20 VC FF 032: Jeff Seibert on Lessons From Being Acquired By Twitter & Box and Now Leading Twitter's Consumer Product

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4.4 • 637 Ratings

🗓️ 29 January 2016

⏱️ 29 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Jeff Seibert is an experienced serial-entrepreneur and currently Senior Director of Product at Twitter. Previously, Seibert was the CEO of Crashlytics, which he co-founded in 2011 with Wayne Chang. Crashlytics delivered crash analysis tools for iOS and Android apps via an SDK that reached 300 Million mobile devices worldwide. Crashlytics was acquired by Twitter in 2013 for $259m. In 2007, Seibert co-founded Increo and served as its COO and lead architect until its acquisition by Box in August of 2009. He subsequently oversaw the integration of Increo’s document preview and annotation technologies into the company's cloud-based content platform.

A special thank you to Mattermark for providing all the data displayed in today's show and you can find out more about Mattermark here!

In Today's Episode You Will Learn:

1.) How Jeff made his move into the wonderful world of tech?

Today we are going to break up your story into 3 chapters:

1.) Acquisition by Box:

What was it like going to Sand Hill Road to raise in 2009?
How much runway would Jeff advise for a startup and how can companies know whether a strategic acquisition is optimal or whether they should continue building with a further round?
Jeff has spoke before about being overly transparent with this team about the acquisition. What are the problems with being overly transparent and how can you balance the two?

2.) Acquired by Twitter:

At what point did Jeff transition to thinking the acquisition by Twitter would be a beneficial and viable and why?
A reason for Jeff being favourable to the acquisition was Twitter's agreement of continued investment in the space. How can founders negotiate and ensure that this occurs with their acquisition? One of the mistakes stated about the acquisition by Twitter was the reporting structure. How can founders ensure that they are speaking to the VPs of engineering, CEOs etc and attain the support they need?

3.) Life at Twitter:

How life is following the acquisition? What are Jeff's plans for the future as Senior Director of Product at Twitter?

Items Mentioned In Today's Episode:

Jeff' Fave Book: How To Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie

Jeff's Fave Blog or Newsletter: Daring Fireball

As always you can follow The Twenty Minute VC, Harry and Jeff 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

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	Now, my word do I have a very special interview for you today. The 20-minute VC is always on the cutting edge of tech, and with that in mind, I'm sure many of you will have seen about the restructuring that happened at Twitter recently. Well, joining us today is an absolutely phenomenal entrepreneur and currently senior director of product at Twitter, Jeff Seibert. Prior to his role at Twitter,
0:23.1	Jeff was the co-founder alongside Wayne Chang of the Crash Analysis Tool, CrashLytics, which I believe
0:29.4	is used on over a billion devices today, and they were ultimately acquired for $259 million
0:35.2	by Twitter. However, his entrepreneurial success does not end there, as before
0:40.2	CrashLittics, Jeff was the founder of InCrayo, which was Box's first ever acquisition in 2009.
0:47.7	Now, this is probably one of my favourite ever interviews we've done, and it really is a sit down and
0:52.6	get a pen and paper interview with some real gold dust
0:55.6	from Jeff here. And I'd like to say a huge thank you to my good friend Nico Bonatzos at General
1:00.7	Catalyst for making the intro to Jeff, without which this interview could not have happened.
1:05.9	However, without further ado, ladies and gents, I'm so delighted to to welcome jeff sibert senior director of product at
1:13.1	twitter three two one zero you have now arrived at your destination jeff welcome to the 20 minute
1:23.7	VC i'm super excited about this interview today. Thank you so much for joining us.
1:28.0	I'm happy to be here. Thank you, Harry. Now, can you get the ball rolling state by telling us a little
1:33.0	backstory about you and how you made your way into the world of tech? Yes. So it starts actually
1:39.1	quite a while ago. I grew up in Baltimore, Maryland, which is not a bastion of computer technology.
1:46.0	It's very much dominated by Hopkins.
1:48.5	Everyone was a doctor growing up.
1:50.4	It was like, oh, you should go be a doctor.
1:52.3	And that just wasn't something that interested me.
1:54.3	I was very into sort of science and nature more so than technology growing up.
2:00.3	And in sixth grade, my parents sort of out of the
2:03.4	blue gave me the book Mac programming for dummies. And I was never really into computers. I read the book,
	...

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