put in that you could have gotten around with capital or people now start to pay off really well in these times. And so that's sort of a bottoms-up theme that that is I think very important to watch that ends up becoming a an advantage.
33:48
I'd probably steer away from just trying to chase this thing at this moment would like a new company start because the companies that are benefiting from this or ones that were started eight years ago and
33:59
flourishing as you run into it as opposed to reacting quickly and one thing, you know, I would encourage everyone to keep in mind is that this will pass just like oh one past the no 8:09 past and so keeping a level head and not freaking out is generally important, but that's also why I wouldn't start a company for this particular environment because I think I don't think it's going to stay this way through do you think Bill that kind of ugc based and maybe even some
34:29
As businesses not necessarily ones that are being started this week reactively but ones that were started more recently or well-positioned going into this Market it's going to depend but certainly a ugc company where most of the interaction is online should not see a great deal of disruption from people being asked to work at home. So that would make a lot of sense to me any closing thoughts guys for people out there in markets in general running businesses running investment portfolios things that you want to leave them with here.
34:59
I think I allude to what Bill said in the last correction. Oh 809 is that as investors? We make money by deploying our Capital versus like sitting on our capital and so the main message to all of our entrepreneurs and to entrepreneurs period is that entrepreneurial spirit and entrepreneur energy and Innovation is is timeless and it's not dependent on sort of macro environments and as a firm that's focused on the earliest stages of innovation. We're
35:29
Going about doing our business and we're open for business. And you know, I think we're getting more creative about how to be more interactive with our ecosystem how to open ourselves up to the ecosystem so that as people move to work more remotely how they continue to feel integrated and connected into the broader Innovation ecosystem and the entrepreneurial energy and I think those things will be creatively solve over a couple of weeks. But as Bill just a little two situations pass and things take time and things take time to work out.
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But things pass over time and so it's important to continue to stay connected and continue to just keep going while taking the necessary precautions, of course and continue to really have that positive and hopeful energy that it makes Innovation entrepreneur energy. So special keep that going Patrick, I'd leave everybody
36:21
with this final thought. I think it was Graham and Dodd before Buffett that said be fearful when others are greedy and greedy when others are
36:29
They're fearful and I think you know now that we're clearly in a fearful world. It is interesting to ask the question for every entrepreneur depending on stage or where their company is. What does it mean to be greedy right now? And the Tony Shea example is a great one right where he improved his competitive position by changing a business tenant in an environment like this and you know, there may be certain companies that have way more fun.
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Then their competitors and so if things get tough, they might have an advantage a relative advantage and they might even decide to push more aggressively in this window where someone else has to retreat and these are all independent but I do think that if someone can figure out what that question means for them. How can you be reasonably greedy at a time where everyone's panicking that's a really interesting provocative question.
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Or all of these entrepreneurs bill. I love that as a closing spot. I think this conversation as I knew it would be as was was very nice and balanced, but it's great to close on a somewhat optimistic note. So guys. I really appreciate your time. This will be up much faster than in our past iterations. We have tomorrow morning. So have a great evening and thanks for doing this. Thanks Patrick. Hey everyone Patrick here again to find more episodes of invest like the best go to investor Field Guide.com forward slash podcast.
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If you're a book lover, you can also sign up for my book club at investor field guide.com forward slash book club after you sign up to receive a full investor curriculum right away. And then three to four suggestions of new books every month. You can also follow me on Twitter at Patrick underscore. Oh shag OS H kg if you enjoy the show, please leave a quick review for us on iTunes, which will help more people discover invest like the best. Thanks so much for
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listening.
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