20VC: Science Inc's Peter Pham on Why The Battle Between Entrepreneurs & VCs Is Unfair, How To Even The Playing Field & How To Tell When A VC Really Is Interested

Peter Pham is a Co-Founder at Science, the startup studio that helps incubate companies co-building them alongside CEO's, with recent companies like Dollar Shave Club (acquired by Unilever for $1B) and leading marketplace, DogVacay. More recently Science created created one of the top 100 iOS Apps called Wishbone. Peter has also helped his portfolio raise over $350M in that time. Previously as an operator, he led Photobucket to its $300M acquisition by Fox Interactive Media as well as CEO of BillShrink (acquired by MasterCard.) In Today’s Episode You Will Learn: 1.) How Peter made the transition from operator to company builder with Science? 2.) How does Peter approach the fundraising process itself? How does he instruct founders about the right ways to approach and enter the fundraising game? 3.) How can entrepreneurs determine whether a VC is saying not to them? What are the signs that an investor is genuinely interested? 4.) With 3,000 no's from investors, how does that affect Peter's mentality? How does he avoid the negativity surrounding a VC saying no? 5.) What are Peter's major learnings on how companies scale effectively today? How important are network effects to this scaling? Items Mentioned In Today’s Show: Peter’s Fave Blog and Newsletter: Recode Peter’s Fave Book: How To Win Friends & Influence People Peter's Most Recent Investment: Handstand App As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Peter on Twitter here! Likewise, you can follow Harry on Snapchat here for mojito madness and all things 20VC. Eve make 1 perfect mattress – made with 3 layer technology and next generation memory foam. It comes packaged in a beautiful box and arrives the day after you order. You get 100 nights to try it with free return pick-up – it really is the perfect mattress for everyone. Just go online to evemattress.co.uk and enter the code 20VC for £50 off. Everybody deserves the perfect start with Eve.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Harry Stebbings?

  Welcome back to another week in the wonderful world of VC. I'm your host Harry Stebbings at H Stebbings on Snapchat and you're listening to the 20 Minute VC. Now for the show today, I'm thrilled to welcome Peter Pham. Peter is the co-founder of Science, a startup studio that helps incubate companies, co-building them alongside their CEOs, with recent companies like Dollar Shave Club, acquired by Unilever for $1 billion, and leading marketplace Dog Vacay, who we actually had on the show with Aaron Herschon coming on. More recently, Science created one of the top 100 iOS apps called Wishbone, and Peter's also helped his portfolio raise a staggering $350 million in that time. And previously as an operator, he led PhotoBucket to its $300 million acquisition by Fox Interactive Media, as well as being CEO of Bill Shrink, acquired by Masked

• 0:44Harry Stebbings?

  Guard in 2012. Now, I have to say, this call was scheduled to be 30 minutes. 75 minutes later, we were still chatting. Really was such great fun and one of my favourite shows to record. And a huge hand to Mike Jones at Science for making the introduction today, without which the interview wouldn't have happened. However, before we meet Peter, how did you sleep this weekend? Because the weekend is time to sleep and unwind, but a great mattress makes it a lot easier. That's where Eve come in. Even the makers of that great mattress, with three-layer technology and next generation memory foam, it comes packaged in a beautiful box and arrives the day after you order. They also offer a 100-night trial, so you can ensure the mattress is perfect for you, with free return pickup. So what's the risk? Go to eve mattress.co.uk, enter 20VC, and they'll

• 1:28Harry Stebbings?

  give you a staggering £50 off, and it'll be with you the next day. However, enough from me, so I'm now delighted to hand over to the main man, Peter Pham, co-founder at Science.

• 1:42Speaker 01

  You have now arrived at your destination.

• 1:46Harry Stebbings?

  Peter, such a pleasure to have you on the 20 Minute VC. I've heard such great things from from Mike, from Aaron at Dog Vacay, from Carl at Home here. So fantastic to have you here. Thanks so much for joining me.

• 1:56Speaker 02

  Absolutely. Thanks for having me.

• 1:58Harry Stebbings?

  Now, I'd love to get the ball rolling by discussing how you came to found Science, and a quick bio of you, really.

• 2:03Speaker 02

  Sure. So Mike Jones and I have known each other for quite some time. I was

• 2:10Speaker 02

  This goes back to where I started. My first entrance into consumer internet was a company called Photobucket back in two thousand and four. Prior to that, I actually did enterprise sales, AS400s, RS6000s, Lotus Domino implementations, like hardcore, CA Unicenter, Tippco type stuff.

• 2:27Speaker 03

  Sexy stuff.

• 2:28Speaker 02

  Yeah, sexy, which I kind of missed to some degree. You know, there was a company called Photobucket based out of Denver. It was four engineers and, you know, my guy I knew called me up, who's VP Venge, said, this thing's growing on MySpace and Blogger and LiveJournal, but they don't know anything about business, you should come help them out. So I joined and kind of ran everything except for engineering, like business development, marketing, et cetera. User acquisition was my specialty in business development, grew that to sixty million users. And one day, when YouTube sold to Google, I remember the moment I had TechCrunch up on my laptop. I turned the laptop over to my CEO and I said, Alex, I think we should sell the company. And he says, if you can do it, do it. And I hustled and we sold it for three hundred million dollars in MySpace.

• 3:12Speaker 02

  I actually moved to the Bay Area for that. When I moved back to LA, Mike and I had been friends because back then, you know, I always remind people, MySpace only allowed six photos on MySpace, right? Photo sharing, this whole idea of social was fairly early. And Mike had founded a company called UserPlane, which was like web chat. And again, he powered all the major social networks. What is like web messenger today? It's, he built it years ago. And I remember sitting in his office once and thinking to myself, you know, after we do all this, we should, you know, I really want to build lots of companies. And the idea of Idea Labs and incubation and doing, and everything that we're learning, applying to lots of companies should exist. But really on the west side of town, because I prefer the beach. Fast forward, you know, I was CEO, co-founder of a company called Billshrink.

• 3:56Speaker 02

  Trinity Ventures also backed, they backed Photobucket, they backed Billshrink. We sold that to Mastercard. I EIR'd at Trinity Ventures twice. I like to say I'm the only two-time EIR they've ever had. And I don't know if because they felt sorry for me, if I was good, but I returned the money twice. And that was my taste of venture. I knew I wanted to help companies build and I knew I wanted to kind of be a part of that, but be.

• 4:20Speaker 03

  More hands on. So, uh, two thousand eleven, Mike and I got back together. He had done his stint in private equity. He was a CEO of MySpace at one point. Um, when kind of Facebook overtook MySpace and we started Science and our thought was, uh, let's do it in L.A. So I spent six years in Bay Area, really learning and spending the time of building companies, but also kind of understanding venture and understanding the, the needs of startups on the full stack. So when we started Science in L.A., we thought, gosh, you know, writing a check to early-stage startup and then just checking in on every board meeting just wasn't what we felt like we wanted to do. And we also had our own ideas and we love to kind of build things. And so, Science was born, you know, at the end of two thousand eleven.

• 5:04Speaker 03

  And so we started, uh, what we call a Science Studio. You know, the terminology kind of continues to change, but think of us as a incubator is how people kind of come to understand the, the term. Uh, we're not an accelerator, right? We aren't not a Y combinator, which I think is amazing and a gold standard. But we go deep, right? We have a twenty-six thousand square foot office. All of our CEOs start in our offices, take a desk and work with us side by side. There's daily reports. We have access to all the data and analytics. We have team members that do lots of different things, from growth marketing, Facebook paid acquisition, to design, to CTOs and engineering, to help you architect.

• 5:46Speaker 03

  You know, I spend my time and Mike spends our time more tactical in a day-to-day approach where Mike is product, right? He's probably one of the best product people I've ever met in his contact switching of understanding different types of products from web to mobile. And, and always with a stint of, and this is the L.A., I think Gene and all of us, is with the, always with the stint of paid marketing, growth and revenue, right? So how do I make money if I built this? Is it through, be through advertising or is it going to be through somebody paying, uh, buying something? Or is it going to be a subscription, right? So, uh, that, that's a stint and he spends a lot of his day-to-day working with CEOs to figure out what that is and the bobbing and weaving of the product to understand and get growth. I spend my time, um, kind of split between.

• 6:30Speaker 03

  Managing platforms and business development for our companies and then fundraising, which is probably feels like seventy, eighty percent of my life.

• 6:37Harry Stebbings?

  How can I not jump on the fundraising?

• 6:39Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 6:40Harry Stebbings?

  It's a VC show, you can't blame me.

• 6:42Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 6:43Harry Stebbings?

  But as you said, I spend a lot of time thinking about fundraising. So having had a few of your founders on the show, I'm intrigued to hear how you approach then the fundraising process itself? And how you instruct founders to enter that arena of fundraising?

• 6:56Speaker 03

  So my approach is that always, I think it's unfair, I think in the the battle of entrepreneurs to VCs to get money. In the sense that a VC has been doing this for years, right? They're getting a couple pitches a day, years, and so their their default answer is a no. And also, they've seen hundreds, if not thousands of pitches at this time. An entrepreneur, especially first time, is they've never raised, even on the second time by the show, they've probably only done, you know, three rounds. Yeah, I like to even the playing field a lot of it, which is understanding and deciphering the product, the companies, and pitching it in a way that venture will understand. So my process for all of our companies is I'm the front lines, right? I'm I go out there first. We we say we're gonna go raise money.

• 7:41Speaker 03

  I'm out there talking to VCs, angel investors, softly pitching, this is what we're working on, is this something you're interested in? At this point, I I think I'm at three thousand plus no's, right? And what counts is the eighty-three yeses that we've had and three hundred and fifty million raised against the portfolio. And and now, of course, the Dollar Shave Club billion dollar exit. But it's the helping them get and figure out filtering, like, who do I talk to? And the world of venture, which is when we started four and a half years ago, was relatively small, right? Today, I mean, between angelists, angel investors, hundreds of seed funds, relatively it's the same number of A, Bs and Cs generally. But there's hundreds and hundreds of people that you can go talk to.

• 8:25Speaker 03

  How do you not waste your time, right? Startups have two things, they have time and money. And if you're wasting a day, that's a big deal. If you're wasting a week, it's a huge deal. Some, I think some startups end up wasting a month, month.

• 8:37Harry Stebbings?

  So how can they optimize the process then to to not waste any of the time, all the money that's so precious to them? When probably the burn's going and the runway's shortening?

• 8:46Speaker 03

  Yeah, so that's kind of where I come in. I pre-pitch, I figure out who to talk to. In a lot of cases, I'm doing the first phone call. And then generally, I'm shadowing the CEO. That's both on phone calls and in person, in the meetings. I remember when we first started this four and a half years ago, almost every VC, when I walked in with the entrepreneur into the partner meeting, they would look at me and they'd say, Peter, what are you doing here? Right? And I said, I'm just here to make sure that it's a, this is a fair exchange of information. And that they understand what you're asking. We're gonna, I'll make sure that they answer the question with the data that you're looking at. And the prism and the lens, because I know they have it, that's why we're here, but I want to make sure they're putting the best foot forward. And it was weird. I would say the first six months a year, and now I think it's normal.

• 9:29Speaker 03

  All the GPs and partnerships of all the firms expect me to be there and are okay with it. But I'll never forget, you know, when we met Bill Gurley for Benchmark, at Benchmark for Dog Vacay, and I walked in with Aaron, the CEO, and, you know, we're in the, we're doing the pitch for the partnership, and everyone was like, Peter, what are you doing here?

• 9:49Harry Stebbings?

  I'm here for, I'm here for the free la quoi.

• 9:51Speaker 03

  Well, I'll, you know, back, I always say I'm their Uber driver, and I just want to, and I'll sit quietly in the corner. But generally, I don't sit quietly. I generally interject when I find them struggling in the meeting a little bit.

• 10:02Harry Stebbings?

  What do they tend to struggle over?

• 10:04Speaker 03

  You know, I think the framing of questions and how it's answered is, without repetition, right? I always tell people, I'm not the smartest person in the room, but I've done this thousands of times, and I kind of understand why they're asking it, you know, and how, how, if we know the data, how to answer it so that they can comprehend and understand the answer. So I think there's always a miscommunication a lot of times when, you know, a VC will ask a type of question, like competition, where you see growth, what does this mean? What does this mean? I think in their mind, they want to hear an answer in a, in a framework that they're gonna digest and understand that looks like everything else. So that looks like everything else. And it's, it's that part.

• 10:46Speaker 03

  And then the process of honestly understanding what a no means, which is, I think, most entrepreneurs just have no idea and they waste their time. Right? Which is, oh. Oh gosh.

• 10:57Harry Stebbings?

  So much is optionality, you know, it's really interesting, we'll let you know.

• 11:00Speaker 03

  It's lucky. In the history of every round I've ever done, not just the ones within science, I I I've helped many other entrepreneurs and friends raise rounds, seed rounds, late round, you know, fifty million dollar rounds, hundred million dollar rounds. It it all generally is the same, which is if someone's interested, they'll they're interested. If you think about an A round investor or B round investor, right, they're doing three deals a year, tops, maybe four, but really two or three. The reality is if they if they if you met with them and they liked you, they're following up and they're clearing their calendar tomorrow. And they're clearing their calendar for the rest of the week and they're doing everything to get this thing closed, right? That I always say sense the sense of urgency, otherwise it's a pass or it's an option, no, and fine, push them away.

• 11:44Speaker 03

  I think the false positives of ventures, the hardest things to entrepreneurs, right? It's it's false hope. I I just got off the phone with one of my CEOs literally yesterday and he says, no, no, that, you know, so and so is interested for sure. And I said, okay, walk me through the communication and what they said, exactly what they said. Go through it. And I said, it's a pass. He's like, no, no, no, it's a pass. I'm like, I'm gonna bet you it's a pass. And of course, it was a pass two days later, right? Like, I know what they feel like and that's just a law of numbers of I've just done this enough.

• 12:12Harry Stebbings?

  What was the terminology?

• 12:13Speaker 03

  I I have a general rule, I call the twenty four hour rule, uh, which is in any, is there any engagement with you inside of twenty four hours? And I might expand that to like thirty six, but generally twenty four hours. And I'd even consider a favorite of a tweet an engagement, right? It's something. Did they text you? Did they email? They ask for a follow? Are they trying to schedule a follow up? They're asking for information. Are they starting to ask for information so that they can sell to their partnership? And the telephone game in venture is the most important part of all this. Uh, in rare instances, will a sole G P make a decision on their own, right? They have to sell, even if you're the top partner at every firm, they have to kind of sell everybody else.

• 12:54Speaker 03

  And are they asking the type of questions that they know already and they're happy with? But are they asking you to help them frame it so that when they tell their partners, it's an easy way to digest? And that's the hardest part because. That telephone game, right, and convincing everybody, the cop out of every G P and every partner is always the, well, I love the deal, but I couldn't get my partners. No, that's actually a lie. They didn't have the conviction. They they're using that for optionality for later. Right. Trust me, I've heard every witch version way of saying no. I don't get insulted anymore. It's a no.

• 13:24Harry Stebbings?

  How do you, how do you take it? You said you three thousand. I I read in an article thirteen hundred no's in a year once. How does that affect your psyche? Does it affect your psyche?

• 13:34Speaker 03

  You know, I used to do in enterprise sales, I used to do like a hundred cold calls a day, right, to C T Os and Director of I T. You know, it gets to you a little bit, particularly, I think, in venture. I've, yeah, I genuinely am friends with a lot of these people. Over the years, I've probably pitched the same person a dozen, twenty, thirty times. And also, just being in the industry, you generally become friends with them, inside and outside. And and after a lot of no's on something, when you have so much conviction, right, and when we say we have conviction, it's a bit different. When we say we have a conviction, this company is in our building. This company, we've been working on every single day for the last X months, three months, six months, a year.

• 14:13Speaker 03

  Like, we have one right now. She's been working with us for a year, right? I have so much conviction. Obviously, we have conviction, otherwise we would have shut it down already. We wouldn't waste our time, right? And so when you get enough no's, part of me gets a little upset, but part of me wants to be right. And I love proving people wrong, and it motivates me to do more and motivates the entire team, or motivates Mike, the C E O, to say, what do they know? Right? We're we're building things. We have perfect data, right? They're judging us on the hardest part of everything. They're judging us on thirty minutes. If you look at venture, in a lot of ways, they're just kind of judging you inside of thirty minutes. And wow, I I have data of thousands of hours with the C E O in this company. And they're judging it in a thirty minute moment, whether it's just they they want to continue. And then maybe they judge it for another hour, and then they do another meeting, maybe it's two hours.

• 14:57Speaker 03

  Maybe they look at the data and they're looking at those spreadsheets for another three hours. You know, they're judging this thing in hours. We judge it in months, which is a different perspective. And so, look, I'm not saying we're going to be right every time. That's improbable, right? We do have our convictions, and when we have our convictions, yeah, does it bug me? Sure, but I have to get over it, knowing that I'm going to have to go. Back to the same VC probably next week.

• 15:18Harry Stebbings?

  As you said, it's a slightly uneven playing field. VCs have done it many, many times, the pitch. And founders haven't, obviously first time founders, haven't been rejected before by VCs. Uh, so how do you coach them? Although you're used to it, is there a, is there a kind of supportive role?

• 15:33Speaker 03

  Uh, gosh, it's funny. I, I think I have a process. Not a lot of people understand or like it so far has worked for me. I, I'm pretty hard on, on the CEOs. Uh, I have a, I have a, I break it down and build them up and see what the resilience is. Because remember, maybe they're saying no to me, but fundamentally they're the founder. They're, it's their company, right? We're helping them. We, we like to say we're helping them build a company. We're, we're alongside with them. We're co-building it. But it's their company. They're the founders and they sleep, think and drink this thing 24 hours a day, seven days a week for however long. A year, two years, however long this product's been nagging on their head. And for them to get 20 no's, 30 no's on their dream and from really smart people that they've probably looked up to, right? They read about, they know that investor invested in so, so company.

• 16:19Speaker 03

  And they imagine that person that they're sitting across is, you know, they're impressed and they're smarter than me. Um, and wow, they're telling me it's a shitty business. Sorry, I don't know if I can cuss.

• 16:27Harry Stebbings?

  You can't swear, don't worry.

• 16:28Speaker 03

  All right. Uh, they're telling me it's a shitty business. Yeah. Uh, preparing them for the no's actually is pretty hard. And I do that by being really hard on them early. I mean, in every case, the simple nuances of those first couple pitches and I have to see them interacting kind of real time live with the VC. It's like, don't say this, don't sit like this, don't look this way, you know? Never say this word, never talk about this, push on this, focus on this. And it's just refinement of what that story is because again, you have 20 to 30 minutes to tell your story and get the other piece of the person believe like. And also by the way, the no's, I also have to remember, I say no as well.

• 17:07Speaker 03

  No's just means they're not into you, right? Like I, I want fundamentally investors that are passionate about the business. I really don't want passive investors who just say blindly yes to things, right? Because when startup, the highs are highs and the lows are low. And it turns out like when you get a Pacman, David. Man, who believes in it when when other people don't like that's important to me knows are okay. I'm okay with my friends saying no because it's not for them, right? I want them to be obsessive about it. I want them to think about the company all the time. Whether they think about how I can help that company twenty four seven. When I'm talking to press, when I'm talking to partners, when I'm talking to other VCs. How do I make sure that this company is on top of their list when they think about those things?

• 17:50Speaker 03

  Recruiting for all these little things that I'm hopeful. I don't expect because the reality is most VCs don't actually think about you all the time. But I'm hopeful that in that passing conversation with a strategic person or a hire or venture or press. Our name bubbles up first because they they love us more than anything else.

• 18:10Harry Stebbings?

  Now, this sounds like a very harsh question.

• 18:12Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 18:13Harry Stebbings?

  Has your extensive experience of of getting the nose to three thousand nose? Has that influenced how you relay the no to people you say no to? You know, uh, science is the top startup studio. You must get thousands of applicants. How do you say no?

• 18:28Speaker 03

  I think we try to be helpful uh in the senses. I think we can always give people tactical advice, right? So no is look, it it doesn't fit our model. I don't see us ten Xing hundred Xing the value that we provide, right? Uh, and remember, our model is a bit different. We co-build companies for equity. We're not a we I don't have a fund. Mike and I, we our team, we don't not have a fund. We are an operating company. We're an LLC, uh, similar to Beta Works, but we don't have a fund. So I don't I can't say to CEO, I love the idea. Let's do this and give you a million dollars and by the way, move in and build it. We say, look, we're gonna help you co-build this. Come on in, you know, we're gonna earn our equity. We're gonna but it's in a sizable, right? We're not again, and we're not an accelerator, so we we don't do six and seven percent equity.

• 19:11Speaker 03

  I have to know that I want to work on this every day, right? And so part of that know, at least it's a bit easier for us is is we say no to things that we don't think we can be impactful, right? Where I can think about it every day. I can talk contact switch. Mike can't think about the product and how he can be helpful. The marketing team can't, you know? If we don't think we can be tactical in a in a very multiplicity way. Have to say now because I'm doing disservice for the company. Fundamentally, I need the the Michael Dubins and the Aaron Hirshorns and the, you know, the Kyles to the world over a very long time to tell other people, say, no, science made our business like we fundamentally, we fundamentally changed the trajectory of the business. Otherwise, I'm playing a short game, right?

• 19:56Speaker 03

  We have to play this. We're going to be doing this for a very, very long time.

• 19:59Harry Stebbings?

  And you you said about the many different ways that that you add value and and some of the companies have enjoyed the benefits of that value. Obviously, one one of your crucial elements is scaling. You mentioned earlier about photo bucket. So in terms of scaling effectively, talk to me about the major learnings on how companies scale in Stays ecosystem and and the importance of network effects to this scaling that you've experienced with science.

• 20:22Speaker 03

  There's a lot of lessons learned of all the things we've done, but I think at the core, we were fairly conservative at science four and a half years ago. Being in L A, we realized like venture was, and by the way, you know, I do fifty trips a year to the Bay Area. I was there three days this week and I understand the money, big checks are in Silicon Valley. The scaling of it is the metrics, being early, realizing like we need to get from point A to point B as a company as fast as we can. And and B, scale or kind of a zero. We we shouldn't waste a lot of time if we know it's not working. The scale part is if we, if you're really good at the internal metrics, dashboarding and KPIs early,

• 21:03Speaker 03

  you can understand at a one person or three person or five person company where your effort should be. Because we're pre-seed, we're we're at the inception, concept idea is rarely at the first year, am I that concerned about the the GMV or the the large number up top? It's the little things. It's the cohorts, it's the conversions, it's the retention. And tweaking and tuning that so that I understand what my LTV, you know, what my lifetime value is in scale means every time I put a dollar to work and whether it means building the team or buying traffic, that there's leverage on top of that. We we have a law of concentric circles in startups, whereas everybody's assumption is I've acquired this many customers for the X. People believe that's linear. That's never true.

• 21:46Speaker 03

  Never ever ever true. Where do you find the outer bounds of each one of those? How much does that cost? Again, whether it's people, network effects, or actual paid media, which generally speaking, uh, we're probably pretty well known for is at scale Dollar Shave Club has to buy podcasts, television ads, because there is a saturation point in, on all places. And the only way you can reach mass adoption is kind of advertising.

• 22:14Harry Stebbings?

  Peter, I'm right, I'm right here for the Dollar Shave Club ads, don't worry. You've got, you've got my number.

• 22:19Speaker 03

  Uh, but yeah, I think, you know, Bill Gurley did a great post a couple of years ago about how the little things you do on the conversion inside the funnel, before you dump everything at the top end of the funnel, there's a multiplier effect by increasing the retention by 20% or increasing the time for someone to do something by 20%. Like those little things make the, before you dump everything at the top, whether it be big viral tactics or big, uh, advertising or, you know, big PR stunts, whatever it is, like you're wasting all of that effort if you're not focused on that, that, that tight funnel of conversion. So we spend a lot of time thinking about that.

• 23:00Harry Stebbings?

  Well, I, I want to dive now on a quick fire round. So I, yeah, you ready?

• 23:05Speaker 03

  Yeah, okay. I don't know what this is, but okay, sure.

• 23:07Harry Stebbings?

  So sixty seconds per answer. Um, yeah, quick fire.

• 23:10Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 23:11Harry Stebbings?

  Favorite book and why?

• 23:12Speaker 03

  Um, I don't read books. There's one book my brother gave me when I was 18 years old. It's Dale Carnegie, How to Win Friends and Influence Other People. You know, I've read it seven, eight times. I've actually even taken two Dale Carnegie classes and I'm still bad at it. Uh, I should, I should, good reminder, I should read it again. It's my only book.

• 23:27Harry Stebbings?

  That's, that's not true, Peter. I've spoken to so many people and everyone says Peter is the people person. So, so I'm not sure that's true. I think you're too modest on that one. But I want to talk about, let's, actually I want to, let's do, um, effective Dollar Shave Club on kind of your status and reputation in the industry. How's the inbound changed?

• 23:46Speaker 03

  Uh, I, it's been three weeks, uh, which is funny because, you know, news cycles change so fast, but I think the combination of Dollar Shave Club for us and Jet.com for the e-commerce industry definitely has a bigger effect. Everyone thinks we're smarter now. I think we're obviously the same people. Um, but we just had the vision four and a half years ago that retailers don't know who their customers are and kind of building on that thesis that the social web and the social mobile now in the last two years is where you should be making impact and growing audiences of brands. Uh, the pipeline has increased. The investors are calling me back a little bit faster, trying to figure out the next one. And, uh, yeah, I mean, it's great, but we're just doing what we're doing, building the same stuff and hopefully we get right again.

• 24:30Harry Stebbings?

  What's the vision, what's the vision for science?

• 24:32Speaker 03

  We have theses, uh, every couple of years and our vision is to build amazing companies with amazing founders, right? And, and my biggest joys so far is every time we've had two exits this year, um, Hello Society, which was New York Times and Dollar Shave Club. Hopefully we have more. The joy is this, to know where the CEOs started, right? When they first walked into our office and us working daily with them, I mean, daily with them and seeing them kind of succeed and seeing the team. And I love that. I, and I think there's value and I think there's companies to be built that aren't built the right way, in our opinion, right? And investors leveraging and understanding how to deploy

• 25:12Speaker 03

  capital, um, in a different light. Like the idea of the studio model has been tried multiple times. Everybody does it slightly different. Uh, I, I just want to keep proving that when you put a lot of smart people in a building and, and you really, you know, you say the word value add, I kind of hate that word because that's not what we do. We help people build companies. Yes, that like, that's value add, but that's different. That's, yeah, I can't imagine a world where I just am not, I'm not doing what I'm doing, which is just in the weeds every single day with the CEO.

• 25:44Harry Stebbings?

  You've said before, the biggest problem that you've found, uh, is focus. How do you look to implement focus?

• 25:50Speaker 03

  Uh, I just started taking, uh, Vivance personally.

• 25:54Harry Stebbings?

  What is Vivance?

• 25:56Speaker 03

  Uh, I've A D, apparently I've, I got diagnosed with ADHD in January. It's, uh,

• 26:01Harry Stebbings?

  Oh, wow. I, I am, I'm clearly missing out on some medication.

• 26:05Speaker 03

  Yeah, so it's interesting. I I thought my whole life I knew what focus was. Now I absolutely know what focus is. Uh, but I like that my brain context switches very quickly. Right. And I my joy is every hour typically I'm thinking about something else. I'm thinking about a company, what their needs are. I spent a lot of time on the platform side of the business, which is, you know, what's the world look like with Messenger? What's next door? What's medium? Where are the new places that we should be figuring out, thinking about growing audiences and traffic? What is Snapchat doing? What is Instagram doing? And luckily, we've had, you know, Mike and I go back so long ago when social in two thousand four, two thousand five, there's like ten people doing social company wise.

• 26:48Speaker 03

  We've been lucky to become friends with all the people who end up kind of making important decisions and running these platforms. And we have these honest conversations of where we think these things are going. Um, and I think our advantage is, you know, we've been around around long enough to see the pros and cons of them. And figuring out that is fun. My focus is always, how do I make sure at the end of the day? That CEO walks away and says, regardless of the company went to zero, and ideally it went to big. That was an amazing experience. Let's do it again. Favorite blog or newsletter? What are your must reads? Actually, the newsletter now, again, because I do, I raise money most of my days. Uh, Dan Primack's Fortune Newsletter is awesome, just because it's a quick summary of every deal that gets done.

• 27:32Speaker 03

  Every company that gets funded, every VC, because in the back of my head, I'm thinking, what firm did what deal? Uh, competitively or what firm did a deal and that went to zero? Because the other part about venture investing, interesting enough, in terms of figuring out which partner is the personality in the in the psychology of that partner in the moment? Did they just win on something big in the category? Did they just lose big on that category? Are they in favor inside the partnership or they out of favor inside the partnership? How much juice they have at the end of a given time, right? There's a dynamic. Again, that's probably way too much inside baseball. Uh, it's very sensible. Yeah, I mean, it's quite amazing to see the personality dynamics and new partners, old partners, retiring, understanding who's retiring, who's the new blood, you know, how, when did they raise the newest fund, are they deploying from the last fund, are

• 28:17Speaker 03

  they already deploying from the newest fund, is the new fund bigger? I take that entire matrix and as part of my decision process of how to pitch and who I'm pitching. In terms of blogs, Recode still is one of my favorite.

• 28:29Harry Stebbings?

  And then talk to me, I'm gonna, I'm gonna ask you a really hard question here and don't say it's like your favorite child. Company from science currently now in science being built that you are excited about. It's not most excited, it's just excited. I'm sure you're equally excited about all of them, but which one are you excited about?

• 28:46Speaker 03

  Um, Handstand. Handstand is, uh, yeah, that's the one. This, we have a CEO Tiffany, uh, we've been working with her for over a year in our offices and by single-handedly, when I say this, it's literally, it's a one person, um, has built a amazing business, basically fitness trainers on demand. Uh, we actually just raised money with Reebok, we just did a big partnership with them, we're about to do a massive rollout over Labor Day. You know, that's one of the, one of the businesses people have been saying no to us for a while. Her resilience and what she's able to accomplish has been unbelievable and better than almost every CEO we've worked with, you know, just in a different way.

• 29:27Speaker 03

  Her hustle is unlike anybody else we've seen and her wanting to win is at the extreme level of ever seen. So, yeah, Handstand. The CEO is just phenomenal and I can't wait to see her thrive and build the team around her and all that.

• 29:42Harry Stebbings?

  Peter, thank you so much. I absolutely loved having you on the show, really did. This is one of my favorites to record. Um, genuinely, um, such a pleasure. Thanks so much.

• 29:51Speaker 03

  Come visit, we're in Santa Monica, we're at seventy-five degrees.

• 29:56Harry Stebbings?

  Hmm, beach, seventy-five degrees, LA. Yes, Peter, I think I can make it. And I want to say a huge thank you to Peter for giving up his time today to be on the show. As I said, really was one of my favourites to record. And if it was one of your favourite shows and you'd like to see more from me, then you can follow me on Snapchat at H Stebbings, or you can sign up to the newsletter on the twentyminutevc.com so you never have to miss an episode or an update from us. However, before we leave you today and with the week ahead, with all its challenges and achievements, do not forget the world is a better place after a great night's sleep. And a great mattress makes that a lot easier. And that's where Eve come in. Eve are the makers of that great mattress with three-layer technology and next-generation memory foam. It comes packaged in a beautiful box and arrives the day after you order. They also offer a 100-night trial,

• 30:41Harry Stebbings?

  so you can ensure the bed is perfect for you with free return and pickup. So there really is no risk. Go to eve mattress.co.uk, enter 20vc for £50 off and it'll be with you the next day. As always, we so appreciate your support and cannot wait to bring you Wednesday's show with Jesse Middleton, founder at WeWork and newly announced general partner at Flybridge.