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The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch

20VC: Accel GP, Rich Wong on When Is The Right Time To Scale A Startup, Optimising Initial vs Follow-On Investment Decision-Making & The Globalisation of VC In Recent Years

The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch

The Twenty Minute VC

Finance, Venturecapital, Tech News, News, Siliconvalley, Technology, Investing, Startups, Business

4.4 • 637 Ratings

🗓️ 4 December 2017

⏱️ 26 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Rich Wong is a General Partner @ Accel, one of the world's leading venture funds with investments in the likes of Dropbox, Slack, Facebook, Deliveroo and Atlassian, just to name a few. As for Rich, Rich has led investments in the likes of Rovio (IPO), SwiftKey, AdMob, MoPub and more incredible companies. Rich also sits on the boards of the likes of Checkr, Osmo, Rovio and Atlassian where he was first outside Board member and lead investor. Prior to joining Accel, Rich served as SVP of products for mobile pioneer, Openwave Systems and CMO of Covad Communications.

In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:

1.) How Rich made his way into the world of VC with Accel from OpenWave and having been active in the mobile and broadband ecosystems?

2.) What does Rich mean when he states the rise of the "Globalisation of VC"? How does Accel both find and win deals in locations such as Australia, Finland? How do the founder's mentalities differ to Bay area founder mentality?

3.) How does Rich think about price sensitivity when assessing opportunities? What would be considered a good return multiple when investing from the early stage fund? How does this differ from the growth fund?

4.) What is the internal structure of investment decision making at Accel? How does Rich analyze reserve allocation? How does initial to reserve decision-making differ? How does the Accel partnership determine the 10% of portfolio that are "winners"?

5.) Question from Manu Kumar @ K9: How does Rich decide when is the right time for a company to scale? What is the balance of not too early and not too late? How should unit economics play a role in this decision? What characteristic must be inherent within multiple functions of the business, pre-scaling?

Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:

Rich’s Fave Book: The Big Short

Rich’s Fave Blog: Wolf Street

Rich’s Most Recent Investment: Instabug

As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Rich on Twitter here!

Likewise, you can follow Harry on Snapchat here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.

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Transcript

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0:00.0

Welcome back to the 20 minute VC with me, Harry Stebbings, at H. Stebbings with two Bs on

0:04.5

Snapchat. I always love to see you there. And you can download our app on the app store by searching

0:08.6

for 20 VC, that's 20 VC, and with the app you can easily tag episodes and go back to them at later

0:14.3

dates, easily find and buy resources mentioned in the show. And most importantly for me to continue improving the content, you can rate

0:21.1

episodes and provide feedback. However, to this week on the show, and I'm thrilled to feature one of the

0:25.5

top performing funds of the last decade, with investments in the lights of Facebook, Dropbox, Slack,

0:30.6

Atlassian, Deliveru, and many more incredible companies. Have you guessed it? Well, I'm thrilled to be

0:35.5

featuring Excel this week. And joining me in the

0:37.5

hot seat from Excel, we have Rich Wong, general partner and the man behind investments in the

0:42.0

likes of Rovio, which IPOed earlier this year, Swiftkey, which was acquired by Microsoft, AdMob,

0:47.5

MoPub, and many more incredible companies. Rich also sits on the boards of the likes of Cheka,

0:52.3

Osmo, Rovio, and Atlassian, where, fun fact,

0:55.0

he was the first outside board member and lead investor.

0:57.8

And prior to joining Excel, Rich served as SVP of products for mobile pioneer, open wave systems,

1:03.1

and CMO of COVAD communications.

1:05.4

I'd also want to say a huge thank you to Rich's colleague, Brian O'Malley, for the intro to

1:09.1

Rich today and to Manu Kumar at K9

1:11.4

Ventures for providing such fantastic questions, we really do appreciate that. But before we

1:15.9

dive into the show today, the heart of any good company is its people. That's why Namely

1:20.0

brings employees together on the HR platform that everyone loves to use. It's as intuitive as social

1:25.2

media, but powerful enough to support the complexity of today's

1:28.2

workforce. Namely is the all-in-one platform that helps companies manage HR, payroll, benefits, and more.

...

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