20VC: How To Design Investment Decision Making That Allows For Outliers, Why Personal Voice Computing Is The Next Big Platform & The Challenges That Could Prevent It with David Beisel, Founding Partner @ NextView Ventures
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
The Twenty Minute VC
4.4 • 637 Ratings
🗓️ 16 August 2017
⏱️ 20 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
David Beisel is a co-founder and Partner at NextView Ventures, one of the East Coast's leading early stage funds with their recent $50m seed fund being announced just this month. David was most recently a Vice President at Venrock and previously a Principal at Masthead Venture Partners. Prior to becoming a venture capitalist, David co-founded Sombasa Media, an e-mail marketing company best known for its flagship product BargainDog. Sombasa was successfully acquired by About.com where David served as Vice President of Marketing.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How David made his way into the world of early stage venture and came to co-found NextView?
2.) How did Nextview design an investment decision-making process that allows for outliers to get through? How does this change with the decision for follow on investment?
3.) Why should firms write investment memos for every investment, regardless of stage and sector? How can firms implement a voting process that is both rigourous yet innovative?
4.) Why is David so excited by the voice computing space? With incumbents like Google and Amazon dominating, where is the opportunity for startups to play? Why does David believe that voice is the most natural user interface possible?
5.) Why does David believe distribution is one of the biggest challenges facing startups today? What does David look for in founders that suggest inherent knowledge of marketing and distribution prowess?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
David’s Fave Book: Look Homeward, Angel
David’s Fave Blog: Gotham Voices, Hearing Voices
David’s Most Recent Investment: Skyways
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and David on Twitter here!
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | We are back for another episode of the 20 minute VC with the dulcet British tones of me, |
| 0:04.2 | Harry Stebbings, at H. Stebbings with 2Bs on Snapchat, and I'd love to see you there and hear |
| 0:08.7 | your suggestions for future guests to have on the show, where you can submit them on Snapchat. |
| 0:12.7 | However, to the show today, and this is a firm that I'm a huge believer in, having featured |
| 0:16.5 | the lights of previous founders Rob Go and Lee Howe previously. I'm thrilled to welcome David Bicel to the hot seat to date. |
| 0:22.4 | David is a co-found and partner at Next View Ventures, one of the East Coast's leading early stage funds, |
| 0:27.8 | with their recent 50 million seed fund being announced just this month. A huge congratulations to them for that. |
| 0:32.7 | David was also most recently a vice president at Venrock and previously a principal at Mastead Venture Partners. |
| 0:38.5 | Prior to becoming a venture capitalist, David co-founded Sombasa Media, an email marketing |
| 0:42.7 | company best known for its flagship product, bargain dog. |
| 0:45.8 | Sombasa was successfully acquired by About.com, where David served as vice president of marketing. |
| 0:50.6 | I'd also have to say a huge thank you to both Lee Hauer and Rob Go for the intro to David |
| 0:54.5 | today, without which this episode would not have been possible. But before we head into today's |
| 0:58.7 | episode, Pendo helps companies create products that customers love. It was founded when alumni from |
| 1:03.6 | Raleigh, Google, Cisco and Red Hat combined their heads and their hearts to build something |
| 1:08.4 | they wanted but never had as product managers, a complete |
| 1:11.5 | platform for product teams. With Pendo, you can understand product usage and rapidly make data |
| 1:16.5 | driven decisions. Survey users in-app for NPS and feedback, deliver contextual help to improve |
| 1:22.4 | UX and user onboarding, promote new features in product to drive adoption without requiring any engineering |
| 1:28.1 | resources. Pendo is the proven choice of innovative product leaders at Salesforce, optimise, |
| 1:33.4 | Leacetrix and many more leading companies. Learn more today at go.pendo.io.com slash harry, that's |
| 1:39.2 | go.combo.com. But what if you're starting out in the industry and want to learn to code? |
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