20VC: Greylock's Josh Elman on Why We Are Not In A Consumer Downturn, The Next Wave Of Social and What Twitter Should Do Next
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
The Twenty Minute VC
4.4 • 637 Ratings
🗓️ 4 April 2016
⏱️ 26 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
1.) How Josh made his move into the VC world from Twitter, Linkedin and Facebook?
2.) What were the biggest takeaways of watching fb, Linkedin and Twitter to hyper growth mode?
3.) Question from Jeff Seibert: What would Josh do with the Twitter product today??
4.) How would Josh apply his principles of the on boarding process to Twitter? What does he mean when he refers to the ladder of engagement?
5.) How does Josh respond to Fred Wilson's out on the consumer downturn? Is consumer really as hard as Fred makes it out to be? What sort of metrics really get Josh excited when viewing consumer startups?
6.) How has Josh's own investment decision making process been honed and refined since joining Greylock?
Items Mentioned In Today's Episode:
Josh's Fave Book:
Josh's Most Recent Investment:
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to the 20 minute VC with your host, Harry Stebbings, and I'm so excited for the week we have ahead for you, |
| 0:05.9 | as today marks the start of our very special feature week of the amazing team at Greylock Partners. |
| 0:11.3 | Now, joining me on the show today, I'm delighted to welcome Josh Elman. Wow, this one will be a tough one to do a short intro for. |
| 0:17.4 | So here goes. Josh is a partner at Greylock where he invests in entrepreneurs |
| 0:21.6 | building new consumer products and services. Josh himself specialises in designing, building and |
| 0:27.6 | scaling consumer products, having been part of multiple companies that have grown to more than |
| 0:32.0 | 100 million users. Before joining Greylock, Josh was the product lead for growth and relevance at |
| 0:37.2 | Twitter, growing Twitter's active user base by nearly 10x. |
| 0:41.1 | Prior to Twitter, Josh worked on the platform at Facebook and was an early employee at LinkedIn, helping to establish early models for user growth, and he even launched V1 of LinkedIn jobs. |
| 0:51.9 | If that's not enough for Josh, he currently serves on the boards of medium, |
| 0:55.7 | Mirkat, operator, Discord and Jelly. However, before we dive into the show with Josh, do I sound |
| 1:01.6 | fresh to you say, I feel fresh? Want to know why? It's because I slept on a Lisa mattress last |
| 1:06.8 | night. So what do I love about Lisa? Well, they've done away with the awkward mattress |
| 1:11.5 | showroom experience by creating a luxury premium foam mattress that's ordered completely online |
| 1:17.0 | and ships for free to your doorstep, compressed in a box. Now, their 10-inch mattress comes in all |
| 1:23.0 | sizes and is crafted with three unique foam layers, including two inches of memory foam, perfect for when |
| 1:29.3 | you get to my age and have a bit of a dodgy back. |
| 1:31.3 | And two inches of latex-like foam to keep you cool at night. |
| 1:36.3 | And even better, the mattress itself is made 100% in the US and UK, and it shipped for free |
| 1:41.3 | to anywhere in the US, UK and Canada. |
| 1:47.9 | Lisa also give you 100 nights to try your mattress risk-free. |
| 1:53.6 | So for every 10 they sell, they also donate one to a shelter, as if it couldn't get any better. |
... |
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