20VC: YC's Justin Kan on The 3 Qualities All Successful Investors Have & Why 'VCs Don't Really Do Any Real Work'?

Justin Kan is a Partner @ world renowned, Y Combinator. The birthplace of the likes of Airbnb, Reddit, Dropbox, Stripe, Zenefits and many more incredible companies. Prior to YC, Justin co-founded SocialCam, acquired by Autodesk for $60m and Twitch.tv, the world's leading video platform and community for gamers, acquired by Amazon for $970m in 2014. In Today’s Episode with Justin You Will Learn: How Justin came to found Twitch.tv and then later made the transition into VC with YC? Having been a YC alum, how has Justin seen YC as an institution change over time? How have the interviews, demo days, mentoring arrangements altered? How can YC keep the same quality of startup treatment with the mass scaling taking place? YC always positions itself as an accompaniment to the VC industry, does the new $700m YC growth fund not directly compete against VCs? What 3 qualities does Justin believes all good investors must have? How has Justin looked to establish his own personal brand? What has worked and what has not? Justin is very bullish on Snapchat, why so? What makes Justin so excited for the platform? How does Justin use it to such success? What would Justin like to see change in the platform? Items Mentioned In Today’s Show: Justin’s Fave Book: Shogun Justin’s Fave Blog or Newsletter: Nuzzel & The Information As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Justin on Twitter here! Likewise, you can follow Harry on Snapchat here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.

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

• 0:00Harry Stebbings?

  The weekend is over, but what better way to start the week than with the 20 Minute VC and your host Harry Stebbings at H Stebbings on Snapchat. And today, we have a very special show for you, although I'm not sure whether he should be on Founder's Friday or the regular VC show on 20 Minute VC, but we took his current position and went for VC. So joining me today is Justin Khan, at Justin Khan on Snapchat. And Justin is a partner at the world-renowned Y Combinator, the birthplace of the likes of Dropbox, Airbnb, Scribd and Reddit, just to name a few. And prior to YC, Justin was the founder of Twitch.tv, the world's leading video platform and community for gamers, which was ultimately acquired by Amazon for $970 million. Previously, we've had Mike Siebel on the show, he's another partner at YC and he was also

• 0:45Harry Stebbings?

  part of that amazing journey with Justin. And if you haven't checked out that episode, that really is a must, number 16, back in the old days of the show. But before we meet the main man, Justin, everyone knows that UI and aesthetics are a key element of will someone or won't someone check out your business card, site, logo? It's all down to design, and that's where Design Crowd come in. Design Crowd is an online marketplace for custom graphic, logo and web design that helps startups, entrepreneurs, web developers and agencies outsource design projects to over 500,000 registered designers who can bring their creativity and flair to your project and allow you to go from launching a project to design completion in just three days, whilst also avoiding the usual exorbitant agency fees that we all hate.

• 1:30Harry Stebbings?

  Perfect for entrepreneurs and small businesses using Design Crowd to outsource logo, site and print design. So check them out at designcrowd.com/vc and enter the promo code VC100 for an incredible $100 off. However, it's now time for me to shut up and to hand over to the main man, Justin Khan, partner at Y Combinator.

• 1:55Speaker 01

  You have now arrived at your destination.

• 1:58Harry Stebbings?

  Justin, it's such a pleasure to have you on the 20 Minute VC. Thank you so much for joining me today.

• 2:03Speaker 02

  Thanks for having me, Harry.

• 2:04Harry Stebbings?

  Now, I want to start off-

• 2:05Speaker 02

  Excited to be here. I'm sorry, I'm excited to be here. I'm still excited.

• 2:08Harry Stebbings?

  Well, fantastic. What a good start. And I want to start though today with a brief three-minute summary of of your life, a very hard first question, and how you came to be a partner at YC.

• 2:19Speaker 02

  Summary of my life in three minutes and how I became a partner at YC.

• 2:25Harry Stebbings?

  Okay.

• 2:25Speaker 02

  Okay. I started off in 2004 trying to start an internet startup because a friend of mine in college, I was at Yale College in undergrad, said to me that we basically had a access to all this intellectual capital, he called it. He's now an investor, so he's always looking for undervalued things. And he was like, we have this access as we're undergrads, and we should take advantage and start a company. And so we kind of started thinking about ideas. The idea that stuck was called Kiko, and it was a web calendar. We thought of making a calendar like Gmail that was all Ajaxified and like, you know, kind of a modern interface on the internet. And this was back in 2004, so there wasn't very many of those. Gmail was kind of like the only one that had come out.

• 3:09Speaker 02

  So we recruited another friend of mine, Emmett, at Yale, also an undergrad, and we started hacking on this. And eventually, a friend of ours whose idea was for the company, Matt, he dropped out, and so it was just Emmett and I working on this web calendar as we were in our senior year of college. The only problem was that we actually had no idea why anyone wanted calendars, because we never used them ourselves. And so we decided, we didn't really build anything that people wanted. We just built what we thought a good calendar should be. Luckily for us, that turned into a friend sending us the first advertisement for the first batch of Y Combinator in 2005. He was like, you guys have an internet startup.

• 3:53Speaker 02

  This guy, Paul Graham, is funding internet startups. You should apply. And so we did apply back in 05, and we got an interview, went up to Cambridge, pitched Paul and Jessica and a bunch of the- Robert and Trevor, the other two YC partners that had founding. And we were accepted. I remember we argued about the merits of JavaScript-rich Internet applications and Trevor didn't believe that they would ever be a thing. We were funded to the tune of $12,000, moved up to Cambridge for the summer and started working on our product. And we continued working for about a year until we realized we had not really gotten very much traction and Google Calendar also launched and wiped out most of the traction that we actually had because their product, quite frankly, was integrated with Gmail

• 4:38Speaker 02

  and a little better. And so we decided to sell the company, end up selling on eBay, decided startups weren't quite as bad as we had thought because from the eBay sale, which was about a quarter of a million dollars, we made a little bit of money, decided to start the next startup, which was Justin TV. The idea for Justin TV was basically us creating our own reality TV show on the internet. Pitched this to Paul. We actually came with a different, more sane idea and he was bored of it and didn't think it would work. And so he asked us if we had anything else. We pitched him this idea for us making our own Big Brother-like reality show. And he was like, oh, that's interesting. Tell me more. Walked out of there with a check for $50,000 for our second company. That's how we started

• 5:20Speaker 02

  Justin TV. We recruited two other co-founders, Michael and Kyle, started hacking away on making this a reality because this was pre YouTube Live or any other live platform. So we kind of had to figure out all the tech side ourselves. Six months later, launched that as a, you know, as a public site of about our show, tried to launch our show. People came on and they were like, you guys are really boring. What, we want to be entertained? Go do something. Because we were programmers, so we were sitting around the whole time, right? It wasn't very good TV. Stimulating TV experience. Not at all, not at all. But luckily, they also said to us, we want to create our own content as well, live content. How are you doing it? And so from that, we decided to make ourselves a platform for anyone to broadcast. Ended up raising some money for

• 6:04Speaker 02

  that, raised angel round, raised a venture round, ended up raising about $7 million by 2011 and had a pretty big sizable live platform, kind of the YouTube of live. From that, site stopped growing around 2010.

• 6:17Speaker 02

  And we decided we would need to build some other things in order to continue as a company. So we couldn't decide on what. We built two products internally. One was called Social Cam, which was like Instagram for video. Instagram had just come out. And one was called Twitch. We actually got the name Twitch later, but at first it was just working on the gaming uh side of Justin TV, all the all the gaming content and the working with the gaming broadcasters. Long story short, we spun Social Cam out as a new company. Eventually it sold to Autodesk for sixty million dollars in two thousand twelve. We're continuing to work on Twitch, you know, part of Justin TV, and eventually Twitch became much bigger than Justin TV. And we uh we end up selling selling Twitch to Amazon for nine hundred seventy million dollars.

• 6:57Harry Stebbings?

  Does that annoy you that it's not a billion?

• 6:59Speaker 02

  I think they specifically did that, but um you know, it's after retention, it was over a billion. But yes, it's it's I guess it's it's not the end of the world.

• 7:08Harry Stebbings?

  It's the Ross Altman situation, isn't it?

• 7:11Speaker 02

  Yeah, I guess so. I'll move past. I'll somehow survive. That was the, you know, that was kind of my my entrepreneurial career. And then started off at Y C as a part time partner in two thousand eleven. Two thousand fourteen joined full time and I've been there for about two years. And that's three minute. I think that was a little longer than three minutes, but that's a short version of.

• 7:30Harry Stebbings?

  It's it's always a hard question to summarize your life in that short a time. But there are a couple of things that jump out to me from there. And and and one of the most definitely is the interview process. You mentioned in two thousand and five going pitching uh and talking about applications uh with your co-founder. How have you seen the interview process then change at Y C? I've seen your Snapchats. You you do a lot of uh Y C interviews now. How's the process changed over the tw- eleven year period?

• 7:58Speaker 02

  So the interviews when they started off were forty minutes long, which I'm sure to the interviewers felt exhausting. Uh now they're only ten minutes long and they still feel exhausting. However, I think they're actually pretty similar, which is three or four partners in a room asking questions about the business to the entrepreneurs, you know, questions like, why are you starting this company and what's your insight here? And then digging into the model or digging into product and trying to determine are these the people that are going to take this product to be a multi-billion dollar company? You know, it's it's a short amount of time, but it's the same process pretty much since since the beginning. I think P G and Jessica and Trevor and Robert got a lot of things correct in the beginning. Uh you know, the interviews.

• 8:42Speaker 02

  Funding companies as a cohort, a demo day, um, doing these like weekly check-ins through weekly, you know, kind of this weekly dinner. So there was this heartbeat of, uh, of your company in the early days. I think all those, you know, were key insights in the beginning that have persisted to the till until today.

• 8:58Harry Stebbings?

  And on the success of Y C, uh, Sam Altman actually said in, in Greylock's, um, course at Stanford, he said that it wasn't actually, I mean, particularly to his Y C and how they performed that made them so successful, but it was more the opening that was made from poor performing V C's and the old V C generation. I'm really intrigued whether you agree that the opportunity that Y C exploited is due to a lack of V C ambition and hunger that we've seen potentially.

• 9:27Speaker 02

  Well, I mean, I think that you can see it's a classic disruption, right? Where someone went cheaper, uh, with a, you know, new service, um, in this case, funding people to the tune of $10,000 at a time or $20,000 at a time instead of hundreds of thousands or a million and kind of disinteriorating them as the first investment in that company, right? And that coincided with the cost of companies, forming companies coming down, right? Because of the various things like A W S, I'd say greater dissemination of programming knowledge and lighter weight, uh, you know, programming interfaces and frameworks as well as cheaper distribution through things like the app store, um, as well as greater adoption of the internet.

• 10:08Harry Stebbings?

  What do you make of V C's now today? The V C community that you see around you?

• 10:13Speaker 02

  I mean, I think V C's still play an important role. If you look at like most of that, uh, companies, publicly listed companies that have been created in the last 20 or 30 years, the majority of them, I believe, are venture backed. You know, their, their V C's still play a huge role in the economic development in, in the U S. I, I just think that, um, you know, Y C has a new model that's come up in the last 11 years that helps more companies get created and creates a greater feeder into the V C ecosystem. I think it's Y C, to be honest, is very synergistic with, with V C's.

• 10:43Harry Stebbings?

  What about the seven hundred million later-stage growth fund that Y C raised? Is that a competition to the V C market? Because that's looking for a much later-stage financing option. So what form of synergy is there? Or is it a competitive element?

• 10:57Speaker 02

  It depends on which life cycle you're talking about. The continuity fund originally was conceived of as a way to compete with more of the growth-stage investors that were coming into the market in the later stage. So that's people who weren't actually classically V Cs. I think as you've seen, like, tech companies, not I P O. In the past, you know, six years, there's been this bull run in tech, but the companies have remained private for the vast majority of them. As a consequence, a lot of people were traditional public-market investors. Now, you know, in order to get returns, have been coming into the private markets. And so I think that the continuity fund is much more competitive with those investors.

• 11:37Harry Stebbings?

  Absolutely. And what do you think of the extension of the private market for a much more considerable amount of time? I mean, you've exited several companies, four, you've been acquired four times. What do you think of the extension of the private markets? And does it concern you as a seed-stage investor, essentially?

• 11:53Speaker 02

  Does it concern me as a seed-stage investor? Not actively. I mean, it doesn't discourage me from investing in companies, even though, you know, liquidity is, I guess, pushed further out. I guess it doesn't concern me because if you're asking me, you know, when I vote with my wallet, it doesn't seem to concern me.

• 12:09Harry Stebbings?

  Yeah, no, that's fair enough. In terms of the angel investment philosophy that Y C have for their partners, are you allowed to make angel investments on the side and very much carry out your own portfolio, too?

• 12:20Speaker 02

  Yes, so we do make angel investments in our own Y C companies only after Demo Day. So, yeah, I have, I invested in about, I think, around fifty to sixty companies myself.

• 12:32Harry Stebbings?

  And when did you start the angel investments?

• 12:34Speaker 02

  Two thousand thirteen, I think, or two thousand, I think I made a few in two thousand twelve and then mostly in two thousand thirteen.

• 12:42Harry Stebbings?

  So when you look back to that time, two thousand and twelve, two thousand and thirteen, starting, and you see your transition, just as a kind of individual within the industry, having worked as a partner at Y C for that time, how have you seen your investment decision making change and your kind of approach to patent recognition change?

• 13:00Speaker 02

  Well, I would say that I have learned a lot. I think that the fundamental thing is that you want to invest in founders who are talented people. I think everyone kind of says that, and I really think that's true. Like, for me, like, all the, you know, I guess if you look at my angel investing portfolio, the angel investments I've made, the good ones are like Zenefits, Cruise, which was started by one of my co-founders from Justin TV, Kyle, and my brother Daniel, and was just acquired by G M for over a billion dollars, Tilt. I think those are the best companies. Oh, and Ginkgo Bioworks and Bella Beat. A lot of them are like more recent, so, you know, they had less time to grow. So if they weren't named, there's a lot, you know, doesn't mean it's not a good company.

• 13:44Speaker 02

  It just means that it's probably early, later in the portfolio. And I guess the commonality among all of these is really the founders were really good. Oftentimes, I invested in things where the founders actually weren't that good, and it became apparent, you know, like, pretty quick, within the first year. It's very hard to know day one, I think, of investing, but retroactively, it's much, much easier to tell. And then, you know, so now I try to look more actively on like, are these people actually gonna take this all the way? Instead of just like, is this a big idea in a big space? I think before I was much more driven by the size of the market and the thesis, and now I think I'm much more driven by the founders.

• 14:19Harry Stebbings?

  And you mentioned the demo day there, investing after the demo day. I've been lucky enough to attend a demo day recently, actually, the last one. And they're very considerable now, stretching several days. So I want to talk about batch sizes and scaling Y C in terms of sheer number per batch. So how do you approach the scaling of batch in terms of retaining the same quality of mentorship intuition within each batch?

• 14:43Speaker 02

  So you might have heard from other partners, but we charred Y C. We have four different groups at Y C. I run one of the four groups with Adora and Kasser right now. So we have three group partners in my group. They are the kind of the first line of defense for our companies, which is, you know, somewhere between twenty six and thirty companies. Our companies, you know, basically if they have questions about fundraising or hiring, you know, getting the product market fit, come to us first. It feels like a much smaller. It's like a business school section, I guess, like a smaller group that you can, you know, more intimate and a long connection with your partners.

• 15:17Harry Stebbings?

  What are the biggest problems that these companies come to you with? Have you found any commonalities within? It could be visas, it could be follow on funding, it could be hiring quality engineers. What's the main problems they come to you with?

• 15:29Speaker 02

  I think it's it's how do we grow? Or how do we decide between two potential things that we could be doing? And it's also what do I need to do to raise more money? Or it's I'm running out of money. What do I need to do? Or I'm in the process of raising money or being acquired. What do I do? I think those are the major questions.

• 15:48Harry Stebbings?

  And I want to move on to a second segment of the show, just discussing your own brand now as a as a V C with Y C and how you've approached the personal brand. So how important do you think a personal brand is for investors in today's environment?

• 16:03Speaker 02

  Well, I think investors have to have, you know, there's three qualities of investors that I or of investors or firms that I think are important in investing. I've thought about this a little bit. The first one is a platform that generates leads for them or reasons why people want their money, right? So an example could be me of like trying to put out a lot of advice on Snapchat, or it could be Sequoia having a really great or Y Combinator having a really great reputation and name. Or it could be something like Jason Lemkin, who just raised his seventy million dollar fund with Saster and he has a community that's all about a specific vertical, right? SaaS software. Number one is a reason why people want your money. The second thing is picking good companies with like based on a strong

• 16:48Speaker 02

  thesis. And the third, I think, is being relentless in pursuing companies. Once you've decided to like make sure that they take your money and not someone else's.

• 16:56Harry Stebbings?

  Do you find that's a problem with Y C though, it's such a strong brand. Is there ever competition that's kind of outperforms you?

• 17:04Speaker 02

  We're known as the best accelerator in the world. I think it's kind of like, well, it's a self fulfilling prophecy after a while, right? We have momentum and and great entrepreneurs come to us and so that reinforces the brand. And so, you know, I'd like to that say we can take all the credit for it. And I mean, I think there's a huge amount of credit and funding those early companies before it was a popular brand. And now we are lucky to have a position where many of the world's best entrepreneurs want to come to us. And we always work hard to try to find entrepreneurs that aren't coming to us and entrepreneurial communities that aren't coming to us yet. And figuring out how we can access them and get them to be part of Y Combinator.

• 17:40Harry Stebbings?

  And and then I want to just go back before we move into the quick find, just discuss your activity on Snapchat. Uh, why are you so bullish on the platform and what you'd like to amend or add to it?

• 17:51Speaker 02

  Snapchat, I started using about six months ago, mostly because I saw DJ Khalid. And I thought the Snapchat application had gotten a lot of things that we wanted to do at Justin TV in the very first iteration, right? Making it low friction for individuals to share content in a way that they actually wanted to. I think very few people have gotten and built a platform where people share very personal content. I was enthralled by that and so I started creating Snap stories. And then the thing people wanted to hear from me was mostly startup advice and advice on raising money and stuff like that. And so started doing that and I got a lot of good feedback. To be honest, I keep doing it because people keep telling me, oh, you know, I really loved your Snapchat story on this.

• 18:32Speaker 02

  It really helped motivate me. You know, I always talk, I talk a lot about fitness as well and and um, you know, how you have to like exercise in order to stay healthy and like be a good entrepreneur. And people will like text me their screenshots of their, you know, Strava app or their Fitbit, say how much they worked out, you know? It's like just a, there's a lot of positive reinforcement, I think. That's kind of incentivized me to keep doing it.

• 18:54Harry Stebbings?

  And what would you like, what would you like to add or amend? Say you're Evan Spiegel for the day. What would you change about Snapchat?

• 19:00Speaker 02

  If I were Evan Spiegel for the day, what would I change about Snapchat? I actually think, uh, the thing that Snapchat's missing the most is a way of discovering new accounts. At the same time, I actually think that might be intentional. I haven't really talked with any of their product people about it, but I I feel like it's almost better that there's no way of discovering accounts because then it doesn't dilute the attention from the followers you already have or that your actual friends, you know, people get like start following too many things on social media and then they like it dilutes the power of all of them, massive prisoner's dilemma or tragedy of the commons, right? And so maybe it's good that there's no discovery. I don't really know. Their product teams are like pretty good and they've really built a what I think is the most compelling product I've seen in the last ten years.

• 19:41Harry Stebbings?

  Well, maybe we should have Evan on the show and ask him. Uh, but but then I want to finish with a quick fire round. Uh, so I say a short statement and then you give me your immediate thoughts. How does that sound?

• 19:50Speaker 02

  All right.

• 19:51Harry Stebbings?

  So what's your

• 19:51Speaker 02

  Embarrass myself.

• 19:53Harry Stebbings?

  What's your favorite book and why?

• 19:55Speaker 02

  My favorite book is Shogun by James Clavell, which is the story of an adventurer, uh, like a ship's captain in sixteen hundred who's marooned on Japan. He's like an English ship's captain. It's cool. It's got everything, political intrigue, love story, very well written. And I actually use a lot of things I learned in the book in my business career. One of them is that you don't actually necessarily have to do anything. When you don't have a good decision, when you're faced between multiple bad decisions, maybe you should just do nothing and wait and see what happens.

• 20:22Harry Stebbings?

  Absolutely. And then I want to touch on the most impressive founder that you've seen or worked with.

• 20:27Speaker 02

  Uh, well, I mean, I think Parker Conrad comes to mind. I know that's probably not a popular answer at the moment. Given like when I I remember seeing him, I was a part-time partner at Y Combinator and he came for advice for me while he was in Y C and they had like only a few uh, customers, saw their product, which was benefits. And I was like, this is something I needed as a I need as a customer, right? When we were running our own companies, like explaining health insurance is always a pain in the ass. And so I immediately was like, you have to take my money right now. And he didn't actually want to. And then I like convinced him to just like take some angel investment from me at that moment, like the next day. And I'm really glad I did because, you know, the next time I saw him, the company was like eighty people and that was like six months later, like

• 21:09Speaker 02

  it was crazy how fast it was growing. He was just very aggressive on growth and, you know, they made a few missteps, but um. I I will always, I always think that he is like a very impressive founder and someone who is like relentlessly bent on growing his company.

• 21:25Harry Stebbings?

  So what's the future of Zenefits?

• 21:27Speaker 02

  Well, I mean, I hear very positive things from people who are there um about David Sacks and so I, you know, and he's also been a widely six, you know, hugely successful for her, so I I'm pretty positive on it, but I don't really know from the, you know, I don't have any inside information. At the core, they're solving a real problem, and so that's gonna be something that exists in some form.

• 21:48Harry Stebbings?

  And then what's your favorite blog or newsletter? What are your must reads when they come in?

• 21:52Speaker 02

  Favorite blog or newsletter? I mean, I use Nuzzle actually the most. Do you know about Nuzzle?

• 21:58Harry Stebbings?

  Yeah, we had Jonathan Abrahams on the show.

• 22:00Speaker 02

  Yeah, uh Jonathan's a friend of mine and I've been using it for a couple of years actually, and it's just gotten better and better. And I think that's like now my primary source outside of Hacker News. It's like Nuzzle and Hacker News are the must uh reads. Cause I know when Nuzzle sends me something, it's like something that it's like pretty good because it's been filtered by a lot of my friends. And so I find that I, it's kind of the highest hit rate, Nuzzle is probably. And then after that, probably the information. I really like the way they just email you the important articles and uh I think that that works pretty well as well. So that's my, you know, probably my second.

• 22:32Harry Stebbings?

  Well, good. We had Jessica on the show too, so that's a good uh coverage from us. Um and then what challenges you most to this day?

• 22:39Speaker 02

  I don't know if anything has changed very much. I love learning new things. I mean, the challenge for myself, I think, is that I I always love learning new things and learning about new industries and trying new stuff. And so I spend a lot of time exploring, I guess, and and um I hope I continue doing that. I don't know if that's a challenge. I guess I don't have any like horrible adversity anymore now that it's very easy being a VC. That's the truth.

• 23:02Harry Stebbings?

  Why why'd you say that?

• 23:04Speaker 02

  Cause you don't do any of the real work, you know, I like this is, I can, I s- I talk to founders all day and I give them my advice and they either do it or they don't do it. But at the end of the day, you know, I you don't have any control. And so you wait, see what happens. But it's not something like, as long as you have like an even temperament, you can't really get that stressed out about it. It's it's it's not useful to like, when you're, when you're an operator and and something's going wrong, well, then you'd better like go do something about it. When you're a VC and something's going wrong with one of the companies you invested in, well, you can try to help, but you can't really do that much. Uh yeah, as long as you are, you know, stoic about it, it's a pretty easy job.

• 23:38Harry Stebbings?

  Okay, no, that's a interesting perspective. Um, but and then I want to finish final question on the the next five years for you then. VC is an easy job and I presume you enjoy it with Y C. Uh, so is there a return to founding companies for you? Is it a upscaling at Y C? What's the future ahead for you?

• 23:58Speaker 02

  People ask me if I'm gonna start another company all the time and um I like to give say, you know, kind of basically tell the story that I about. This time I met these entrepreneurs who were all, you know, army veterans. They're all military, US military veterans. And they came by Y C, it was a group of them, and they were asking me, are you gonna start another company? I was like, well, you know, the way I think about it is. Um, I, the way I'd ask you if you would go back to the army, right? Like, you probably love the army, you probably learned a lot, you got thrown in the deep end, it was like challenging, but you made great friends, you struggled through adversity and you had a great experience, you wouldn't trade it for the world. But when I ask, if I asked you, are you gonna go back to the army? You'd probably all be like, fuck, no, I'm never going back to the army. That's kind of, that's how I feel about startups.

• 24:42Harry Stebbings?

  So you want to be in VC for the rest of your life?

• 24:44Speaker 02

  We'll see, I don't know. I don't want to promise anything, because I said I would, the last time I said something for the rest of my life, I said I'd wear a webcam for the rest of my life and uh, I don't, I don't think that.

• 24:54Harry Stebbings?

  And now you have.

• 24:54Speaker 02

  Clearly that didn't.

• 24:55Harry Stebbings?

  Now you have Snapchat. I mean, it's just an evolution.

• 24:58Speaker 02

  Yeah, I'm, I'm not doing anything for the rest of my life.

• 25:01Harry Stebbings?

  Well, Justin, it's been absolutely fantastic having you on the show today. Thank you so much for joining me today.

• 25:06Speaker 02

  No problem.

• 25:09Harry Stebbings?

  So fantastic to hear from Justin there and so grateful to him for giving up his time to be on the show. Not entirely sure about the VC being easy, but everyone has their difference of opinion, I guess. But if you would like to follow Justin or I on Snapchat, you can all do this by adding at H Stebbings on Snapchat and at Justin Khan on Snapchat. Likewise, you can sign up to our newsletter so you never have to miss an episode or an update from us on the twenty minute V C dot com. But talking of updates, do you ever feel like your branding and design could do with a refresh? Well, that's where Design Crowd could come in. With their five hundred thousand registered designers, they have the ability to completely refresh and update your branding, whether it be business cards. Logo design, site design, hey, they even do T-shirts and billboards.

• 25:53Harry Stebbings?

  All you have to do is launch a project, then wait for the designers to submit their incredible designs, traditionally about sixty to a hundred designs per project. And then you can choose your favorites. The designers will then send them to you, and from start to finish, it takes only three days, avoiding the long wait times and exorbitant agencies that mostly persist the design industry. So head over to designcrowd.com/VC and enter the promo code VC100 for an incredible $100 off. And I want to say a huge thank you for tuning in today. I so appreciate all your support and am very forward to bringing you our episode on Wednesday.