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

20VC: Ashton Kutcher on Early Lessons From Investing in Airbnb and Spotify, Why VC Ownership Requirements Are Becoming More and More Egregious & What Being Good At Product Truly Means

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

4.4637 Ratings

🗓️ 17 February 2020

⏱️ 38 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Ashton Kutcher is a Founder & General Partner @ Sound Ventures. Over the last 5 years, Ashton and his partner, Guy Oseary, have built Sound into one of the West Coast's leading new entrants with a portfolio including Lambda School, Calm, Gitlab, Affirm, Bird and many more incredible companies. As for Ashton, he started his investing career as an angel with early home runs including Spotify, Alibaba, Skype, Airbnb and Optimizely. Due to his immense success both in media and technology, Ashton has been named one of TIME magazine’s “100 Most Influential People in the World”.

In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:

1.) How Ashton made his way into the world of startups with his foray into angel investing in Skype, Spotify etc? How did that lead to his founding Sound Ventures most recently?

2.) How does Ashton's background in the world of media impact Sound's investment strategy and the type of deals they get excited by? Question from Daniel Ek @ Spotify: How did your deal sourcing look lin the early days? How has that changed over time and with the institutionalisation of Sound?

3.) Why does Ashton believe people creating the future are perpetually young? What question does Ashton always like to ask founders? What does he look for in their answer? How does Ashton ensure founders feel comfortable with him? What does he do to allow them to open up? What is the hardest thing Ashton feels he has persevered through?

4.) How does Ashton build strong product intuition about products in areas he is not familiar with? In terms of great product, Ashton backed Spotify with Daniel Ek and Shak Khan, what did Ashton see in Spotify way back then? How did Shak and Daniel innovate on distribution and customer acquisition with him and Spotify?

5.) What have been Ashton's learnings in what it takes to truly win the best and most competitive deals? Before as an angel, Ashton's check size was friendly, now with Sound it is competitive with VCs, how does Ashton approach the element of now competing with many VCs he once co-operated with? What does Ashton make of the rise of many celebrity investors today?

Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:

Ashton’s Fave Book: The Undoing Project: A Friendship that Changed the WorldScale: The Universal Laws of Life and Death in Organisms, Cities and Companies

Ashton’s Most Recent Investment: Community

As always you can follow HarryThe Twenty Minute VC and Ashton on Twitter here!

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

 

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0

This is the 20 minute VC with me, Harry Stebbings, and you can see all things behind the scenes on

0:04.0

Instagram at H. Stebbings, 1996 with two bees, but to the show today, and I've wanted to do this

0:08.9

episode for a long, long time. We're all fans of his media work, but he's also the most incredible

0:13.5

investor and product mind, and I'm just very, very honored and grateful to be able to do this show today. So with that, I'm thrilled to welcome Ashton Coutcher, found and general partner at Sound Ventures. Over the last five years, Ashton and his partner,

0:25.6

Gaiasiri, have built Sound into one of the leading West Coast franchises in the new scene of

0:30.0

entrants, with a portfolio including the lights of Lambda, Calm, GitLab, Affirm, Bird, and many more

0:36.0

incredible companies. As for Ashton, he started his career

0:39.0

investing as an angel, with early home runs including Spotify, Ali Barbar, Skype and Optimizely, to name a few.

0:45.5

Due to his immense success, both in media and tech, Ashton's also been named one of Time

0:49.2

Magazine's 100 most influential people in the world. And I do also want to say a huge thank you

0:53.6

to one of my

0:54.1

dearest friends, Shack Khan, for really helping me think through some fantastic questions today,

0:58.6

as well as Daniel Eck, Sid at GitLab, Austin at Lambda, Roger had untitled, and then

1:03.3

Shaheed at Loom. Without his kind intro, this episode would never have happened. Before we move into

1:08.0

the show today, though, I wanted to take a moment to mention HelloSign, a great example of a company that found success in building a product focused on

1:14.9

user experience. HelloSign is an effortless e-signature solution used by millions to securely

1:20.0

send and request legally valid digital signatures and agreements. I have to say, I absolutely

1:25.1

love their design and workflow. It's just so intuitive.

1:27.8

And they've raised a total of $16 million in funding and recently got acquired by Dropbox for an

1:32.4

impressive $230 million. Check out HelloSign.com forward slash 20VC to join thousands of companies

1:39.3

and founders who value fast, secure and simple e-signatures. And if HelloSign saves the day for signatures, Hymns saves the day for wellness as the

1:47.5

wellness brand for men.

...

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