20VC: 7 Powers: The Foundations of Business Strategy: Deconstructing Economies of Scale, How To Assess True Market Size, Assessing Risk vs Uncertainty, What “Brand As Power” Really Means with Hamilton Helmer, Managing Partner and Chief Investment Offi
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
The Twenty Minute VC
4.4 • 637 Ratings
🗓️ 18 May 2020
⏱️ 38 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Hamilton Helmer is the Managing Partner & Chief Investment Officer @ Strategy Capital a long-only public equity fund that selects securities for investment based on Power Dynamics, a proprietary model of fundamental value, developed by Hamilton over decades of strategy consulting with clients such as Hewlett-Packard, Adobe and more. Hamilton is also the author of one of my favourite books, 7 Powers. If that was not enough, Hamilton is also an Instructor in the Economics Department @ Stanford University.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Hamilton made his way into the world of investing from advising some of the largest tech titans on the planet with Adobe and HP?
2.) What is a strategy mental model? What makes the most effective strategic models? What characteristics do they have? How should founders balance between sticking to models and being willing to change them? What are Hamilton's biggest takeaways from working with Netflix?
3.) "All strategy begins with invention", what did Hamilton mean by this? How does Hamilton explain the success of copycats in markets? How does Hamilton separate between first mover and creator? How does Hamilton analyse the transition from startup to pricer with scale economics?
4.) How does Hamilton advise founders to view and approach competition? Why does Hamilton totally disagree with the requirement of being 10x better than your competition? Is product innovation alone enough without brand or business model innovation?
5.) How does Hamilton define "brand"? Is brand an attainable strategy alone or is it the byproduct of something else? How transferable is brand in one category to alternative categories? How does a brand truly know when they have sustainable leverage and power?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Hamilton’s Fave Book: The Road to Reality: A Complete Guide to the Laws of the Universe, Stardust
As always you can follow Harry and The Twenty Minute VC on Twitter here!
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome back. You are listening to The 20-minute VC with me, Harry Stebbings, and I know I'm excited about |
| 0:04.2 | every episode, but I'm really excited about this one's day, welcoming the author of one of my |
| 0:08.2 | favorite books. Investors, you should send this to every new founder you invest in. Founders, it will |
| 0:12.9 | fundamentally change the way you think about building your business. And so with that, I'm thrilled |
| 0:16.8 | to welcome Hamilton Helmer, managing partner and chief investment officer at Strategy Capital, |
| 0:21.3 | a long-only public equity fund that selects securities for investment based on power dynamics, |
| 0:26.7 | a proprietary model of fundamental value, developed by Hamilton over decades of strategy consulting |
| 0:31.8 | with clients such as Hewlett-Packard, Adobe and more. |
| 0:35.1 | Hamilton's also the author, as I said, of one of my favorites, |
| 0:37.9 | Seven Powers. It's also one of the favorites of Daniel Eck at Spotify, Peter Thiel, and |
| 0:42.3 | Reed Hastings at Netflix. If that wasn't enough, Hamilton's also an instructor in the |
| 0:46.7 | economics department at Stanford University. And I'd also want to say a huge thank you to Daniel |
| 0:50.7 | at Spotify. For the intro to Hamilton's day, episode would not have happened without that, so I really |
| 0:55.1 | do appreciate that. |
| 0:56.4 | But before we move into the show today, I wanted to take a moment to mention HelloSign, |
| 0:59.9 | a great example of a company that found success in building a product focused on user |
| 1:03.9 | experience. |
| 1:04.8 | HelloSign is an effortless e-signature solution used by millions to securely send and request |
| 1:09.8 | legally valid digital signatures and |
| 1:11.6 | agreements. They raised a total of $16 million in funding and recently got acquired by Dropbox |
| 1:16.6 | for an impressive $230 million. Check out hello sign.com forward slash 20VC to join the thousands |
| 1:23.2 | of companies and founders who value fast, secure and simple e-signatures. |
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