20VC: Biggest Lessons From Opendoor's Scaling Journey, How To Implement Systems for Growth & The Right Way To Structure Customer Discovery Processes with Julia DeWahl, Angel Investor
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
The Twenty Minute VC
4.4 • 637 Ratings
🗓️ 3 July 2020
⏱️ 35 minutes
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Summary
Julia DeWahl is one of the rising stars of the Silicon Valley angel investor community with a portfolio including the likes of Linear (Sequoia-backed), Modern Fertility (USV backed) and Primer (Founders Fund backed). Prior to angel investing Julia was one of the first 10 employees at Opendoor seeing their hyper-growth first hand in many different roles from Head of Seller Experience to being General Manager of Pheonix & City Operations. Before Opendoor, Julia spent 3 years as a consultant at Bain. If that was not enough, Julia is also an avid cyclist and is setting up a women's cycling apparel line alongside her investing.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Julia made her way into the world of startups with Opendoor from Bain and how that position at Opendoor led to her angel investing? What were the 1-2 takeaways for Julia from her time at Opendoor that have most impacted how she angel invests today?
2.) Customer Discovery: When is the right time to engage in deep customer discovery work? How does one select the customers to go deep with? How does Julia structure the process? What questions are most revealing? Where do many go wrong? How does one determine the feedback to accept vs which to reject?
3.) How does Julia think about implementing systems for growth? What is the structure of these systems? Where does one start? How does Julia determine the metrics to track and focus on? How does Julia balance between growth vs profitability?
4.) Does Julia believe people can really scale with the company? What are the leading indicators that people are struggling to scale with the company? How does Julia advise generalists to survive and thrive in a scaling organisation? Should they specialise?
5.) What have been some of Julia biggest lessons of what it takes to be successful as an angel today? Who has Julia learned and gained the most from in this new discipline? How does Julia measure her own success as an angel? What are the core challenges?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Julia’s Fave Book: The Courage To Be Disliked: How to free yourself, change your life and achieve real happiness
Julia’s Most Recent Investment: Primer: Homeschool with superpowers
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is the 20 minute VC and I'm so excited for the episode today. I've heard so many good things |
| 0:04.1 | both from founders and VC friends of mine about this guest. A phenomenal operator now turned |
| 0:08.7 | angel investor and one that I've actually co-invested with and so with that I'm very excited to |
| 0:12.8 | welcome Julia DeWal to the hot seat today. Now Julia is one of the rising stars of the Silicon |
| 0:17.3 | Valley angel investor community with a portfolio including the lights of linear, Sequoia backed, modern fertility, backed by USV, and Primer backed by Founders Fund. |
| 0:26.4 | Prior to angel investing, Julia was one of the first 10 employees at Open Door, seeing their |
| 0:30.8 | hypergrowth firsthand in many different roles from head of seller experience to being general |
| 0:35.1 | manager of Phoenix and City operations. Before |
| 0:37.7 | Open Door, Julia spent three years as a consultant at Bain. And if that wasn't enough, |
| 0:41.8 | Julia is also an avid cyclist and is now setting up a women's cycling of power line alongside |
| 0:46.4 | her investing. I absolutely love that. And I do also want to say a huge thank you to Mike |
| 0:50.3 | Vernal at Sequoia and J.D. Ross at Atomic for the fantastic question suggestions today. |
| 0:55.0 | I really do so appreciate that. But before we move into the show today, I'm sure you've heard about it, |
| 0:59.6 | but my word, this is a product I love, Carter. Carter simplifies how startups and investors manage |
| 1:04.7 | equity, track cap tables, and get valuations. Go to Carter.com forward slash 20 VC to get 10% off. More than 800,000 employees and |
| 1:13.5 | shareholders use Carter to manage hundreds of billions of dollars in equity, and Carter now offers |
| 1:18.3 | fund administration. So you can see in real time data in the Carter platform and work with Carter's |
| 1:23.6 | team of experienced fund accountants. Again, go to carter.com forward slash 20 VC to get 10% off. |
| 1:30.0 | And speaking of amazing products you've heard about with Carter there, last month I had Jeff |
| 1:33.7 | Zibbert and Wayne Chang on the show from Digges. Simply put, they're two of the best founders |
| 1:37.9 | that I've ever met and they're creating the most intuitive financial software that you've |
| 1:41.6 | ever seen or used, automatically analyzing your |
... |
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