20VC: How Founders Should Think Through Distribution and Customer Acquisition Today, The Challenges of the Digital Advertising Duopoly Currently & How To Structure Company Post Mortems Effectively with Gabriel Weinberg, Founder & CEO @ DuckDuckGo
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
The Twenty Minute VC
4.4 • 637 Ratings
🗓️ 14 February 2020
⏱️ 32 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Gabriel Weinberg is the Founder & CEO @ DuckDuckGo, the Internet privacy company that empowers you to seamlessly take control of your personal information online, without any tradeoffs. Over the last 12 years, Gabe has scaled DuckDuckGo to doing 1.6Bn private searches every month, a team of 83 full time fully remote employees, raising funding from some of the best in the business; USV and most importantly, being a profitable company. If that was not enough, Gabe has also written two phenomenal books, Traction and Super Thinking.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Gabriel made his way into the world of startups and came to found one of today's leading search engines and privacy companies in DuckDuckGo?
2.) Gabriel decided to raise $13M from USV 4 years into the life of DDG, why did he believe that was the right time? Why does Gabe believe that DDG never needed any primary capital? How does Gabe advise founders to think when it comes to chasing profitability early? How does Gabe view the relationship between growth and capital? Are they in conflict or aligned? What does Gabe make of the many $100M rounds getting done today?
3.) How does Gabe feel about the lack of free and open distribution today? How does Gabe strategise when it comes to channel diversification? What is the right level of marketing channel diversification to have? How do you know when to really double down on one that is working? How should founders be thinking about channel saturation rates? What have been Gabes biggest lessons on payback period over the last 12 years with DDG?
4.) How does Gabe feel about the digital advertising duopoly on the internet between Facebook and Google? Why does Gabe argue that this duo of incumbents are so much more powerful than any other prior generation of incumbents? How does Gabe think about strategies to reduce their data monopolies?
5.) DDG is 83 people and fully remote, what have been Gabe's biggest lessons on what it takes to run a fully-remote team from Day 1? What mistakes did they make? WHat would Gabe advise founders contemplating the fully remote strategy? Why does Gabe have nor formal hierarchy or org chart internally at DDG? Why is this so important for culture and employee morale?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Gabe’s Fave Book: The Advantage: Why Organizational Health Trumps Everything Else In Business
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Gabe on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Instagram here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | You are listening to The 20 Minute VC and Founders Friday with me, Harry Stebbings, and I always |
| 0:03.8 | love your feedback on the show and I respond to all messages on Instagram at H. Stebbings, 1996 with |
| 0:09.0 | 2Bs, and it would be so great to see you there. But to the show today, and I've wanted to do this |
| 0:13.2 | one for a very long time now, having been a fan of this guest's two books, and so I'm thrilled that we can make this happen today. And so with that, I'm delighted to welcome Gabriel Weinberg, founder and CEO at Duck Duck Go, the internet privacy company that empowers you to |
| 0:26.3 | seamlessly take control of your personal information without any trade-offs. Over the last 12 years, |
| 0:31.9 | Gabor scaled Duck, Duck Go to doing over 1.6 billion searches every month, a team of 83 fully remote full-time employees, |
| 0:40.0 | and also raising funding from some of the best in the business, USV, and also most importantly, |
| 0:44.7 | being a profitable company. And if that wasn't enough, Gabe was also written to phenomenal |
| 0:48.6 | books, which you have to check out, traction and super thinking. But before we dive into the show |
| 0:53.3 | today, I'm sure you've heard about it, |
| 0:54.8 | but my word, I just love the Carter product. Carter simplifies how startups and investors |
| 0:59.4 | manage equity, track cap tables, and get valuations. Go to Carter.com forward slash 20VC to get 10% |
| 1:06.6 | off. More than 800,000 employees and shareholders now use Carter to manage hundreds of billions of |
| 1:12.1 | dollars in equity, and Carter now offers fund admin, so you can see real-time data in the Carter |
| 1:16.9 | platform and work with Carter's team of experienced fund accountants. Again, go to carter.com |
| 1:22.1 | forward slash 20 VC to get 10% off. I really do so love that product. But to get a deal done, you really need to |
| 1:28.7 | build that relationship and there's nothing like meeting face to face. And there's nothing like |
| 1:32.5 | Zoom to make that happen. Zoom lets you connect and do business across town or across the world. |
| 1:37.9 | Zoom ties together all of your communication needs into one easy platform for video conferencing, |
| 1:43.4 | phone calls, group chat, webinars and your |
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| 1:50.5 | room. And Zoom is how business gets done. Get your free account at zoom.com today. Meet happy |
... |
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