Chris Yeh: Blitzscaling Ventures

In this episode, Joel Palathinkal, Chris Yeh, and John Robinson explore venture capital and community building. They discuss the importance of initiative, Chris Yeh's career, and his experiences with Reid Hoffman and Peter Thiel. The conversation covers blitzscaling, deal access strategies, seed round trends, and crossover funds. They offer advice for fund managers and traits of successful founders, drawing insights from Ted Lasso. The episode wraps up with guidance on intellectual property protection for founders.

Episode Transcript

(00:00):
We're amazing, killing it all the time, all thekind, all the time types.

(00:03):
I mean, you think about some of the greatestentrepreneurs that are out there, something
like a Patrick Collison who we had theprivilege of visiting our classroom when we
taught at Stanford.
I mean that dude runs the most valuableprivately held startup in the world and he is a
soft spoken, really thoughtful kind of guy andI love seeing things like that.
Yeah, no, that's helpful.

(00:24):
John, you got a few questions.
You want to just rattle them off?
Welcome to The Investor, a podcast where I,Joel Palafinkel, your host, dives deep into the
minds of the world's most influentialinstitutional investors.
In each episode, we sit down with an investorto hear about their journeys and how global

(00:45):
markets are driving capital allocation.
So join us on this journey as we explore theseinsights.
People obviously love it.
You can tell that and it's just, it's reallyimpressive.
And again, I'm I'm like, I'm all I alwaysadmire people who go out and actually make

(01:06):
things happen.
I mean, all the time people complaining,emerging managers, oh, we don't know what to
do.
Oh, it's so mysterious.
You said, you know what?
Screw it.
I'm creating a course.
I'm gonna get people to come in and talk.
And I love that last update where one of theemerging managers might be getting an anchor LP
out of it.
It's incredible.
Yeah.
No.
It's been amazing and and, you know, you do iton the premise of just kinda building community

(01:30):
and, getting people together, you know.
So I mean, if you can do it that way and youhave a little bit of fun and you learn and
look, I mean, I get feedback as well.
So like for me, all about this.
I come from a product background, right?
So stuff that the feedback that I get, I haveto take it with a grain of salt.
And it's like what Henry Ford and Steve Jobssaid, It's kind of like if you keep, if you

(01:55):
just ask your customers what they tell you,you're just gonna build faster horses versus
building a car, right?
So that's kind of what we What we gotta, youknow, strive for.
We gotta kind of use our We gotta use ourjudgment and then we gotta take inputs and
there's so many different personalities, right?

(02:15):
There's late stage VCs, there's early stageVCs, each people, each persona has a different
workflow and requirement, but you got tosynthesize all that and like make it something
that everybody could use.
I mean, think about LinkedIn, right?
So LinkedIn, there's job seekers, there'speople that are marketing, there are people

(02:36):
that are like influencers, right, but there'sonly one LinkedIn, right, there's like
different apps.
You know, so that those are things that I'mreally excited to talk to you about.
But anyways, I'm gonna probably send anotherblast to some of the students here.
Some of these people are emerging managers,also aspiring VCs, we'll probably have some
more people pop in.

(02:57):
But guys, we've got Chris Yeh here fromBlitzscaling Ventures.
So he's the author, co author with Reid Hoffmanon blitzscaling.
So I wanna get deep into it, just learn allabout you, because normally when you and I
chat, we're like with 40 other funds, right?
So tell me about you, tell me about where yougrew up and how did you meet Reid Hoffman?

(03:18):
You guys are like together all the time, liketeaching courses and stuff.
I think that you guys are on YouTube and I sawsomething where you guys are doing like a
blitzscaling course.
So just let's start from the beginning.
I wanna just go deep and then we can talk aboutTed Lasso if we want and you know whatever
else, wherever else the conversation goes.

(03:38):
Listen Joel, whatever you like, whatever youwant, we're happy to cover.
If you want me to sing, I'll do it.
You just got to make sure that you picksomething that's with my vocal register.
So the the funny thing is right before this, asa matter of fact, Reed and I were recording a
fireside chat with the dean of the businessschool at the Tech of Monterrey for a Mexican

(03:59):
startup festival.
So we're we're we're trying to make sure thatwe bring the gospel of blitzscaling everywhere.
So just to give you a quick recap, the theshort version of the life story is, I was born
and grew up in Santa Monica, California, wentup to Stanford at a young age to go to college
there.
I studied product design engineering andcreative writing and then when I graduated, I

(04:24):
went to Cambridge, Massachusetts to work for D.
E.
Shaw on startup, internet startup projects andI worked there for three years, then I went to
Harvard Business School, graduated.
Was that a PE role?
Like is D.
E.
Shaw, you know, just for knowledge, for theaudience here, that's a large massive private
equity and hedge fund, right?
Yes, so D.

(04:45):
Shaw is one of the world's largest and mostsuccessful hedge funds.
It also does a lot of private equity, does itsown investing and the like in a lot of
different areas.
So I was working at D.
E.
Shaw not in a PE role but in an operating roleon their various startup projects.
So D.
E.
Shaw was doing internal Internet startups.
One of them was Juno Online Services, which wasa free email service that went public and

(05:06):
eventually merged with NetZero.
And I also worked on our Farsight Financialproject, which was an online brokerage, which
eventually was purchased by Merrill Lynch andand as Merrill Lynch as well as I think one
other company, but I don't remember which itwas.
So I was working on startup stuff, but I didthat was my sort of first exposure to the

(05:27):
financial world, and obviously, I picked up afew things about how hedge funds worked along
the way.
Okay.
And then and then tell me what happened afterthis.
You're at D.
E.
Shaw.
You're you know, you have a really unique role,and and tell me what happened after that.
Well, after I left D.
Shaw, I left to go to business school becausethe thing about being at D.
E.
Shaw was we kind of had infinite money and Ifigured that that was not a situation that was

(05:51):
always going to apply and so I should learn alittle bit more about how the rest of the world
worked and that's what going to business schoolwas for, it was a great opportunity to learn
the conventions of business and had a greatcouple of years at HBS and then after HBS, I
moved out back to Silicon Valley as it were andas an entrepreneur and as an operator.
I've been doing that ever since.

(06:12):
I started making the shift to being more of aninvestor sort of in the mid 2000s, 2010s or so
and then shifted full time to being an authoraround twenty fourteen-twenty fifteen.
So Reed and I met actually back when he wasstarting LinkedIn.
So we both went to Stanford and I in fact metPeter Thiel, his friend, back when Peter was in

(06:35):
law school at Stanford and I was a freshman.
Peter Thiel and I overlapped for exactly oneyear and I remember meeting So not classmates.
So I'm five years after Reed and Peter and itjust happened to be that since Peter stuck
around for law school, he was around during myvery first freshman year but by the time I got
to Stanford as a freshman, Reed was already offat Oxford studying philosophy as a Marshall

(07:00):
scholar but we had similar experiences.
Then we did finally run into each other when hewas starting LinkedIn.
So when LinkedIn first came out, I said, wow,this is exactly the right kind of service for
me.
I'm one of those weirdos who before this, I hadmy Microsoft Outlook file and I actually record
notes on the people I met, right, because Iwanted to remember the details about what they

(07:23):
had done in their lives and along comesLinkedIn and Facebook to take care of that for
me.
So of course, I was very excited about them andthe founders of LinkedIn were all Stanford.
So I went ahead and reached out to them.
Stanford at the time had a proprietary onlinesocial network and that let me reach any
Stanford alum and I said, I really like whatyou guys are doing.
I got to know Reid, had him come speak atevents back when LinkedIn was not very famous

(07:48):
and it was actually useful for Reid to go speakat events and just had stayed in touch ever
since, co invested in a couple deals and thenwe ended up working together on the book
starting in 2011.
Tell me about your interactions with PeterThiel.
Guess how would you know what did you guys talkabout?
Did you guys work on anything together or washe just kind of someone that you met and was he

(08:10):
someone that was he working on PayPal?
No, this this is this
is prior to pay.
This is no, this is prior to PayPal.
So Peter
at the time was actually in law school and mostpeople know before he started PayPal, he
actually went and did a stint as a corporatelawyer for a while.
Realized very quickly it was a terrible ideaand that's when he started a hedge fund called

(08:31):
Clarium Capital and along the way he met MaxLevchin and they ended up starting a company
called Confinity which eventually becamePayPal.
So I didn't know Peter super duper well.
We've met a couple times.
I just knew he was sort of a minor campuscelebrity because he was renowned as this
contrarian conservative thinker on campus,right?
In college environment, he was the guy swimmingall the way to the right.

(08:56):
As Reid likes to put it.
You know, people put them together becausethey're like, they're really interested how
these two smart guys would get along when oneof them is to the right of Attila the Hun, the
other one's a bleeding heart liberal.
But it turns out, you know, being a geniusmeans that they had a lot in common And it was
even apparent to me back then that Peter was areally smart guy.
But again, my relationship was just I met him acouple of times.

(09:19):
Yeah, and you know, we've got a few people herethat are breaking into VC, right?
We've got some people that have techconsulting, banking backgrounds.
Some people have backgrounds that are none ofthe above, but you did an MBA, right?
So tell me, and everybody has differentopinions.
I think you were at a point where it wasmandatory to kind of get that pedigree to break

(09:45):
in.
I feel it's changed, but I just want to getyour unbiased opinion on what you think of MBAs
for people that are trying to break into VC andif it helps, and that might be helpful for the
audience too.
Absolutely, so I think that it is still thecase that having an MBA helps when breaking
into VC, especially if that MBA is from eitherHarvard Business School or the Stanford
Graduate School of Business because it's aridiculous thing where about 30 to 40% of the

(10:11):
industry has a degree from one of those twobusiness schools.
It's absolutely insane, so it helps largelyjust because you have this incredible alumni
network that you can draw Now I will say that Ioften tell people because I'm the owner of very
expensive degrees from Stanford and HarvardBusiness School, I feel like qualified and I
have enough distance.

(10:31):
I can actually say there are times when itdoesn't make sense to pursue those degrees and
I've had various friends who I've given adviceto over the years.
Some of them are pretty well known so my friendBen Casnoka who co authored the Startup of You
with Reed and was our co author for theAlliance and is now a very successful VC at
Village Global.
Back when I met Ben when he was a 15 year oldhigh school student and we were commenting on

(10:55):
the same blogs and when it came time for him todecide what he was going to do after graduating
high school, He had all sorts of people tellinghim things like oh you have to go to college,
if you go to college, if you don't go tocollege, you'll regret the rest of your life
and there are other people saying why would yougo to college?
College is a waste of time and what I told Benwas very simple.
I said Ben, you know going to college is notgoing to significantly improve your standing in

(11:21):
life.
You already have a great set of relationships.
You're going to be able to succeed regardlessof whether you go to college or not.
What you should do is you should go to collegefor a year and then drop out because if you
don't, I predict that you'll spend the rest ofyour life wondering if you missed out on
something but if you go for a year and thendrop out, you won't have that worry but you'll
be able to get on with your life.

(11:41):
Now he ended up going for eighteen months,three semesters and we had dinner about a month
ago and he admitted to me, know that lastsemester was a mistake.
Should have listened to you and dropped outafter freshman year, but and then my friend
Ramit Sethi, who's a very famous personalfinance guru, he had this amazing scholarship
that would pay for any school he wanted to andhe said, you know, Chris, should I go get an

(12:04):
MBA?
And I said, Ramit, you know that I have an MBA.
I value it very highly.
I'm very glad I went to Harvard Business Schoolbut you would be insane to go to business
school.
It's not the, I mean, think about it, finance,you talk about money psychology, the cost of an
MBA is not the tuition, though that issignificant.
It's the opportunity cost, two years out of theprime of your career.

(12:28):
Right now you have a best selling book that'sgoing to come out, you have a business that
you're building, why would you take two yearsaway from that to get a degree that ultimately
won't make that big a difference in your life?
So there are people who I tell don't go but onthe other hand, the circumstances under which

you should go get an MBA are (12:43):
you should have an idea of what you want to get out of the
process.
Like I went in saying I want to learn whatconventional wisdom is in the business world
because I don't know any of it.
I've been operating in wonderland this wholetime and so I went in with a specific plan of
what I wanted to do.
I stuck with that plan.
I achieved my goals and had a great time and awonderful lot of fun and great relationships

(13:06):
along the way, but in contrast, if you went tobusiness schools because you weren't sure what
to do, well it's not going to change that.
The other thing about business school isthere's certain types of people for whom it
makes more sense.
So I call business school the great source ofcareer laundering.
So we have money laundering where you takemoney of some kind and you wash it off.

(13:27):
Well, business school like HBS is careerlaundry.
Whatever you happen to do before that, captainin the US Army, ran a nonprofit organization,
was in the Peace Corps, guess what?
At the end of it, you're a Harvard MBA andMcKinsey or Goldman Sachs is going to hire you.
And so the people who probably benefited themost out of the experience were friends of mine
who were coming from very radically differentthings.

(13:48):
Mean, when I said, you know, captain in themilitary or you know, Corps volunteer, I'm not
kidding.
These were the backgrounds of the people whoprobably got the most out of it.
Whereas I had other friends who had worked atMcKinsey before they went to business school
and when they're at HBS they're just bored outof their minds because they already knew all
this stuff.
Yeah, no that's helpful.
Yeah, mean Peter Thiel has a differentcontrarian view too on school as a whole,

(14:12):
right?
Doesn't he have the Thiel Fellow?
So, you know, what I have to say to that islook, I mean, you're getting, and we've just
talked about this when I was kicking off thecall.
Like there's going to be a bunch of insightsand feedback and different perspectives and,
you know, you got to synthesize it your ownway.
Let me also comment on that just for a second.
So Peter Thiel doesn't care what happens toyou.

(14:33):
Peter Thiel cares what happens in the bigpicture and in the big picture encouraging
people to not go to college produces moreoutlier outcomes.
However, those outlier outcomes are faroutnumbered by the number of people who
actually would have benefited from taking amore conventional route, so he's fine with
everyone going contrarian if there are a fewwinners, but the problem is if you're the

(14:56):
person who is not the lucky contrarian whoactually succeeds, your life has been made
significantly worse.
Now again, if you look at it from the bigpicture and you're able to say, know this is
all about expected value and if I happen to endup in a bad place, that's okay because you know
overall the world did better, that's great, butI only have one life to live and so I tend to

(15:16):
focus on giving people advice that's going tooptimize their happiness rather than some sort
of objective function across the entire race ofhumanity.
I totally agree, yeah, I mean, I think, look, Itruly believe that I feel like if you're happy,
then you're successful, right?
Because there's people that are successful thatare unhappy.
So I think if you can find happiness, that's agood point, but again, I'm just one of the

(15:39):
other people that have an opinion.
Okay, so let's talk a little more about Reid.
So tell me the story of how you met Reid.
You met him in college.
He was a couple So of years ahead of your
I did not meet Reid in college.
Here's how we met.
So what happened, now I knew of Reid.
So oddly enough, I was interested in socialnetworking before it became hip and as was

(16:01):
Reed.
So he had a previous company called SocialNet,that was his first startup that failed and I
was one of the few people who actually signedup for it because I was interested potentially
in creating my own social network.
It would have been a great idea but you knowwhat, it was too early and in fact LinkedIn and
Facebook and those were the companies thatfinally came around at the right time.

(16:23):
And did social net happen after PayPal?
No, or before?
Okay,
oh okay, got it.
So when did Reed and so Reed got into PayPal alittle later then, I guess.
Yeah, so here's what happened.
So Reed started Reed started SocialNet.
So he
had worked for Fujitsu and Apple and thenSocialNet was his very first startup.

(16:44):
Now while he was doing SocialNet and towardsthe end of it, he actually ended up on PayPal's
board because what Peter and Max agreed to dowas to invite, each of them agreed to invite
their smartest startup friend onto the boardwith them because they wanted to have their
smartest friends around to help them figure outhow they're going make this a business and
Peter invited Reid and Max invited ScottBannister who of course is also an incredibly

(17:10):
successful guy and brilliant brilliant dude andso that's how Reid got involved in PayPal and
then after SocialNet, after he left SocialNet,it was going nowhere, Peter was like, come on,
I need your help at PayPal, come join me here.
And so that's when Reid became the, I think,executive vice president of strategy which
actually meant, you know, do whatever is mostimportant at any given time.

(17:37):
And so that was that and then tell me about howyou guys started brainstorming on the
blitzscaling concept and then the book, becausethen at that point you were helping them and
working on these other projects and then tellorigin me story of the Blitz because you guys
have a whole rubric and a framework and I lovehow that's kind of carried on into your

(18:02):
investment thesis as well.
But tell me about that and then tell me thebook process because you guys have blown up.
I actually mentioned you to somebody and theperson actually showed the book.
I love it.
So I was like okay.
No, it's fantastic and I often joke and I tellpeople as an author you know you've succeeded
when people use a term that you created foryour book and they use it incorrectly because

(18:28):
that means it's so important and so famous theyhave to use it even if they didn't read the
book.
So when you've got to the point where peoplewho didn't read the book are citing it, then
you really made it.
So that's where we finally got to withBlitzkilling.
So the way it happened is back in 2015, Reedand I were like, okay, we finished our previous
book, The Alliance that came out in 2014, nowit's time to think about the next book and we

(18:52):
are playing around with a couple of differentideas.
One idea was really understanding truly therole of the CEO because we often, our opinion
is people haven't done a good job of writingit.
Most CEOs, when they talk about it, their PRpeople are there.
It's a bunch of BS.
Whereas Reid knows them all personally so wecan get the real story from them.
So we're thinking about doing that but thenReid came back from a trip to The UK and said

(19:16):
I've got an idea.
I'm like oh wow, I'd like to hear this.
He said he'd been on a panel where they weretalking about the secret of Silicon Valley and
he heard all these answers which were oh it's aculture that accepts failure, it's great
research universities, it's venture capitalistsand he's like those are all answers because

(19:36):
those things are now true all over the world.
Why does Silicon Valley still succeed and whereother places don't?
What makes it special?
And we said okay, let's try to figure out whatthe secret of Silicon Valley is.
We don't like those answers.
Let's figure it out and being intellectualties, we said okay, we're going to take the
Plato's Republic approach.
For those of you who remember Plato's Republic,Plato's Republic is about the concept of

(20:00):
justice and the approach that Socrateseventually takes in that dialogue is to say if
we look at a well functioning society and weeliminate all the other elements of it,
whatever remains must be justice.
So that's kind of what we did withBlitzkimming.
So let's pull aside all the things that wedon't think account for this and whatever is
left is the thing that really matters and whatwe ended up concluding was of course that we

(20:24):
live in a world where there are more and morewinner take most markets where if you win the
market, then get to print money for decades andthat's why these companies are growing so fast
and becoming so valuable and the objectiveshould be find one of those markets and then
prioritize speed to scale above everythingelse, beat the competition to scale, become the
market leader that just dominates for decadesand that's where the idea of blitzscaling came

(20:48):
about and so the way we did it was the way wetypically work on a book which we spent a bunch
of time talking about ideas.
As those ideas began to emerge, what wouldhappen is I'd be doing most of the typing but
one of the things that Reid is probably thebest in the world at is like he actually
literally thinks in frameworks.
You talked about frameworks and rubrics before.

(21:08):
These are things that just come straight fromReeves brain.
He'll just come up with a framework on the spotand you know we'll refine it a little bit after
that, but oftentimes it's pretty close to whathe just came up with or cooked up while he was
walking, while he was walking or taking ashower or something.
So we had the ideas behind blitzscaling.
We then converted it into a book.

(21:28):
We knew we wanted to come up with a new wordbecause if you come up with a new word, then
you can trademark it and make more money.
And also you can do a Google search and knowwhen people are talking about you.
And we actually do not remember now which of uscame up with the term blitzscaling.
We cannot actually figure out the attribution.
So we decided it must have just come to both ofus at roughly the same time.

(21:52):
Yep, no, that's helpful.
And tell me how you use that framework forevaluating companies, because when we've kind
of collaborated together, and I'm sure this isprobably in the book, but there is some scoring
matrix to evaluate, you had some, don'tremember, but I remember seeing a graph, but
there's some characteristics that prove that itis blood scaling or blood scaling worthy.

(22:17):
So can unpack that for us a little bit?
Absolutely and this is part of where building aventure firm goes beyond what you do in the
book.
So in the book what we did is we identified theseries of elements of blitzscaling but we
didn't prioritize and we just threw out there.
There was this list of these elements and thatwas fine for the book but then when it came

(22:38):
time to do the fund and my partner ScottJohnson was basically like well this is all
fine and dandy but we can't invest just onfeel, right?
How are we going to actually instantiate thisin a way that is a little more rigorous and
that's when we said, okay, well let's startthinking about how we actually do this and so
we did things like first of all, just like,okay, well what if we just assign them a one or

(23:00):
a zero or a score of one to 10 and added it upand then we're like well actually when we apply
these scores, the scores don't look right andwe're like okay well maybe we should weight it
so that certain factors are more important thanothers and we're like, well that still doesn't
look right.
So we just kept fiddling with it includingadding an exponential factor into the formula
until we finally arrived at something thatseemed to spit out scores that made sense for

(23:22):
companies in the past and it's basically anexercise of what we call curve fitting.
What we did after that is start applying it tocompanies then tracking what happened with them
to make sure that the scoring mechanismactually made sense, that it actually
identified companies that did in fact grow veryrapidly, raise vastly more money and become
enormously valuable and fortunately it did.

(23:43):
So that's what we do at Blitzscaling Ventures.
We do something really different from almostevery other VC firm because most VC firms, the
goal is you meet with a bunch of entrepreneurslike five a day, they come to your office or
rather they come to your Zoom account, you hearthem pitch and you decide, okay, do I think
this is going to work or not and what we doinstead is we just track the deals that are
done by the top VCs.

(24:05):
We look at each of them through the lens ofsplit scalability and that means they're about
five to six a month that actually qualify andthose are the companies where we then do a
deeper study and so instead of having to do,you know, five meetings a day, I have five or
six companies I could really do some in-depthwork on each month and then the goal after if
we like what we find is to then reach out tothe CEO and begin building a relationship.

(24:29):
So the way we actually get our access to thedeals because these are typically companies are
doing super well and everyone wants in isthrough the CEOs themselves.
So the CEOs are like wow, this is so helpfulwhat you've taught me about my company.
I want to have your help as I grow this companyand our answer is well, you know, you don't
have to pay me money and you don't have to giveme any free shares, you just have to let

(24:52):
Blitzskilling Ventures invest 1 to $2,000,000and the answer then is yeah sure absolutely, I
could definitely get my investors to sign offon that.
Yeah and usually you know what you're sayingtoo is usually that 1 to $2,000,000 that's a
super exclusive company that's usuallyimpossible to get into but because you're able

(25:13):
to connect with them in your network with, youknow, the bigger funds, right, that's kind of
how you get that unique edge.
Although I'll tell people, so we know GPs at,you know, we have 30 funds that we track, we
know GPs, I think 28, personal, we havepersonal friends with GPs at 28 of them.
There's the other two, we're going to get therein time within the first couple of co

(25:34):
investments.
We're pretty sure that's not going to be aproblem, but we don't go to those VCs at the
outset.
Right?
A lot of people do this, they want to run a coinvest fund, they're like okay, have a great
relationship with Sequoia, have a greatrelationship with Greylock and they give me
deals and I'm like yeah, okay, do they give youthe best deals?
I'm pretty sure that's not the case because thebest deals, I know for a fact they keep for

(25:55):
themselves.
Mean Sequoia notoriously Whatsapp Sequoia isthe only investor in that deal.
It made them quite a pile of money.
Mean they're incredible investors.
Why would they take their best deals and giveup slices of them?
And so they're not worried about not filling upa round, right?
Because I mean they will just fill itthemselves, swallow up the whole term sheet or

(26:16):
you know just get two or three of the peoplethat they know that are going to be strategic
on the cap table for that company to already beoversubscribed even before you even know about
it, right?
Exactly and so our goal is not access it to theVC, it's access it through the CEO and then
when the CEO says, hey, I want to bake theseguys into the next round, that's when we spring
into action and we talk with the VC firm andeverything like that but that allows us to not

(26:41):
have this sort of adverse selection of oh whichdeals are you bringing us?
It's we go out and find the deals ourselves andthen we rely on those relationships to make
sure that they say okay when the CEO proposesit.
What do you think is gonna happen now with allthe stuff that's going on with the crossover
funds right?
So the CO2s the Tiger Globals, how is thatgoing to impact Venture in the next few years?

(27:06):
So again, this is recorded but I'm happy to goon the record saying this.
I mean people often during the process ofraising money for blitzscaling ventures said
well you know it's ironic that you have thisartisanal approach.
You're investing small amounts of money intothese companies.
Can you blitzscale this approach?
I said yes somebody is blitzscaling theapproach and it's called Tiger Global and to a

(27:28):
lesser extent Kotu and what they've done isthey've ripped the mask off of venture capital
because what it's revealed is at the laterstages of investment, there's less of that sort
of hands on value add from the VCs.
The money becomes more of a commodity and sobeing able to offer a quick decision, a higher
valuation and zero interference is a winningformula and as long as you're able to correctly

(27:55):
identify which companies to invest in andyou're able to go to them with that offer, you
can deploy a lot more capital, a lot morequickly than the traditional model would allow
and so what they've determined is they'reoptimizing for the deployment of capital into
an asset class that they think is undervaluedand I think it's brilliant.
Now I think what that means is that if you area traditional growth stage investor, it's going

(28:21):
to become harder and harder because you'regoing to have to win deals against these guys.
It's not like the successful companies are anysecret, It's pretty obvious who's doing well
and you can bet that Tiger or Kotu orsomebody's going to go to them at some point in
time.
In the past, sometimes it was the big mutualfund companies like a TRO or something like
that but Tiger goes even a little earlier thanthat and so as a result, they're going to have

(28:42):
to adjust.
You're not adding value at the later stages,you may have to go back towards being more of a
series A series B fund where you're actuallyworking closely with the entrepreneurs or you
may need to go and become more like Tiger orKotu and say look we're going to take a high
velocity approach that focuses on thedeployment of capital as opposed to applying

(29:05):
the traditional series A series B model tolater stages.
Yeah, and I'm starting to see, you know, seedrounds be the size of a series A, right?
So I feel like the round sizes are gettingbigger.
The question is, do you think that's going tocontinue?
And then, yeah, you know, what I've been seeingnow is there's a lot of verticalized platforms
for retail.

(29:26):
So there's a, you know, I saw, you know, aspace company that allows you to invest in
space tech with, you know, kind of a retailplatform.
And then there's also healthcare companies now.
I think we were looking at one a couple ofweeks ago where there's no ways for you to
invest in healthcare focused.
They already have Republic and Seed Investwhere you can invest in startups as a Reg A,

(29:51):
but do you see that getting more verticalizedinto different sectors?
Maybe there's a quantum computing republic,right?
We can just get into quantum deals.
So then how do you think that's going to playinto the capital stack and just people
investing more into these startups?
So I think that's absolutely the case.

(30:11):
Again, it makes more sense at the later stagesthan the earlier stages because the later
stages, there's not as much value add to havingtraditional investors and one of the things
I've always said is an issue with crowdfundingat the earlier stages I.
E.
What happens if something goes wrong?
How do you get more money out of people?
Is not as critical at the later stages so Ithink it could very much easily happen more at

(30:31):
the later stages and by the way, I mean I wasjust talking with someone the other day who's
going to be an LP in Blitzskilling Ventures.
They have a model where they are actuallylooking to fund specialists or highly
specialized early stage funds because theirthesis is that things are going to be much more
verticalized and they're going to put hundredsof millions of dollars behind this thesis.

(30:53):
We weren't a part of their thesis.
They were just like you guys are so cool.
We still want to put some money in.
Okay, well far be it for me to object.
By the way, there was a question from Peter whosaid I understand Christa Sage is performing
due diligence and deep dives on companies firstbefore contacting them and then contacting the
CEO.
Yes, so obviously the deepest dive is going tocome after you start talking with the CEO and

(31:14):
getting information and by the way we actuallyhave a significant advantage there because the
nature of our investments are that we're justgoing along for the round.
We don't really affect whether there's going tobe a round or not.
The CEOs tend to be very candid with us becauseincentive for them is to share their biggest
challenges and get my help fixing them asopposed to trying to spin me and make me feel

(31:36):
like, this is the greatest investment ever, Ishould just put money in.
No, they come out and say, here's our problemsand so that helps us on the due diligence side
but we do do a certain amount of due diligencewith as many information sources as we can
before we contact the CEOs and especially ifit's a product driven company and it will often
include my working with the product itself.

(31:56):
Sometimes I could do that without talking tothe CEO, sometimes I have to talk to the CEO in
order to experience the product but either waywe believe that assessing product market fit
personally is a really important part of it.
I want to go back to a point that you weretalking about with LPs investing in specialist
funds.
So I think that's, I resonate with that andI've actually seen that firsthand.

(32:18):
Going a step further, I've seen people who arenot LPs, I've converted a few people into being
LPs, they've only done direct and I'm like,well, you heard about what I'm doing here?
And did you know about these emerging managers?
Because again, I mean, especially with thesenew funds that are Gen Zs, people that are
doing NFT stuff.

(32:38):
Yeah.
The typical high net worth individual, they'regoing to these family office dinners at Italian
restaurants and they're talking aboutopportunity zones, right?
So getting exposure, I think is a really greatopportunity to invest in these nano funds.
Then also it's quite easy to offer kind of likehow you're thinking about it, co investing, so

(33:02):
that way you can also get into the underlyingasset, but you're also learning and getting
that knowledge from that subject matterexpertise.
And they're doing all the work, they're doingall the sourcing, you kind of get a diversified
exposure if it's a Quantum Fund, Like you canget exposure to all of the segments of Quantum,
so you're kind of spread out, but then ifthere's a company that you just have a lot of

(33:25):
conviction on, can go, you can actually justdirectly invest into that deal as well.
Absolutely and again the thing to remember,mean it's crazy right, I sometimes relate
things to what it's like being a retailinvestor because I just find it relatable.
I'm an ordinary guy and I remember this is thesame cycle I went through when I first learned
about stocks and stock markets and things likethat.

(33:47):
I'm like wow, I know so much.
I'm going to invest in these companies thenlater I realized holy there's somebody who who
spends all day doing nothing but thinking aboutthis and I'm an idiot for thinking that I could
do better than them.
That's the same thing that happens forprofessional allocators.
At first they think to themselves, wow you knowI'm so smart.
I'm going do a much better job and eventuallythey realize holy these managers spent every

(34:09):
day all day thinking about this one area, howthe hell do I expect to compete with them?
I should actually be backing them instead.
Yeah, no I agree.
Mean when you think about quanta, I mean I'mjust going a little deep on quanta because I
just spoke with a manager and I was reallyintrigued and I mean this person is in
academia, know, he's going to the universities,they're looking, they're at labs, know, there's

(34:31):
hardware infrastructure in place and you know,just a typical LP just number one does not know
that that's the case and then they just don'tknow who to contact, right?
So there's just that the deep networks and theacademia sometimes or even if it's not
academia, it's just the sector expertise, know.
So it looks like Ash has a question.

(34:51):
This could be a very loaded question, but
what's your best advice
for a first time fund manager?
I'm still trying to figure that one out.
Well, so first of all, let me just point outthat I am also a first time fund manager.
I'm in the same boat as you guys.
I may have been raising money for a littlelonger so I feel a little more comfortable with
it but I'm still very much learning in thisprocess but what I'll say is this, it's be able

(35:15):
to really succinctly express your competitiveadvantage.
This was rammed home for me today.
I was talking with potential LP, a guy who runsbillions of dollars for a billionaire family
that also owns a large business and he runstheir pension funds as well and he's like
listen, what I want to know is what's yourcompetitive advantage and if you can't

(35:36):
articulate your source of competitiveadvantage, you're going be in trouble.
Now again, the thing that I've heard over andover again from managers, from allocators is
that I talk to them and they say, you know, welike what you're doing.
They don't always invest but a good number ofthem have.
We like what you're doing because at least wecan tell that it's different.

(35:57):
It sounds unique.
The vast majority of emerging managers soundlike the following: hey, I'm entrepreneur or a
successful executive at a major company and Ihave an incredible network of people in this
particular space and I'm going to pick someamazing companies and here's my track record as
an angel investor and I've done really well formyself and now I'm stepping up to being a VC

(36:22):
and look that is incredible, that's greatsuccess but when somebody hears that a thousand
times, eventually they're like well I don'tknow which of these people to pick and so you
have to be able to articulate that competitiveadvantage and say oh and by the way I'm a
former professional basketball player and I'mdoing sports tech.
Oh okay great, all right, fantastic, right, sothere has to be some sort of focus and this is

(36:44):
classic notion of focus, right?
So if you just put your hand down on something,that's one thing.
If you concentrate the weight of your hand onthe head of a nail, that's another, right?
One of them is just going to sit there on thetable.
The other one's going to penetrate the board orsomething like that so being able to focus your
effort on a smaller and smaller area and againit doesn't have to be sector focused right with

(37:09):
blitzscaling ventures.
We're not sector focused, we're business modelfocused, we focus on a particular stage, but
the key is we're focused, we're not trying tobe everything to everyone.
You know outside of the blitzscaling framework,what are some traits that you've seen in
successful founders?
You know, just culture fit wise, and then alsojust, you know, when you look at the metrics or

(37:32):
KPIs, you know, what are the patterns thatyou've seen consistently?
So the number one thing we look for is founderswho are able to learn, who have the humility to
know that they don't know the answers and thatthey're going to go and And find those that
also means being willing to unlearn the lessonsof the past.

(37:52):
So often, I mean, we've seen this that theycall it the sophomore slump, right?
We see an entrepreneur who is really successfuland they go and they start a second company and
for some reason it doesn't work as well.
Well, why is that?
Because they learned a bunch of lessons withthe first company and they're like, wow, now I
know how it works and then they try to applythose lessons to the second company and
meanwhile it's like five years later and guesswhat?

(38:12):
The world is entirely changed and so being ableto unlearn those things and having the humility
to say, you know what?
I don't know all the answers just because I'vedone this before is probably the thing we look
for most and I love founders who arethoughtful.
They don't have to be this bead on their chest.
We're amazing, killing it all the time, all thekind, all the time types.
I mean, if you think about some of the greatestentrepreneurs that are out there, somebody like

(38:36):
Collison who we had the privilege of visitingour classroom when we taught at Stanford.
I mean that dude runs the most valuableprivately held startup in the world and he is a
soft spoken, really thoughtful kind of guy andI love seeing things like that.
Yeah, no, that's helpful.
John, you got two questions.
You want to just rattle them off?

(38:56):
Yes.
So first thing, you know, it's an honor havingyou, Chris, as part of this forum and giving us
such great insights.
I really appreciate it.
And Joe, thank you for connecting us with sucha great thought leader.
I believe that blitzscaling is an offensivestrategy.

(39:17):
It can be also a defensive strategy.
Right.
So one of the things that I have reviewed istaking the market by surprise.
Can you expand on this?
This is really critical because this will bringyou to the next level very quickly.
That's where the hyperscalability happens,right?
So please expand on those steps.

(39:39):
Absolutely, so this and you bring up a reallyimportant and valuable point, John.
So oftentimes people, whether they'reentrepreneurs or managers seek comfort in
conventional wisdom and they're like, oh, thisis a hot space.
I'm going to go after this hot space.
The problem is they're looking at thingswithout considering the overall competitive

(40:01):
landscape and what else is going on, right?
This is why, and this is not something weinvented, it's something we took from Peter
Thiel and Peter Thiel no doubt probably took itfrom elsewhere, but being contrarian and right
is so important because when you are goingafter the thing that everyone agrees is
valuable and everyone wants to go after, you'recompeting with the entire rest of the world and
no matter how brilliant you are, the fact isyou're competing with so many other brilliant

(40:25):
people that your chances of success have justgone down down down down down down down and so
what's really important is taking the market bysurprise, which is why I tend to prefer, even
when I was an entrepreneur, I tended to prefernot going out there and trying to make the
biggest splash immediately.
I preferred to build up the momentum even if itwas happening more behind the scenes and then

(40:47):
be able to announce and declare victory asopposed to try to declare victory up front then
desperately try to make it stick.
So I think that taking a market surprise isgreat.
I think that being stealth works as long asit's not interfering with your gaming customers
and oftentimes the most important thing is togain those customers early on to prove that you

(41:07):
have the product market fit because if you havegreat product market fit, I'm pretty sure you
can find ways to reach the market and expandthe number of users, but if you have product
market fit, even if you've got a great go tomarket, I'm pretty sure you're not going be
able to make it stick.
Great answer.
Second question that I have, if we were toapply the same framework from blitz scaling to

(41:34):
the social net concept that had a lot ofchallenges back then.
Yes.
How we would have succeeded.
So here's what it is and we've done postmortemson social net, right?
So why did social net fail?

(41:54):
Because it wasn't because Reid wasn't a smartguy.
Obviously he's a brilliant, brilliant guy.
He was inexperienced and there were somemistakes made along the way.
We talk about them in the book.
Probably the biggest mistake he made was on theproduct side and this is what it sort of boiled
down to.
With SocialNet, they didn't achieve productmarket fit.
There were several reasons for that.
One of them was that as Reid put it, he wasinexperienced and so he focused on like

(42:17):
polishing and polishing and polishing withoutany real world feedback which meant building
stuff that people didn't actually use and thendiscovering after you launch, there's a whole
bunch of stuff that people actually want, butyou can't build it because you've spent all
your money building other stuff that nobodygives a crap about.
So that's where the Reid Hoffman principle ofif you're not embarrassed by your first product
launch, you've launched too late comes from.

(42:38):
In other words, you have to have a bias towardsgetting out into the real market with real
users and getting their feedback and thenimproving your product as quickly as possible.
So there's that, but the other reason is thatSocialNet, and this speaks back to the point of
focus, SocialNet was too unfocused and whatSocialNet did was it tried to be everything to
everyone and it was like if you want to dobusiness, go to social net.

(43:02):
If you want to socialize, to social net.
If you want to have a club, go to social netand the idea was well, we want to serve
everything and we're not really sure what'sgoing to work, but when you do that, you don't
succeed at anything and obviously you look atLinkedIn.
LinkedIn was very different, really tightlyfocused a particular area.
Facebook, even though we think of it as beingfor everyone, started off hyper focused on
college students.

(43:23):
Starting off with a focus that you can actuallygenerate a product market fit and generate
momentum is one of the most important things todo.
I see, and would you consider competitiveadvantage versus unfair advantage two different
things or one of the same?
They're pretty much similar.

(43:43):
Unfair advantage is just the extremecompetitive advantage.
I will say this, I mean I think that peoplelike the term unfair advantage because it kind
of sounds cool and scary and everything likethat.
I mean it just means it's a big competitiveadvantage that people compete with you on a
level playing field and you have this advantagethey can never win and that's great.

(44:05):
You should definitely try to do that and thisis actually one of the principles I give to my
kids.
I've told them over and over again, listen, ifthe world is rigged, if the world is unfair,
why don't you make sure it's unfair in yourfavor?
Okay, and can we apply the same framework withblitzscaling into taking by surprise the VC
industry?

(44:27):
That would be a third book
that you might be able to write.
Listen, it's happening.
Like I said, Tiger Global is upsetting theapple cart of the VC industry and they're
really essentially taking a blitzscalingapproach.
Their inefficiency is that they're willing toaccept lower returns.
I mean When you pay double the price that otherpeople are willing to pay, it means that you're

(44:49):
going to take lower returns but when you paydouble the price, you can do a lot more deals.
This is very similar to one of the things wetalked about in the book which was the rise of
Chesapeake Energy.
Chesapeake Energy succeeded because theyrecognized before other people did that
fracking made shale oil and gas formationsvaluable whereas before people thought they

(45:09):
were worthless and what they did to generatevalue is they went out and they bought up the
mineral rights to as much land as possible andunlike other people who were very careful, they
went, they surveyed the land, they figured outif there's oil there or not, Chesapeake told
their people go out, pay whatever it takes,don't bother with the geological survey, if we
have to throw away some of the lots, it doesn'tmatter because there is so much undervalued

(45:33):
stuff out there, we just want to get as much ofit as possible.
That's essentially what Tiger Global is doing.
They're like the entire asset class isundervalued.
Things are growing faster than ever before.
It doesn't matter if we pay double the priceand therefore we have more returns.
We can deploy a 100 times as much capital as aconventional fund and even if our returns are
only 50% as good, guess what?

(45:53):
The carry on 50% of the returns multiplied by a100 times the capital is a lot bigger.
Thank you very much, Chris.
It's been a pleasure hearing your feedback.
I have put things in a much better perspectivenow.
Thank you.
My pleasure.
Thank you for participating.
So John, you've got a question on identifyingVC funds.

(46:14):
Is this identifying VC funds for co investingor are you saying from an LP perspective?
John Robinson.
Oh, think John had to drop off.
Oh, did?
Okay.
We'll have to make it up.
Have to decide which one.
Could answer both.

(46:34):
So I mean, when it comes to the VC funds, bytheir portfolios you shall know them, right?
And this is the point I make.
Joel very kindly said earlier on that I'mreally old, which is true.
And what that means is that once upon a time,right, the land was dominated by certain VC
firms that everyone knew about.

(46:54):
Kleiner Perkins was the most prominent andSequoia was around even then but there were
also firms like Seven Rosen and Brentwood thatwere huge important venture capital firms that
obviously are no longer around and the point isthose companies didn't die off because you know
they're the reason the VC firms are no longeras prominent is because they no longer do good

(47:18):
deals and that's the thing.
If a VC firm does good deals, it's a good VCfirm and eventually the market will recognize
it and if a VC firm stops doing good deals,eventually the market will recognize that as
well.
Yeah, no, I totally resonate with that.
Well guys keep pinging any questions you got,we got about fifteen minutes.
I want to spend a little time talking aboutthis lasso conference that you put together and

(47:42):
that just came across my feed somehow because Iwas watching the show and then I was like, what
the hell is this?
Like, there's like a lasso fan conference andlike you were giving like some keynote speech
on Twitter.
So tell me all about that and then you havethis whole thing called lassoisms and you and I
pinged each other like after every Fridaybecause I think there was a new episode every

(48:07):
Friday so we would fanboy a little bit but tellme about that whole thing and tell me just kind
of your perspectives and just how that cameabout.
Absolutely, so I came across Ted Lasso the sameway most people did.
People were starting to write articles aboutit.
It's not like I was like, oh yeah, Apple TVplus I'm gonna be watching whatever comes on
there and by the way Apple TV plus had no ideawhat they had on their hands either, right?

(48:31):
They just kept promoting The Morning Show andSee.
They never promoted Ted Lasso but it became aword-of-mouth hit.
People watching were like, wow, this show isactually incredible, I can't believe it and
they started telling their friends.
By the time I got there, this first season itwas already fully out, I was able to binge
watch it.
I basically, for the sake of sanity, had tolimit myself to watching one episode per day.

(48:53):
I had other friends who I turned on to the showand they literally watched the entire first
season in one day and stayed up until 4AM tofinish it and it was just a show that was both
incredibly well executed but also did somethingthat was very important in this day and age
which is talk about the importance of, well, itdepends on how you say it.

(49:14):
A lot of people said it was about kindness.
I tend to think it's less about kindness andmore about acceptance, more about accepting who
you are and accepting others for whom they areand But whatever it is, it's a positive side.
Now, are a lot of great television shows thathave come out recently, prestige television
shows that focus on anti heroes.

(49:35):
And some of my favorite shows I've also watcheda lot of are HBO shows ironically enough,
right?
So if you think about a show like Succession,which is actively releasing new episodes now,
phenomenal show, that show is about the worsthuman beings imaginable.
Or a show like Veep, which is a great show,absolutely hilarious.
Everyone on that show is a monster or you thinkabout a show like Silicon Valley, again, not

(49:59):
quite as bad, but most of the people there arenot good people and so what do we take away
from these shows and we're entertained, weenjoy it, we like watching them but it doesn't
make us feel better about life and especiallywhen I came across Ted Lasso towards the 2020,
was something where I'm like, you know what,here's something where if I watch it, I feel

(50:20):
better, I feel inspired, it makes me want to bea better person.
That's something I need more of in my life andso it's actually funny because what led to
LassoCon is the testing of product market fit.
Back in early twenty twenty
You started LassoCon?
So I started.
You started it?
Okay, how many people were at the conference?

(50:42):
So the first LassoCon conference had 200 peopleand we're going to do LassoCon two in early
December.
We're expecting to double or triple that.
And is this
one going to be in person?
This one is still not going be in person, stillnot safe, it'll still be virtual, but we're
probably going to expand it.
LassoCon one was four hours, two hours each dayon two weekend days and there's so many people

(51:04):
want to participate in LassoCon two, we'reprobably going to increase to three hours each
day and again, Do
have speakers that talk about their takeawayson Lasso?
Absolutely and so these are members of the TedLasso community, the Ted Lasso podcasters,
the
Ted Lasso columnists and authors and whatnot.
I actually need to set up a call with, there'sa woman who is a mental health professional, a

(51:28):
therapist who wants to talk about the portrayalof therapy in Ted Lasso.
So we're going to have all these things.
We're going have a couple cast members show up.
That's amazing, you're going have cast members?
I would love to be involved or at least attendbecause I'm a fan myself.
Well, go to lassocon.com or follow Lassocon onTwitter.
You'll make sure anyone can attend and it'sfree.
Great.
We're inclusive.

(51:48):
Right?
The whole idea is to get people together.
The the whole experience of Lascon isincredible.
And I think everybody sees Lasso.
So I my take away from Lasso was the importanceof having a good coach, right?
Because you know, the team, they're all goodathletes, they're rock stars, right?
But if you don't have the right coach that is,and this goes back to your life, right?

(52:12):
If you don't have coaches, people that arecheering you on, people that are supporting
you, it's tough to get through life.
And the problem was, you know, what I took awayfrom that too is he was also behind the scenes
dealing with anxiety, dealing with a lot ofmental health issues.
So my two takeaways is like the importance ofmental health and then the coaching thing.
Then not to ruin it for everybody, but it wasthe guy that became the coach, I forgot his

(52:37):
name.
And I messaged you about this too.
But just the importance of realizing that nowyou are a coach, right?
You used to be a player.
When you work in corporate America, they havethis whole concept of being, if you work in
tech, if you're a product manager like I was,you can be just a coach where you're the

(53:00):
director of product and you've got some productmanagers behind you and you're just kind of
like, and that was my role, I was almost like atherapist.
Like the product managers would come in to me,there'd be some drama with some designers and
I'm kind of like schmoozing the head of designand we're getting coffee, right?
But then there's also player coaches whereyou're a coach but then you also are shipping

(53:22):
product at the same time.
Everybody's an individual contributor.
My takeaway was just kind of holisticallylooking at the whole thing.
I think it's kind of like, if you have anamazing coach, your team will be an all star
team.
The guy came from Texas, right?
So he was like kind of a country guy fromTexas, and that was a huge huge thing.

(53:44):
People were rooting for him to to lose, andthen he comes in and, you know, just game
changer.
Right?
So
Yeah.
No.
It's it's a wonderful show.
Kansas as opposed to Texas.
Kansas City barbecue is a key factor in theplot.
A couple of people ask how do we register forLassoCon?
Just go to lassocon.com and it redirects to theregistration page.
We're going be using Crowdcast and you know,we've got now more professional event people

(54:09):
involved and donating their time.
So we're very excited about it.
But the way that I ended up getting involved inthe Lasso world and becoming a Lasso global
influencer and getting like swag from Applesent to me in the mail and stuff is that you
remember I said, I thought it was reallyimportant to figure out product market fit
personally.

(54:29):
Well, back at the 2020 when Clubhouse firststarted getting a lot of attention, one of the
questions we had to ask ourselves is, is this acompany that we're going to invest in?
And I said, well, know, if they in fact docreate a new social network in a new medium and
dominate it, that could be worth anincalculable amount of money but I have to go
figure out if I think they're going do that ornot.

(54:50):
So I signed up for Clubhouse and since I wasn'tsure what else to do, I'm like, I got to start
a club and I was talking with a friend of minewho I said, know, he was also curious about
Clubhouse, say join me at this time, I'll pingyou in and I just created a room.
This was before clubs even existed onClubhouse, I just created a room called Ted
Lasso is Awesome, just created a room.

(55:11):
It was just for my friend Tim and I to chat andunderstand the features of Ted Lasso, sorry, of
Clubhouse, but just by naming it Ted Lasso isawesome, people started streaming in because
they wanted to talk about how much the showmeant to them.
I was like wow, that's incredible and so weended up doing these Ted Lasso Clubhouse

(55:32):
sessions every week.
They're on Sundays at 1PM Pacific.
There's a club called This is Awesome and it'salways Ted Lasso oriented and after LassoCon
even more people started coming in.
So people come in every week and we just talkabout Ted Lasso and the other things in our
lives and there's so many incredible things, somany incredible people we've met and people
support each other, people are going throughdivorces, people are going through cancer,

(55:56):
people are going through all these transitionsin their lives, maybe they're changing their
gender identity and through it all Ted Lassohelps everyone get through it and helps
everyone appreciate each other.
Yeah, so part of that is thinking through,kudos to Apple, But part of storytelling and
this goes back to fund management as well, likeideating your story.

(56:17):
And I think they really nailed, like you said,right, it was critical that Ted came from
Kansas City.
So that, just the creativity of coming up withthese personas and really developing these
characters and then casting the right personthat would make sense, right?
If you had somebody else, it probably wouldn'thave provided the same effect.

(56:39):
And what's interesting is I think it, you know,for those of you who are familiar with the
career of Jason Sudeikis, the character of TedLasso is actually a big departure for him and
he's best known in movies like Horrible Bossesand Horrible Bosses two and We're the Millers.
Those are all very successful
Totally comic different character.
Totally different personic.
If I would describe Jason Sudeikis' comicpersona as basically Chevy Chase lite, right?

(57:04):
Not quite as much of an asshole as Chevy Chasebut still a wise ass kind of asshole and Ted
Lasso is exactly the opposite and you knowwe've seen, it's interesting, we've seen in
sort of his actions in the real world andeverything that in many ways Ted Lasso is truer
to, is closer to his true character than hiscomedic persona was and he's been unleashed on
the world so to speak.

(57:25):
Yeah, no that's definitely excited for that.
I know we got three minutes left, so any finalquestions guys?
Chris, this is amazing.
I mean we covered so many great topics, butI'll, you know, guys feel free to ping any
questions here.
I'll ping the link on our post on LinkedIn, butmaybe you can share with all of this stuff, All

(57:48):
the lassoisms and all the lessons you'velearned in your career, any general advice that
you'd like to share from a mentor or a familymember that you want us to take back with us?
So there's a couple of pieces advice that Igive to everyone as much as possible.
The first one is you can never meet enoughsmart and interesting people and you don't know

(58:10):
where things are going to go.
You can't be instrumental about it.
In other words, can't say, well, meeting has apurpose.
Just meet smart and interesting people andincredible things will happen out of it and you
know a lot of the things that have happenedwith Blitzskilling Ventures or the rest of my
career, those have all happened just because Iwas open to meeting smart and interesting
people.
It doesn't mean you have to devote equal timeto all of them.

(58:32):
It doesn't mean that you have to stay in touchwith every single person you meet but building
a network around you is in general one of themost important ways to succeed in life and the
other is to be patient.
I would say that in general on a day to daybasis, it seems like you're never making
progress, but then when you look at things on ayearly basis, it's insane how much progress you
make and so being able to take the long termview and to be persistent over time and

(58:58):
understand the incredible power of compoundingis something that I think everyone should
appreciate in their careers.
Super amazing.
I have, if I may add two more questions ifpossible unless Joel you want to step in and
you have your final.
No, go ahead.
Got about a minute John.
The first question is do you also as a ventureguide those founders to follow your framework,

(59:23):
which you feel that it's and you believe thatis very successful because I think that a lot
of companies, if they had the right framework,they could have succeeded instead of failed.
Do you actually cater to that need and youembrace those founders and help them scale as

(59:43):
they supposed to?
Absolutely, and that's one of the reasons whythey bring us in.
They explicitly bring us in so that I can helpthem use the framework at their companies and
we also give them access to something we callthe Blitzscaling Academy, which is just an
online community full of courses and otherpeople in the community who are interested in
blitzscaling.
So we try to provide support, but then ofcourse, the difference with Blitzscaling

(01:00:05):
Ventures is they actually get me personally.
So that is a big part of what we do.
Okay.
And the last question that I have is right now,it's the market is extremely competitive.
And if somebody has an idea and he wants tocreate a SaaS product or a different type of
service, or social media platform, forinstance, how would they protect the idea

(01:00:32):
because they want to take the market bysurprise, but how do they simultaneously
protect the idea their IP or their conceptbefore somebody else who has more funding can
actually scale up very quickly, copy it andexpand, you know, and surpass that original

(01:00:53):
concept.
Well, here's the beauty of it.
Probably people don't believe in your idea,because otherwise everyone else would already
be doing it, so it's unlikely.
In fact, you would probably have to pay peopleto do what you were doing, at least until
you're successful.
Now what I do encourage people to do is I tellthem, listen, it makes sense to go ahead and
get patent protection if you really gotsomething that's super innovative.

(01:01:13):
You have to view this as defensive, notoffensive.
Right?
It's defensive just to able to keep people fromdirectly cloning you, but it's unlikely to have
much offensive value.
Don't expect your investors to really value youhaving a patent.
It's just something you should do as a matterof course to defend yourself as best you can,
but the fact remains, getting people to signNDAs, being super secretive, I don't think

(01:01:35):
those things really help.
I think that you're far more likely to need to,it's far more likely you're gonna be like, I
wish more people knew about us.
I wish more people were talking about it.
So I wouldn't worry too much about that if youneed to get a patent, but other than that, it's
much harder to get attention than it is toworry about other people trying to steal your
ideas.
That's the same approach that you will followif you are a fund manager?

(01:01:58):
Yes.
You should follow the same approach andstrategy?
Yes, although again, things like let's say youa great company, you know, you should not say
well before I invest, let me tell everyone elsehow great the company is.
You should go ahead and invest, but if you'retalking about like here's our competitive
advantage and here's why we think we helpportfolio companies, You should be trumpeting

(01:02:23):
that, you shouldn't be hiding that because whatyou want is you want the founders out there to
hear your story and say, hey, you know what, Ilike what John is saying, I think it could help
me, let me reach out to him because you want tobe somebody that people go inbound to as well.
Thank you, Chris.
Perfect feedback.
Thank you very much.
My pleasure.
Joel, thank you so much for having me on.

(01:02:44):
Thank you everyone for coming in tonight.
Yeah, thank you and sorry we ran over a coupleminutes.
So appreciate your patience and everyone else,thanks for engaging and, having good questions.
So Chris, probably see you next week and, goodluck with everything and catch up.