Pod Insights Equity Podcast Tiger's den of due diligence About this episode Hello and welcome back to Equity, a podcast about the business of startups where we unpack the numbers and nuance behind the headlines! This is our Friday show, a roundup of the week's biggest and most fascinating stories from startups, venture capital and technology.
Natasha and Alex along with Grace and Chris had to cut and cut and cut to get the show to fit this week, so if we didn't get to your favorite story, we wanted to. We just ran out of space!
Here's the rundown:
Twitter Blue: Natasha is not sold, but Alex is all-in on Twitter's new subscription service. What does it include? What do we hope it adds? We have it all for you.
Seasoned raised $18.7 million for its frontline worker app and matching service, You.com raised $20 million to continue taking on Google's search hegemony, and Helsing.ai raised a huge pile of money for reasons that we like, even if the details of what it intends to do are still a little vague.
INDIAN EDTECH
Tiger Global's investing rush. Thanks to an act of journalism by our Twitter friend Sar Haribhakti, we had fresh perspective on just how the startup investing community is handling Tiger's race to win growth-stage investing. The Information has more, as does FT and Crunchbase News,
And then we were out of minutes! Don't worry, however, Equity is back Monday morning!
Credits: Equity is produced by Theresa Loconsolo with editing by Kell. Bryce Durbin is our Illustrator. We'd also like to thank the audience development team and Henry Pickavet, who manages TechCrunch audio products.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Transcript 0:10 Speaker 00 Hello and welcome back to Equity, a podcast all about the business of startups, where we unpack the numbers and the nuance behind the headlines. My name is Alex. This is Friday. This is our news roundup show and I am joined by my bestie Natasha Moskorenas. Natasha, hello. Happy nearly end of the week. How are you doing?
0:25 Speaker 01 I'm doing good. I had Friendsgiving last night. My dish was a hit, so I can't complain.
0:30 Speaker 00 What did you make? Because I have to ask.
0:32 Speaker 01 I made, I made mac and cheese, which I like realized midway through the cooking process has a lot of pressure around it.
0:38 Speaker 00 It does.
0:38 Speaker 01 I did like an Indian fusion on it, though. So, a little bit of a gamble. Are you celebrating this year?
0:44 Speaker 00 Am I celebrating Friendsgiving? I don't know. I am celebrating Thanksgiving because I like to eat and any excuse to put pie into my face will always be good. And you made vegetarian mac and cheese, not vegan mac and cheese, right?
0:55 Speaker 01 Oh, yeah, totally vegetarian.
0:57 Speaker 00 Because I've had various vegan cheeses and let me just say to all my vegan friends out there, y'all wildin'. Alright, this is Equity, not the Cooking Channel. So, we are going to riff on a great number of things, including the launch of Twitter Blue and why I am very excited about it. We have funding rounds from seasonedu.com and hellzine.ai. I know that's not about vampires, amazingly enough. Then we're going to talk about ed tech in India, questions about MBAs, and I would just go and say certification or kind of like the status symbol that comes with certain diplomas. We're going to riff on Tiger, bring up one of our Twitter best friends, really, and a great thread that taught us quite a lot about what the definition of journalism really is. And then finally, Robin Hood, a breach, crypto volatility, and kind of like making money off of trading incomes.
1:39 Speaker 00 It's going to be a real hit of a show. But first, Natasha, Twitter Blue, are you paying for it to start?
1:44 Speaker 01 Not yet, but I think I'm going to be convinced by the end of this episode, since like all of my cool friends have already forked up their $3 a month for Twitter's subscription service.
1:54 Speaker 00 Yeah. So if you haven't heard about Twitter Blue, it is a Twitter subscription service. It costs in America $2.99 per month, $2.99, since not $299, I should specify. Could be true. It's a low-cost monthly service and it brings to you a variety of currently small tweaks to the Twitter experience. You can change the icon, you can change the theme color, you can have a pause before your tweet goes out to make sure that it's spelled correctly, things like that, Natasha. Nothing that's individually fantastic, but in aggregate to me seems kind of impressive. So, tell the people why you're on the fence about coughing up 2/3 of 1 Americano per month for Twitter.
2:29 Speaker 01 I will say it's mostly out of laziness for this point and not being entirely sure what Twitter Blue's experience is. It feels like it's a little bit like the things people would pay for if they're super fans of Twitter and use it every day, all day, AKA you and me.
2:43 Speaker 00 Yeah, I was gonna say.
2:44 Speaker 01 You obviously have subscribed to a few of our team members have too. I'm wondering, like, who else is the target user? Like, who else is interested in all of these little features for now?
2:54 Speaker 00 Yeah, no, it's a great question, one that I've been chewing on. A thing that I didn't bring up that it does have, though, is an agreement with a couple dozen publications to provide an ad-free experience. Now, critically, ad-free experience does not mean past the paywall. And so you could actually get an ad-free note from a publication telling you that you can't read it. But if you are inside of your free article limit, you can see things. To me, this is more potential than reality as a product. Like, I'm stoked to see Twitter building quickly, building in public, trying new models, and a wide number of things. They didn't just build two features and say, pay them. Like, there's even a lab feature in there with, like, here's some wild stuff we're tinkering with, like, 10-minute video uploads and stuff like that. I think you're right, though. Who is it for? It needs a killer
3:36 Speaker 00 feature, I think, to reach mass market scale. And I think that, like, the impossible white whale of Twitter Blue is always going to be paywall access. If you could get to read more publications on Twitter without paywalls, I think, even though I subscribe to everything, I'm always logged out. Even for me, that would be an enormous benefit.
3:54 Speaker 01 And it seems like they are starting to build relationships with news teams, so maybe they'll one day experiment with that. I really liked, I think I saw on The Verge article, that they're going to be giving a portion of revenue from Twitter Blue subscriptions to sites that they are linking to with those ad-free articles. So I was like, okay, there's a bone. There's some money out here for news.
4:12 Speaker 00 Yeah, Twitter Blue team, by the way, I follow some of you on Twitter. If you want to give TechCrunch a bunch of money, we're probably up for that. So [email protected] with the check and we'll hook you up. All right. We'll have more on Twitter Blue as it comes along, but fun to see subscription products inside of social media. There's a lot to say about there down the road, but for today, we'll put it aside. Let's talk funding rounds. We have three from a very diverse set of perspectives this morning, starting off with seasoned, which Natasha is not aimed at technology workers or venture capitalists, but is instead actually aimed at regular folks.
4:43 Speaker 01 Yeah, so this app is really built for, I would say, a pre-pandemic problem, which is restaurant hiring. It's always been really hard to keep talent and to get talent in the door in the first place because hourly workers have tough jobs and they're not always treated the best. Seeing some startups like Seasoned, which just raised 18.7 million in a Series A, led by Horizons Ventures, building an app for employee networking and recruitment, felt, you know, if not late, very much needed in this current moment.
5:13 Speaker 00 Yeah, totally. And so what they built is kind of a two-sided marketplace. On one side, you have regular workers, people that might pick up shifts, might be looking for a new gig at a service industry position. And then on the other side, you have actual like restaurant managers. And of course, the people who are paying for this are not the workers. It's the restaurants themselves who want to have access to, I presume, the labor pool and the tools built into it. I'll just say that like, when you think about your friends that work in the service industry, they often like just text, trade shifts, get coverage and that sort of thing. I think that like text is the non-enterprise version of like, oh, we're still doing it in Excel. Like, if a company is doing something in Excel, they should build software for it. And if people in the IRL world are using text, build them an app. And so to me, this really
5:56 Speaker 00 fits thematically into like the idea of making more digital products for more folks.
6:00 Speaker 01 This recruitment being mobile-based is important because employees will talk over texts is that they don't have company-issued email addresses. They are more on the go and a little bit more disconnected than you or me, who has a company email address. So I think like, there was one other startup I covered a while ago called WorkStream. And their whole pitch is that we're going to be a text-based platform for recruitment. So I find it that it's both like, you need to disrupt the fact that people are still texting about it because that's just messy. But it's also like, meeting people where they are. So I would love to see Seasoned, I don't know, talk more about that, or at least make sure that they're getting people who don't have the time to download an app and join a community about restaurants.
6:38 Speaker 00 Also, it kind of precludes people that may not have a smartphone. I know it's a dwindling percentage of the population, but there is a, an access and equity component there. But I'll just say that Seasoned is not alone in pursuing building software for hourly workers, frontline workers, you might call them. Fountain put together an $85 million Series C, WorkStream, $48 million Series B, and also ByteNinja, which is a company I forgot to look up actually before the show, so my bad on my prep there. But thematically startups are working on this. And I'll also just say, several years ago, Microsoft's Teams product began to focus more on frontline workers. And at the time, I was kind of like, eh. And now, looking back, it kind of feels prescient to a degree. Like, people now need more code, more places.
7:19 Speaker 01 I wonder why it didn't work then? Or I don't know if I can go as far as saying it didn't work, but like, why, why didn't we see this happen earlier, do you think?
7:26 Speaker 00 Oh, I think it's because venture capitalists, like everyone else, like everyone else, have not a recency bias, but like a proximity bias. Like, you know, why, why are there so many email apps and productivity services funded? It's because VCs have too many emails and too many small, discreet tasks. This is why there's always going to be a startup out there for like virtual EAs, right? Because VCs need that.
7:49 Speaker 01 Yeah.
7:49 Speaker 00 VCs probably don't know that many people who bring food to folks for money.
7:54 Speaker 01 That's a great point. Like, I remember I talked to like this lawn care startup and they were like, yeah, like, we're kind of impressed that VC's back desk, given the fact that they probably don't have lawns or they don't take care of their own lawn.
8:05 Speaker 00 But VCs have a lot of experience interacting with the point person for the lawn care company that they do use.
8:11 Speaker 01 So there's some argument there.
8:12 Speaker 00 I'm sure we could probably, we could back our way into it. Anyways, next up is you.com. And Natasha, I know that I've bored you on Slack and on the show with my various complaints about Google's search product, my excitement about new search, uh, competing services, if you will. So I'm curious, what were your first impressions about you.com and are you optimistic?
8:32 Speaker 01 You know, it took me a while to understand how they were different from some of the new search competitors. It is like a more organized and different way of presenting search results on your screen. I mean, I know this may have been somewhat a marketing move, but I was really interested in the fact that they're not going to be displaying results vertically down your screen, but instead doing it in pods connected to apps that you use. So I'm going to try explaining this well to everyone who's listening, but Alex, please feel free to add on right after. The example they give in the story is like, okay, we're looking up Thanksgiving side dishes. They know that Natasha really likes to use Yelp and Reddit as like her two sources when thinking about food. So I'll type it in and then like a bunch of Yelp results will come
9:14 Speaker 01 up and a bunch of Reddit results will come up and then some regular web pages will come up. Does that feel like that's a pretty good response?
9:20 Speaker 00 I would say it's a different way to organize search, as we brought up. It's more of a horizontal scrolling than a vertical scrolling, focused on apps, focused on bringing things in that are displayed in any kind of a new way. And I don't know if I like it, but I am playing with it.
9:34 Speaker 01 Okay.
9:35 Speaker 00 It's too soon. I mean, like I used Neva, which competes with you.com and Google and others for a couple of months before I kind of had a real impression of it. Because Natasha, one thing that people probably don't know about us is that you and I are power Googlers. We're looking stuff up all the time. And so like my search load is very high. And so I need to kind of like get enough total time in to figure out the edge cases. And one thing that I found with Neva is that for a great number of things, and probably for most people, Neva, of course, competing search engine, raised a bunch of money, their idea is to charge a monthly fee, but Neva was not as good at edge cases for me. And so if I needed to find a specific article that I wrote in 2013, and I remembered one word from the headline, I ended up kind of defaulting back to Google. You.com so far kind of a
10:20 Speaker 00 similar set of issues, but I like the take on the interface change and I'm glad Google has more competition.
10:24 Speaker 01 That's a great argument. I mean, I feel like you would be the kind of place I go for a very specific set of needs, maybe more like creatively, or just not for our jobs, or not for like the casual Google search, which is probably not great news for them now that you say it.
10:38 Speaker 00 Well, no, I disagree ever so slightly with that. I think for most folks, a more visual, less old school interface for search might be popular. I can see that being, being useful, frankly. I just think that you and I are effectively required power users of search. And so what we need is the absolute best search experience and we can kind of dive past Google's myriad ad blocks and make it work. But the news story here is that they raised $20 million and that was by Time Ventures, Salesforce, and also this was news to me, Mark Benioff's private venture fund.
11:09 Speaker 01 Wait, yeah, I was like, is that like a double, double, doubling, doubling down? Like what?
11:14 Speaker 00 Well, I mean, Salesforce Ventures is distinct from Mark Benioff's checkbook. I mean, not, it's not, it's not three degrees of separation, maybe like one degree, but like, you know, there, there is a difference.
11:23 Speaker 01 Yeah, a little bit.
11:25 Speaker 00 Just a little bit.
11:25 Speaker 01 I wrote that down too, though, to bring up. I was like, are we sure that that's a thing? Like, I want a name and a website. Why did Mark not try and become like an emerging fund manager and give us the exclusive on it?
11:36 Speaker 00 I think if you already like, at a certain level of wealth, I mean, I, right?
11:42 Speaker 01 You're just our venture fund. Like, you don't get asked.
11:45 Speaker 00 You have your own team at that point. And so like, yeah, I believe the polite phrase is family office.
11:52 Speaker 01 Okay, well said. One other note on you.com. We haven't even unpacked their name, which I'm really curious, like, what you think about it. I've been watching the show you. So when I saw this, I was kind of like, whoa.
12:03 Speaker 00 I like the name, hate the logo, but also, you know, Google is named after a number they misspelled and it had a weird logo to begin with, too. So I'm not going to be overly censorious about the, the actual design. You.com is short, memorable, easy to type in. It's fine. Neva is phonetic, short, easy to type in. It's fine. Brave Search, a little bit less so. Duck, duck, go. Phonetic, hard to type in, yet memorable, so probably okay. Yeah, I did generally positive, I guess is what I'd say.
12:29 Speaker 01 I just love that we have like a search king on the show, like someone who cares so much about search, because it's just something that's going to be fun to track. Like, I feel like it's, a lot of people are too lazy, AKA me, that I'll just go to Google. But like, this is making me at least rethink if I should put all my energy into that one site.
12:46 Speaker 00 So like, I remember the pre-Google days. Like, I remember AltaVista Search. I remember, I think like mama.com was the search engine. And like, you would have these various search products before Google took over the world. And they were all kind of median bad. Like, Ask Jeeves was an actual search engine people used for search back in the day. Like, if you go back in time far enough.
13:03 Speaker 01 Okay.
13:04 Speaker 00 And so, we had this period of time when no one did that. And then we owned one search engine. And now, thanks to Microsoft pouring money into Bing for a long time until it began to make money, there is kind of a core search layer that products like Neva, and I think some of the others are also using to kind of flesh out their early vanilla results.
13:19 Speaker 01 Yeah.
13:19 Speaker 00 And then doing variations and tweaks on top of that. So, overall, I'm bullish. I think Google needs competition. So, I'm glad to see it. Now, the hard bit of the show is going to be the next three minutes. So, if the quality of commentary declines, it's because we care about this, and it matters, but we're slightly confused. So, Natasha, Daniel Eek, of course, the co-founder of Spotify, one of the best-known, I would say, European technology entrepreneurs ever, is putting 100 million euro into a defense startup called helsing.ai. Do you want to take a stab at explaining this, or do you want me to stumble through it?
13:53 Speaker 01 I'll do the high level, which is that helsing.ai is planning to bring like, a more ethical use case of AI to the world. And a lot of its focus on like, what data it will be aggregating is meant to boost defense and national security amongst democracies. And the goal is, like, I was, we were talking about this before the show, is like, let's help these democracies become more efficient, use live data, and be able to protect themselves, or at least have a competitive edge over other types of governments out there. Does that feel okay?
14:24 Speaker 00 Yeah, absolutely. There is a slight gap in my comprehension between the data collection that helsing.ai is discussing, and sensors, and how that aggregates into a bucket of data that then helps democracies. But I do think, generally speaking, what they're working on is cool, and certainly not very well-funded. We have a quote from CEO, co-founder, Rael. And they said that they founded housing because they had this conviction that liberal democratic values are worth defending. Agreed. And that AI will be an essential capability to keep us safe. Agreed. And that they also think that, you know, because we're not living in authoritarian countries, that liberal democracies have this kind of special responsibility, which is the use of technology in a transparent and kind of guided fashion. So, all of that works for me.
15:09 Speaker 00 I have no idea what it actually does per se, but like all the high level commentary matches my politics. I like to imagine that I can own the label of anti-authoritarian and anti-fascist.
15:21 Speaker 01 Hundred percent.
15:22 Speaker 00 So yay.
15:25 Speaker 01 But no, yeah, I hear you. Like, I think the only like other details that I've been able to like clutch on to that makes sense about this company is that it's using data from multiple sensors on vehicles and systems. I'm guessing around the areas that they will be trying to protect or enable with more data. And they're going to be trying to provide a better view of an operational environment. One example that they gave was like, they'll help a government figure out how to do a live scenario of a cyber attack or more kinetic scenarios. Does this just mean like terrorist attacks?
15:54 Speaker 00 Kinetic scenario. Yeah. Kinetic scenarios is the meat space of cybersecurity, I think, is how we should think about that. Are we under attack, though? Like, are you like, what are these kinetic scenarios? And the only real wars that I know about between like major, you know, democracies and authoritarian groups aside from like, I don't know, Ukraine, Russia is like India, China and their border disputes.
16:13 Speaker 01 Yeah, no, fair. I mean, imagine being in like a clubhouse room with the founders of this company. Like, I feel like they feel like they are part of like a secret spy network. This is like the most, probably the most unique slash confusing company we've had on the show all year.
16:28 Speaker 00 Who paid you $5 to say clubhouse on the show again?
16:31 Speaker 01 Oh, my God, you're so right. As I said it, I was like, I meant Twitter Spaces, but I already gave Twitter attention earlier, so I have to.
16:36 Speaker 00 No, it's fine. Clubhouse is a cool product. I mean, actually, Clubhouse is finding, if I recall my stats, quite a large audience, actually, in India. And so we've seen it do well there. So we gently mock its valuation, but perhaps it'll be a long-term win. Anyways, that's our quote take on helsing.ai, a company that is well-funded by very important people. I think we'll just say, we'll see how it works out.
16:58 Speaker 01 Yes, perfect, perfect.
17:00 Speaker 00 Okay.
17:00 Speaker 01 Perfect kicker.
17:01 Speaker 00 Now, we're going to talk actually more about India oddly enough, and we're going to talk about India from an ed tech perspective, but not from a straight up like after school tutoring thing. Natasha, we're going to start by talking about the MBA market, which I know about from the US perspective, but not as much from the Indian perspective.
17:17 Speaker 01 Yeah. So I mean, in India, there are two options. If you want to get MBA or just higher business education, you can either come to the United States or you can go to the Indian School of Business, ISB. And so SOA School, a startup I interviewed this week, is trying to create the alternative MBA for people within India. It's a six month program, and it's all about trying to upscale folks who want to pursue a higher education, but don't necessarily need to go the accredited route, instead want to just kind of jump into the world of tech, which people here preach this idea that you don't need credentials, you just need to understand and have expertise in an area. So that's kind of SOA's bet. And it was honestly really interesting to write about.
17:56 Speaker 00 One thing that I think a misnomer is that we call business school, business school here in the US, when based on all of my friends that have gone through it and some family members at, I mean, just variously Stanford and Harvard, just to pick a couple. It seems to mostly be a networking phenomena coupled to modest coursework. And so like, if we all kind of agree, wink, wink, that business school isn't the most rigorous thing, why does it need to be 24 months? Why does it need to be so expensive? Why isn't it more tactical, short term, and something you can do on the weekends? Like, to me, SOA's model makes sense.
18:28 Speaker 01 Hundred percent. So they said their estimate is that on average, students will spend 12 hours a week, three weeks a month with the program, with most of that programming, as you mentioned, on the weekend, which I think is great for accessibility. And then it's also cheaper. The MBA course is priced at $3,400. Majority of students pay upfront. And interestingly enough, the co-founder originally was trying to do like a Lambda School model for India, but he pivoted because he realized that ISA infrastructure within the country was not developed enough, which I think was smart, because obviously, we've seen even in the US, where people claim that the ISA structure is mature enough to do, to build a company around, it is difficult to execute on.
19:07 Speaker 00 If you don't know what an ISA is, we have talked about this on the show. So feel free to rewind to when we riffed all about, well, Lambda School and kind of that entire saga. We're not going to get back into it. To put that number of $3,400 into contrast, what I've done is I've pulled up Chicago Booth's MBA price page. And I'm picking on Booth because it's attached to my undergraduate university, University of Chicago, and I've taken several classes at Booth while I was an undergrad. So I've actually been in the building and sat in the weird hemispheric rooms and done businessy things. Oh, let's, let's just, let's play my favorite game. Natasha.
19:43 Speaker 01 Oh, no.
19:44 Speaker 00 What is their estimated cost of attendance for Chicago Booth for one year, inclusive of transcript fees and books and housing and tuition? Like, what's the estimated one year cost out of two years?
19:55 Speaker 01 So I guess, I think 90K.
19:57 Speaker 00 90K is too low. It's 112,000.
20:00 Speaker 01 Look, I was gonna guess 100K, but.
20:02 Speaker 00 Yeah. So that means that it's gonna cost you, they expect $224,000 post-tax money to go to a two-year institution that's mostly about networking and maybe learning some business concepts. That's insane.
20:16 Speaker 01 It's insane.
20:16 Speaker 00 It's insane. If your employer isn't paying for that, you're getting fucked and you can bleep that. Like, I mean, that's just ridiculous. And what it is, is really just a credential that you can say you went to. So that way you can basically get a plus one level at your iBanking job. Huzzah. Useless, archaic, old fashioned, backwards, my God. So Stoa being focused on more tactical things makes good sense to me. But there is another company in India that's doing very interesting things, which is Bright Champs. And if MBAs are for old people, Bright Champs is for the kids.
20:45 Speaker 01 So Bright Champs has been valued at narrowly 500 million. Only a year after being founded, it just came out of stealth mode, and they're trying to kind of fill in the gaps within K through 12 schools that are leaving kids without learning stuff like programming or just beyond Excel, how to interact with technology and organize data and think about data. I was really excited about seeing a company so explicitly hold children to a higher standard when it comes to tech skills.
21:11 Speaker 00 Yeah, those kids, so lazy, just ridiculous. I was on the Bright Champs website just while we were prepping for the show. And one thing that I really dug was that they were doing things like scientific simulation. They were letting you build real circuits and also kind of like to map out circuits digitally. And so a lot of the hands-on stuff that I think really fits well into the, the, the technical world, because it's great to write code, but I think how you do a more holistic view of. How technology works would be super useful. One lucky thing that I had in my youth was a very mechanical minded dad. And so he made us like do a lot of stuff, like build things.
21:44 Speaker 01 Okay.
21:44 Speaker 00 Like we built it with a little cannon, you know, stuff like that. And like, it was really helpful to my understanding of just how things worked. And so I love seeing this kind of like building block instruction for kids because it's going to be accretive to the rebel educational experience. I dig it. I don't know why it's worth a half billion dollars, but like it's cool.
22:01 Speaker 01 I think both companies, both Stoa School and Bright Champs are arguments against stereotypes that are somewhat true of the Indian culture, right? Like people think that the Indian culture is focused on credentials, degrees, test scores, and understanding math and science. And I think both of these startups are showing at least alternative attempts on how we value the routes that people take to get that kind of comprehension, which is a win in my book. India definitely may still be ways away from viewing ISB degree from a Stoa School degree, but the fact that there is even interest in something like this is like a shift of some kind.
22:37 Speaker 00 Yeah, totally. I mean, America definitely not focused on credentialism, expensive higher education and STEM, not at all. But you're right, that is a stereotype about about modern Indian education culture. But I think what we're seeing here is chipping away at that similar set of biases around the world, in this case from Indian context, but I think we're also seeing this in and around the world because YC is effectively a degree in startups, if you will, for lack of a better phrase, and more and more folks are going through YC. We joke about the class sizes or the cohort sizes over there, but in reality, they're getting a lot more folks through YC and teaching them a certain way of thought. So you can think about that kind of as a school component, although no school makes as much money as YC. It's the single best and most profitable school of all time.
23:18 Speaker 01 No, you're so right. Like YC has shown us that we can scale something like Signal and a fake credential, fake, I mean, in like the nicest sense of like, it's not a Harvard degree, right? I feel like YC gives hope, but I don't know. I feel like the diversity is another thing that I'm like, just worried about here. Like Stoa is 75% men. I would love to see that not be a thing going forward if there are going to be alternatives, routes to education too.
23:40 Speaker 00 Yeah, I mean, in their defense, it isn't like MBAs have been historically super diverse.
23:44 Speaker 01 No.
23:45 Speaker 00 No.
23:45 Speaker 01 But if you're going to make accessibility part of your pitch.
23:48 Speaker 00 Absolutely. No, I'm agreeing with you, but I'm also saying they're not starting from an equal playing field and making it worse. They're starting from a pretty uneven, inequitable environment and trying to improve it, which is going to be a long and hard process.
24:00 Speaker 01 Totally.
24:02 Speaker 00 Let's go ahead and move on to a different, not long and hard process, but a short, fast process, because that is how Tiger cuts checks. It writes them a hot and fast, rapid fire deal making. It's essentially the machine gun of capital. It is the arsenal of investment. What the fuck is going on with Tiger?
24:17 Speaker 01 Oh, my God. I remember when, maybe like this was like the earliest of when I was on the show, like there was like this conversation we were having about like the future of SoftBank. And I was like, isn't Tiger just doing it all over again? And I think I was completely wrong in thinking that because it's clear now that like, while Tiger, similarly to SoftBank, is doing a lot of fast checks, based on a recent Twitter thread by our friend, Sar Harabakhti, Tiger puts a lot of effort into the checks. I mean, something like 100 hours a week, thanks to these beautiful, beautiful Wall Street DNA transplants. So I was a little surprised, honestly, about getting that so wrong, Alex.
24:54 Speaker 00 I think you're being unkind to yourself and overly generous to how everyone thinks about Tiger. So Sar, our Twitter friend, an occasional debate partner, and where is he? He worked at Slice and then he was at OnDeck. And where is Sar now?
25:08 Speaker 01 I think he's at OnDeck still, but.
25:10 Speaker 00 Well, Sar, tell us where you work. And then we'll drag you on the show and then we'll beat you over the head with pillows. It'll be fun. Sar basically asked a bunch of people what Tiger's deal making is like on the ground. And he put together this great Twitter thread. We have it in the show notes. You can go ahead and find it through us if you want. And people were talking about how fast they're going about things. And so I wanted to expand my understanding of this. So I went through and read a couple of profiles of Tiger from this year. Kate Clark, former host of the show, had one for the information. I also read one from FT and Crunchbase News had a long dive into their kind of investment cadence. People are trying to figure out if Tiger is insane or brilliant. And when it came to the Vision Fund One, it turned out the answer was both. Some of Vision Fund One's deals ended up being incredibly lucrative. Just to give you an example, DoorDash did
25:54 Speaker 00 great. And then some of its deals, Didi did not. And so kind of a mixed bag. Tiger's track record is stronger historically, though there have been some missteps, including some investments made in Brazil that were a little bit early, it appears. And also, they put a bunch of money into Jewel. And despite my best efforts to ensure that that transaction was profitable, it wasn't. I don't know where all my individual incremental investments into Jewel's business went, but it's not clear. Perhaps they went quote, quote, "up in smoke."
26:20 Speaker 01 Oh, no.
26:21 Speaker 00 I couldn't, I couldn't.
26:23 Speaker 01 You had to. I'm proud of you.
26:25 Speaker 00 Anyways, Natasha, the argument is that Tiger does prediligence, that they do all this intellectual work ahead of time. How convinced are you by that argument?
26:33 Speaker 01 I actually am pretty convinced because a lot of that work is being done by Bain consultants. If you can outsource people to do the really hard work of due diligence and build up a story of where a start, a potential investment can go, I can totally see that working. My friend works at a VC firm and they're about to make an investment and they just planned this startup's entire future business strategy, partnerships, like all this stuff. And I was like, maybe this is more, I guess it gave me like more intel into how deals are done because they weren't just writing them a check. They were being like, we have these six relationships with these six partners. And if you, if they all say yes, you will have this revenue. I don't know, maybe I'm just late.
27:13 Speaker 00 No, so, so the way this kind of works out is Tiger shows up to you and says, look, we've contracted McKinsey, we've done a bunch of diligence. Here's where we think you should go as a company. We'll write you a large check within, you know, 48 hours or whatever, at a very high valuation, and then we'll leave you alone. We don't need a board seat. We're not going to be up in your business. We're not going to show up and eat your salads like most VCs do at board meetings. So that's, the pitch is very strong for founders because they get fast money, they get repriced and they get left alone. My contention, and this is just me being essentially stand-in negative Nancy for Danny because he's banned the dust. If you just pay a bunch of consultants to do your diligence, how good is your diligence? Because I don't think consultants are intellectually independent. I think they can come to whatever conclusion you want. I could do that for you.
27:58 Speaker 00 I could write you a memo that says anything you want. I don't care. You know, if I'm just doing it for the consulting hours, who gives a shit? So to me, I bet they kind of get to consensus and then kind of make the paperwork fit in. Our producer, Chris Gates, makes a point that, you know, it's better than no diligence. But that's not, in my humble view, the point. Because who does no diligence?
28:19 Speaker 01 A lot of VCs, I feel like, are technically do no diligence in terms of how fast they feel the pressure to keep up with the other investors in the market. But I agree with your point that like, it can be easily replicated. Like, if someone else chose to do the same strategy and put the same money in, like, that is pretty, you can steal that. But I'm also like, why has no one else done it if it's that easy? Why is no one else winning as many deals as Tiger?
28:41 Speaker 00 Well, I mean, I think the old idea was that VCs would do one or two deals a year, right? And because that's how many boards you could sit on. And that was kind of the cycle of investments and so forth. But like, you know, one of the quotes from Sarah's Twitter thread is like, had a one-hour call with Tiger, had a term sheet from them the same day by end of day. And then, I love this quote, "There are no BS to the point, unlike most of the vanilla VCs." And I was like, vanilla VCs there works for two different reasons at the same time. The last thing I'll say about Tiger as a general investment group is that it is predicated. Strategy is predicated on software multiple staying very, very high because they are prepaying for quite a lot of growth. And there are some risks to that. At the same time, the last 10 years have been up into the right for software valuation. So at least from that trend, it makes a lot of sense.
29:26 Speaker 00 Natasha, we have to go. Apparently, we've yammered through our entire time. I'll just say this, interesting times in the world of venture. We have a 100 million euro deal into a company we can understand. We have people attacking ed tech in one country from like 17 different perspectives. And we have Tiger, who has a $100 million check for everyone with two feet. It's a fun time to be in our little, in our chairs.
29:46 Speaker 01 It's like a nice time to be challenged, too. Like, this was a challenging show, and I'm glad we did it anyway.
29:50 Speaker 00 Yeah, there's so much to learn. I just got off a long call with a crypto founder in Switzerland, in which I had to have explained to me a bunch of new acronyms. And I was like, why am I always the dumbest person on a call? But if I am, then I'm probably on the right phone calls. Anyways, guys, that's equity. We're back Monday morning, hugs and goodbye.
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