Pod Insights The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch 20 VC 094: Kanyi Maqubela @ Collaborative Fund on Rocketships, Feedback Loops and Turning Lemons Into Lemonade! About this episode Kanyi Maqubela is a Partner at Collaborative Fund, who have made investments in AngelList, CodeAcademy, AltSchool, Reddit, Task Rabbit just to name a few. On a more personal note, and a little background on Kanyi, he is originally from Johannesburg South Africa, and was a founding employee at Doostang, a venture-backed peer-to-peer career marketplace, he attended Stanford University and as Kanyi states his most meaningful and difficult work done so far is his work on the Obama Campaign in 2008. You can checkout Kanyi's blog here! I would like to thank Mattermark for providing all the data and analysis for this interview and you can check them out here! CLICK TO PLAY In Today's Episode You Will Learn: 1.) How Kanyi made the move into VC and tech from South Africa? 2.) Was the decision to leave Stanford tough? Why would Kanyi advise others to say in school? What was so tough about the startup experience for Kanyi? 3.) What is the investing thesis at Collaborative Fund? What stage do you prefer? Average cheque size? Sector preference? Does specializing in themes result in higher returns? 4.) How is it being such a young partner in the industry? What are the challenges Kanyi has face? Does Kanyi think his age acts as a disadvantage when it comes to attracting older founders? 5.) What are Kanyi's personal marketing strategies that he uses to establish his own personal brand? What platforms are most effective? 6.) How effective does Kanyi find demo days and hackathons as source of deal flow? Are there any tips Kanyi would suggest to maximise their utility? What is Collaborative's most effective form of deal sourcing today? Items Mentioned In Today's Episode: Kanyi's Fave Book: The Brothers Karamazov Kanyi's Most Recent Investment: CircleUp As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Kanyi on Twitter here! If you would like to see a more colourful side to Harry with many a mojito session, you can follow him on Instagram here!
Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:00 Harry Stebbings? We are back with the 20 Minute VC. I'm your host, Harry Stebbings, and today I'm so thrilled to welcome an incredible guest to the show in the form of Kanye Makubela, partner at Collaborative Fund, who have the most phenomenal portfolio. Literally, I do not know where to start. They've made investments in the likes of Angel List, Code Academy, Old School, Reddit, and TaskRabbit, just to name a few. And on a more personal note, and a little background on Kanye, he is originally from Johannesburg in South Africa, and was a founding employee at Doostang, a venture-backed peer-to-peer career marketplace. He also attended Stanford University, and as Kanye states, his most meaningful and
0:39 Harry Stebbings? difficult work done so far is his work on the Obama campaign in 2008. And today's a fantastic episode discussing all things from young partners in VC, startup exits, and the intricacies of seed investing. I'd also like to thank Matamark today, who have provided all the data and analysis for the show. Always the best, and you can find them on www.matamark.com. And a little personal tip is to follow Nick Frost at @matamark on Twitter, @thinker, for amazing startup advice and VC articles and posts. But before we dive into the interview today with Kanye, we have an exclusive for 20 Minute VC listeners
1:20 Harry Stebbings? from the kind folks at Law Trades. They are offering a free 20-minute strategy session with a top-rated attorney, where you can get your legal questions answered and receive free, comprehensive legal advice for your business. This is perfect for entrepreneurs and startup founders, and they can help with anything from incorporating your business to raising a round of funding. So head over to www.lawtrades.com to check them out, or sign up to our newsletter on www.thetwenty minute vcd.com to receive the newsletter, which will contain all the links back to Law Trades. But back to today's show, and
1:59 Harry Stebbings? it gives me great pleasure to welcome the man himself, Kanye Maqubela, partner at Collaborative Fund.
2:12 Speaker 01 You have now arrived at your destination.
2:15 Harry Stebbings? Kanye, it's an absolute pleasure to have you on the 20 Minute VC. Thank you so much for joining us today.
2:20 Speaker 02 Hi there, Harry. I'm very happy to be here.
2:22 Harry Stebbings? Now, I'd love to hear a little about your backstory and how you made the move into VC and tech from South Africa.
2:30 Speaker 02 Gladly. Well, my journey to VC from South Africa actually had many stops along the way, including coming here to the United States when I was still very young, going to school here, and then ultimately doing a few startups before I before I joined this fund. So the short version is I was a Stanford undergrad and
2:55 Speaker 02 studying philosophy and was compelled by an interest in seeing a different part of the world and having a different late teens experience. So I dropped out of Stanford and did a startup and it ended up sending me on a long and circuitous journey through the world of startups, through twenty million dollars of venture financings across a couple startups and and about the same amount of exit at the end of the day. But it was a great learning experience and I met my partner Craig when I was back at Stanford actually doing some work in design and spending some time finishing school and we had a really great connection and he convinced me to
3:40 Speaker 02 help him with collaborative fund and that was about five years ago and and here I am.
3:45 Harry Stebbings? And was it tough to leave the security of Stanford then? Obviously, kind of Stanford, a fantastic school and, you know, relatively safe and secure path coming out. So was it tough to leave the unknown world of startups? Or were you quite sure of your your future in the tech and startup industry?
4:03 Speaker 02 The decision to leave wasn't tough. Once I had left, it was tough. So there is a point of view uh from a casual observer that being a uh startup entrepreneur and being uh in the in the startup grind uh has an element of glamour to it, particularly for for those who are college dropouts. And the reality honestly couldn't be further from it. I dropped out and didn't really care one way or another. I was just sick of school and didn't wanna be there. And it wasn't speaking to me perfectly, honestly. But when I got into the startup world, that's actually where things got tough. And so uh income was very hard to come by, and so I was living on credit cards.
4:46 Speaker 02 And it turns out that you need to pay back your credit cards or else your score is affected. And so, you know, it turns out that there's only certain things you can buy with credit cards. I rented one of them. And so there's all sorts of tough lessons one learns when going through that experience that I, gosh, had a really hard time with, but I'm glad for now because I've gotten through and and can advise others to stay in school.
5:11 Harry Stebbings? And what what would you say was the toughest experience? And why would you advise others to stay in school? That's a very interesting addition to the sentence there.
5:20 Speaker 02 Well, the toughest things were, one, the loneliness, honestly. So being very, very young, and the lovely thing about college in particular is that you're around your peers and there's an element of serendipity and of density and of shared context, which results in being able to make extraordinarily rich friendships and being able to make really lasting connections with people. And when you're out in the professional world, that disappears, like with the snap of one's fingers. And there are some communities, so to speak, which are, you know, which suffice as replacing that, at least to some degree, but they really don't do as good of a job at. As college students, so I was young and just wanted to be around my friends and that's lonely.
6:05 Speaker 02 And a second piece of that is that people wanna do things you understand. And if you're doing something other people don't understand, then that's isolating too. Because you don't have people who you can sort of commiserate with and who you can feel like you're on a journey with. And so the loneliness was hard. And then the truth of the matter also is if it's not a rocket ship startup, which the vast majority of them are, then it's really hard to justify it to your loved ones. And so my parents thought, what in the world are you doing? Like, why are you, why are you not at school? Like, what are you chasing this stupid thing which is not working for? And that is actually probably the most challenging piece is feeling like you're letting down those who uh have put their faith in you and have also, you know, invested in your future.
6:50 Speaker 02 And so i- it all in all, it's, it's, it's an experience which is a lot less glamorous than it feels. And what I do like to say is that the, the amazing effects of, of having failed in one's career are, are misunderstood often. And it's not the failing itself that it should be celebrated. And I think it's wrongly celebrated. It's actually overcoming failure and ultimately succeeding that should be celebrated. And so the dropping out and the going through a startup part just sucks. And it sucks for everybody, you know?
7:21 Harry Stebbings? And how did you get over those hard times then of loneliness and uh of, you know, did you do credit card debt at a young age? I mean, was there a kind of vision in your mind that drove you on?
7:32 Speaker 02 There, there wasn't. It was the way that I, you know what it actually was, was I didn't feel like I had that much of a choice. So I felt like this is the path that I had chosen. This is the path I was on. And all I really had the opportunity to do at that point was to see it through to the best of my abilities and to, to turn, to turn lemons into lemonade. And so one of those things too, that a lot of people often think about is that it's, it's the actual purity of one's vision and the, and the real promise of this great dream of success that drives people. When sometimes it could be, I don't really know what else I could do. I don't really know what else I would do. I'm doing this, so I gotta keep at it at least until I can finish it so that I can do something else.
8:15 Speaker 02 And so it was in some ways less of a sort of a glamorous and, and a really easy to tell story than I didn't think of anything else, really.
8:26 Harry Stebbings? And and and now you're at collaborative, as you mentioned there. So can you give us a little background on the fund, your investment thesis, the stage that you like to go in on and and any preferred themes?
8:38 Speaker 02 Gladly. So the fund is an investor who believes that we are living in a collaborative economy, and I don't think that's a particularly controversial statement these days, but the way that we frame it is we're living in an economy where the hub and spoke model of creating value and the centralizing of resources uh uh and the centralizing of distribution and the centralizing of production is an anachronistic model that was dying in the twentieth century and is fundamentally over, or at least ending in most industries and that a
9:19 Speaker 02 network-driven model with nodes and collaboration and peer-to-peer and liquidity directly between uh micro-parties, be those smaller firms or individuals, is the mode that's going to come and dominate, and that's, you know, the promise of the internet. But we think beyond that, that there's a really, really important implication to this, and that there's a trend that's that comes right alongside it. And that implication, that trend, is one where, since every individual node is now connected to every other node because of the internet and because of these networks that are open, that means that every consumer, every potential employee, uh even companies themselves
10:02 Speaker 02 uh have an obligation and have an opportunity, and I think increasingly have a trend where they are trying to align their interests and align their value sets. And so from a consumer standpoint, I'm purchasing stuff that is reflective of the value set that I have about the world. As an employee, I'm trying to find meaning and I'm trying to find purpose in my work. And as an employer, I need to be authentic, and those are themes that I think are very impact-oriented and that are very values-oriented. And so we think that the actual outcome of a collaborative economy is one that's impact-driven. And so we care about impact in that way. And so we really love brands that are using collaboration as a competitive weapon, but recognize
10:44 Speaker 02 that values and great impactful brands and that being aspirational about culture are the outcomes of that collaboration.
10:53 Harry Stebbings? And do you think then that this theme specialization results in the higher returns for the fund overall? Do you think that's that's the kind of secret sauce? Or do you think stage specialization is there's often this kind of divergence between, oh, we we don't have, we're theme agnostic, but we're only series A. Which one do you think is kind of more effective to be?
11:13 Speaker 02 That's a good question. I think that any theme being fully candid is is used as a way to be efficient with one's time. And so at the end of the day, somebody, somebody in the venture community said to me, you don't have to do every good deal. You just have to only do good deals. And so I'm going to pass on plenty of really excellent companies. In fact, the best investors of all time have passed on 10 to 10,000 companies multiple times over each of them. And so there's this world in which I need to figure out a best way to be efficient with my time. I need to figure out a way to look at companies in a way that I can fundamentally process.
11:56 Speaker 02 Sam Altman tweeted something a couple of weeks ago, saying that he estimated there were between four and 6,000 seed stage companies looking for funding every year, which means more than 10 a day, every single day. And there's no way you can do that. So you need some sort of a heuristic or some sort of a tool whereby you can decide on a point of view. And say they notice stuff outside of that point of view and just hope your point of view is more right than wrong and that you can find winners within it. And I think that's true about stage and I think that's true about theme. And so that can go for both. It's just a matter of can you find enough of a way to constrain your sample set? And then within that sample set, optimize for getting lucky because ultimately that's a part of it too.
12:38 Harry Stebbings? Absolutely, yeah. And and then at Collaborative, you're a partner, a big congratulations on that. Um, and you're very young for the to be a partner in the industry. So how is that for you? And what challenges do you face as a result of your your youth in the role?
12:55 Speaker 02 That's an interesting question, gosh. I am reasonably young, I just turned thirty. And the are, there are a couple of directions to take this answer, and I'll take a few of them, actually. The first one is what most people don't know about funds, even though you can find it out if you just look for it, is that associated with a with a fund is is what's known as a GP commit, which is a the general partnerships contribution to the fund. And that is effectively skin in the game. And so the limited partners want to know that these general partners aren't just going to take their money and poof, be gone and or be responsible with it. And so they want to see that these general partners have put their own personal skin in the game.
13:39 Speaker 02 And what that has historically meant is if you're raising a four hundred million dollar fund, it can be hundreds of thousands and even millions of dollars that the general partners need to put up for the sake of demonstrating to the limited partners that they have skin in the game. If you're young, unless you happen to be born into wealth or happen to have had extraordinary financial success early, neither of which is the case for me, as an example, then that's actually really hard. And that actually, perhaps counterintuitively, makes me more risk averse because the types of hoops and contortions I need to jump through and twist myself around into so as to be able to figure out a way to satisfy a GP commit means that I've got a whole lot riding on my ability to make these investment decisions.
14:22 Speaker 02 And that may not align me that well with my limited partners because the whole point of venture, as you think about asset allocation from a limited partner standpoint, is being super, super, super high risk and really risk tolerant. And so if I as a partner am less risk tolerant, then I'm not doing my job well as a fiduciary. And so there's something there which is worth thinking about. That's that's strange, and I think it's fundamentally excluding a lot of people who could otherwise be great VCs because they either don't have the capital or if they happened to, it's too much capital to allocate in one place and thereby makes them risk averse. And the second piece that is a challenge about being young is that venture's a long game. And, you know, Facebook was an overnight success, one of the fastest growing companies in history.
15:07 Speaker 02 And it was founded in in two thousand and four and and went public in two thousand and eleven, which is a zippy seven years, right? And so this notion that
15:18 Speaker 02 Were in this with feedback loops that are that long, seven years, ten years, twelve years in some cases. Is something that is some, maybe I wouldn't go so so far as to say an anathema, but it's really hard for. Somebody who's still developing in their career to be able and willing to really hold oneself to and. So the fact that the feedback loops are structurally so long is one piece that makes it hard for a young person. Just psychologically and then the other piece that is also hard is. The feedback loops are not only so long, but there's. A million ways, maybe even infinite ways to do venture and so just like you can be stage specific and you can be themed specific. You can also find different ways to market yourself as an investor, you can find different ways to.
16:02 Speaker 02 Drive value to the portfolio as an investor, there's you can go to conferences, you can write blogs, you can do none of those things and just focus on data. And so there's no right way to do it and you don't know if you're any good until many, many, many years later. And so the input output relationship is actually kind of a tenuous one. I don't know if me being on this call is when a driver turns to my LPs and I'm probably not gonna find out for another five years if I'm lucky. And even if I do, I won't know if it was this call or something else that did it and so. I'm sure it would have been this cool, don't I? Of course, of course, that's right, you know, and so what that means is that it's hard for me to. Figure out how to spend my time in the really most productive way like and I have to do it on pretty much instinctively and I have to go on gut.
16:44 Speaker 02 And then I don't get any output as a result of that input that's really. Uh sort of salient, that's high fidelity, that gives me a statistically significant signal as to my value and so. It's a little bit like being blind and trying to go skiing down a really long mountain, you know, and. And and so that's a a thing that's hard too is is if you're not patient. And not only patient, but if you don't have really honed instincts about how to spend your time and how to protect your time. Then you'll end up doing a whole bunch of stuff and always being busy, but stuff that doesn't ten years from now turn out to be really that. Good at making you a better investor.
17:23 Harry Stebbings? And despite the difficulty then in determining the output of your actions, how do you find it most effective or most enjoyable for you to market yourself? What strategies have you, you've got a brilliant blog, is that how you kind of put yourself across or are there other platforms that you try and utilise?
17:40 Speaker 02 You know, the blog is interesting because there's two pieces of it. One piece is indeed crass, it's just simply. Marketing and it's a high leverage marketing tool and the other piece is somewhat less crass and. Fortunately for me, the two of them have have positively reinforced each other, but the second one is I just like writing and writing is how I. Clarify my ideas to myself and writing is also how I clarify my ideas by. Putting them in front of my peers and having my peers challenge them and so I write for an audience of zero or very few so that I can get smarter. And I think in the course of doing that, I I write sort of like.
18:24 Speaker 02 Like no one's watching, you know, that saying of dance like no one's watching and so maybe that thereby makes it more interesting to read and thereby makes it more effective marketing. So there is something like that, I guess, going on there, if we're being honest. And other than that, it's for me. I'm married and I'm happily married and I really like to spend time with my wife. She's in she's in medical school and so. Anytime she's free, I have to make myself free pretty much immediately and so the intimate dinners with other VCs and the events and. The summit series and the conferences and the stuff that requires either being on a plane or being outside of my home, I tend to. Personally just limit or if not limit, be really, really, really prescriptive about when I participate because.
19:09 Speaker 02 I value my in-person time at home too much and so that's why I'm ridiculously active on Twitter to the. Point of it being an addiction. That's why I spend a lot of time doing things that can allow me to be remote and so it's a matter of taste and what you're good at and also what you like to do and so. That's why I spend my time there.
19:26 Harry Stebbings? And there's a lot of discussion about how effective um demo days are, hackathons are. Uh accelerator days are for VC deal sourcing and deal flow. How effective do you think they are then in terms of kind of making sure that your time is spent most wisely? Do you find them a good source of incoming deal flow?
19:46 Speaker 02 That's an interesting question. It depends on the accelerator for one. And I won't cast aspersions and or call out any particularly, but some. But some communities and some. You know, some are better than others. That's that's that's a fact. But then the other piece is is that for our style and stage, so we like to be early and we tend to be in a first institutional round or even earlier than that into a company. Uh, when we're meeting them, if we're meeting them for the first time at most of the demo days that one would go to, we're probably meeting them too late. And so for us, uh, going to a demo day to discover companies
20:31 Speaker 02 uh, may be a a a decent way of making sure that we've covered our bases. Uh, but that's not actually the best way for us to see companies at the stage we really wanna see them. Because especially the way that some of the accelerators have started to move up the stack now and have started to fund companies that are somewhat later in their trajectories. Uh, we wanna be early and we like the super high risk, entropic nature of being first money in. And so that's one piece. But the other piece about accelerators, which which people, you know, well, there's a couple pieces, but one of them is that it's a really great opportunity for me to see all the other VCs and VCs get get great deal flow from each other. They learn to trust each other. This is a
21:12 Speaker 02 an industry that I, you know, to to coin a term from a friend of mine is i- is driven by co-opetition. And so we're cooperating constantly while we compete. And that means that being able to have a lot of face time and really spend time with each other is important and demo data are a great way to do that. And then the other piece for an entrepreneur is, gosh, talk about high fidelity, high leverage marketing channel to know that there's going to be you know, fifty people who have some financial interest in your pitch all in one place at one time is really a thing.
21:46 Harry Stebbings? It's a dream, yeah.
21:47 Speaker 02 Uh, it's a dream. So why wouldn't anybody do that? So I I don't begrudge anybody for those and I don't begrudge them for deal flow. Uh, from an entre- entrepreneurial standpoint, nor from an investor standpoint, for us, we just are doing our job well if we're seeing companies earlier than that.
22:02 Harry Stebbings? So you said it's not the best way then for you to discover startups. What do you think is then for you at your stage?
22:09 Speaker 02 At our stage, if you take a snapshot of where we are right now, I would say it's our existing portfolio companies. So our existing portfolio companies serve as as a great reference for us. If we wanna do an outbound, so we see some company that's just been formed, or some group of ex Googlers, or you name it, who are leaving to start some company, the first thing I do is go to Facebook, or to LinkedIn, or to Twitter, to see if there is somebody within our portfolio who's directly connected to one of them. Cause if that's true, then what a high signal introduction and a high signal warm reference that is already. Cause if somebody is willing to vouch for us as their financial partner,
22:50 Speaker 02 then that sends a really strong signal to the market, and so we rely on that a lot for outbound and for inbound. So entrepreneurs talk to each other and CEOs treat each other like siblings in in the best of ways, and so when they use each other to get access to VCs, we always really welcome that.
23:07 Harry Stebbings? And then in terms of skipping many, many stages now to the to the exit and the dream of many a VC. You've written that there should be kind of further alternatives other than just the the rather limited IPO or acquisition that we frequently hear about. What what sort of other solution then do you do you suggest? How can we expand this narrow funnel?
23:30 Speaker 02 That's a good question. The first, a tiny bit of background, which I imagine that your listeners will will have been abreast of the news that Fidelity is marked down a bunch of companies. And the implication that I have of that is that these companies which are private are in some ways starting to get treated like public companies. And so, you know, their future prospects are being valued in real time by investors, which is not so different than how a public company has to deal with stuff. And and can that can go up and that can go down, and that can happen within the context of a financing and not. So there's that piece, which I think is worth just making note of, but we live in a a world and and after Sarbanes-Oxley, which was a piece of
24:15 Speaker 02 legislation and act that was passed, I think in two thousand and two. It's become fairly burdensome to be a public company. The SEC just puts a fair amount of restrictions on being a public company. And so even for those companies that have free cash flow, that have EBITDA and want to raise money from the public at scale, it's not necessarily the most attractive thing. And so. And so that's, I think, part of what's contributing to these massive, massive funding rounds that are fundamentally private, even though they should have gone public all ages ago for some cases, and in some cases not. But what I do think is worth thinking about if you're an entrepreneur is that freedom is a free cash flow. And if you can find ways to to create net income, so if you can find ways to profit,
25:00 Speaker 02 then you can find all sorts of ways to exit. Because exiting is liquidity, and liquidity is cash that is used to buy people out of their position. And so if you have that cash just on the basis of your cash flows, then you can buy people out of their position a couple of ways. You can buy them out of their position in a very long-term fashion, where you're paying out dividends in some cases. You can buy them out of their position in one fell swoop by maybe raising some leverage and and having it happen that way, like a managed buyout. And you can find ways to buy people out, perhaps by passing the buck and doing crowdfunding, because because NASDAQ is crowdfunding in and of itself, right? And so if you can do some private crowdfunding, that's also a way to think about creating liquidity for your for your investors.
25:43 Speaker 02 And so I think that being a little bit more creative about getting to cash flows, and once you have said cash flows, thinking about options like debt, thinking about options like crowdfunding, options like dividends, are are going to become much more common conversations, because the IPO bar is so far away that companies with decent revenues, but, you know, aren't necessarily in the position to go through that IPO process, are want ways to create liquidity. And we've seen some of those within our portfolio, but there's there's countless others that are outside as well.
26:14 Harry Stebbings? Absolutely. And if it's K with you, we're gonna dive into a quickfire round now.
26:19 Speaker 02 Do it.
26:19 Harry Stebbings? Your favorite book and why?
26:22 Speaker 02 Favorite book is Brothers Karamazov beca- by Dostoevsky, because it is a philosophically rigorous, religious uh love story about siblings and trust and career and pride. And it's so deep and broad. And I feel like it is a fiction bible for me, where I can go into it and find an anecdote that's relevant to every aspect of my life.
26:51 Harry Stebbings? Which VCs do you look up to and admire?
26:54 Speaker 02 I admire Unions for Ventures hugely. I think that they've built an incredible organization. I love their discipline. I love their dogmatism, their intellectual.
27:05 Speaker 02 Dirty and I really respect their track record. I feel similarly about Benchmark, actually, out in California. I think they have a really amazing story and read eBooks if you haven't read it already.
27:17 Harry Stebbings? And then Founder Friendly, what are your first thoughts?
27:21 Speaker 02 As a concept, I think it is a sign of the times in a good way. I think that founders are starting to take a lot more agency and are starting to hold investors to a higher standard. In practice, Founder Friendly is complicated and has much. And it cuts both ways in any given case, whether it is valuation pricing and Fidelity is a fine example of that. Or, or when it comes to a write down or an exit, or when it comes to serving on a board. So I think it's more complicated than it may meet the eye.
27:55 Harry Stebbings? One habit that you think is most effective in successfully adding to your life, be it going to the gym, be it writing a page, a blog post a week, what is it for you, the habit?
28:06 Speaker 02 Uh, I wish I did either of those things. And so those are both aspirational habits. The one that I'm starting to do more, which has paid off extraordinarily, is waking up early.
28:18 Harry Stebbings? Okay, so you wake up at what time then?
28:20 Speaker 02 Now I've been waking up at six, sometimes six thirty.
28:23 Harry Stebbings? And you feel more productive and awake?
28:26 Speaker 02 I feel more tired, but I have a chance to reflect. I have some quiet time and I have a chance to think about my life and think about the world before I dive into email and disappear into the minutia of the day to day.
28:39 Harry Stebbings? Do you meditate?
28:40 Speaker 02 I pray.
28:41 Harry Stebbings? Okay. And then hardest aspects of being a VC?
28:46 Speaker 02 Hardest aspects of being a VC, one of them is that nobody thinks it's hard. And the other is that the input and the output are so loosely tied, it's really hard to know how good you're doing.
28:59 Harry Stebbings? And then finally, your most recent investment and why you said yes?
29:04 Speaker 02 Ooh, that's an interesting question. Most recent investment and why we said yes. That's actually CircleUp. And CircleUp is Series C investments, and so it's a little bit off the beaten path for us. And it's a crowdfunding platform for CPG with a strong emphasis on food. Said yes because I think that other forms of trading liquidity and financing methods, both at entry and at exit for all sorts of organizations, is going to totally be transformed by the internet, and they have an opportunity to be a great leader in their category there.
29:36 Harry Stebbings? Well, Kanye, thank you so much for joining us today on this very special episode. I've so enjoyed chatting with you. Thank you so much.
29:43 Speaker 02 Harry, this was a pleasure. Thank you too, and cheers.
29:47 Harry Stebbings? What an amazing show that was with Kanye, and I'd like to say a huge thank you to him for giving up his time today to be on the show. And do not forget, if you are a small business owner or startup founder, schedule a free 20-minute strategy session with a top-rated attorney, where they can help you with all things, contracts, IP protection, funding, and much, much more. And this is all thanks to the kind folks at Law Trades. And to get this amazing offer, head on over to www.lawtrades.com, or you can follow them on Twitter @LawTrades. And they truly are an amazing service, and it's so kind of them to give such a great exclusive. We really are very grateful. And thank you so much, as always, for all your support and listening to the show, and
30:30 Harry Stebbings? we look so forward to seeing you in Wednesday's episode with David Tettin at FF Venture Capsule.
Previous 20 VC FF 025: Crowdfunding Gimlet Media and Why The Nature Of Startup Equity Is Changing with Erin Glenn, CEO @ Betaworks' backed, Quire Next 20 VC 095: How VCs Find Startups and How To Add Value Once Invested with David Teten @ ff Venture Capital Page updated October 26, 2026 · transcript and summary are machine-generated
