20VC: Investing $200m In Facebook, The 3 Stages of Founder Development & Why Creating A New User Behaviour Can Be Unit Economics Inefficient with Rahul Mehta, Managing Partner @ DST
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
The Twenty Minute VC
4.4 • 637 Ratings
🗓️ 24 July 2017
⏱️ 23 minutes
🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS
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Summary
Rahul Mehta is a Managing Partner @ DST, one of the world's leading late stage venture funds with a portfolio including the likes of Facebook, Twitter, Airbnb, Spotify and Alibaba just to name a few of the incredible companies they have backed. As for Rahul himself, he leads the firm's efforts in the US, Indonesia and India where he led deals in Snapchat, Slack, Ola Cabs, Houzz and Zalando. As a result of this incredible portfolio, Rahul was listed to the Forbes Midas List in 2016.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Rahul made the way from tech investment banking to one of the leading growth funds of all time with Yuri Milner investing in Facebook?
2.) Having invested in the likes of Facebook, Snap and Alibaba, how does Rahul assess the leadership teams of some of today's leading players? What makes them the great leaders they are? How can leaders look to make the transition from Founder to CEO?
3.) Why does Rahul argue that founder led businesses are always best? What are the fundamental benefits to this? What hurdles do they have to face to remain CEO for the duration? Where does Rahul see commonalities of CEO's struggling?
4.) How does Rahul look to assess unit economics? What does Rahul have to see in the market to see the long term sustainability of unit economics? Why do companies sometimes have to have poor unit economics in the beginning?
5.) How does Rahul assess the balance of building competitive barriers to entry or focussing on aggressive expansion and being first to market? How does this differ according to sector and funding? How will this change in the future?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Rahul’s Fave Book: Open by Andre Agassi
Rahul's Most Recent Investment:Â Wish
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Rahul on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Snapchat here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | You are listening to the 20-minute VC with your host Harry Stebbings, and you can join me on Snapchat |
| 0:04.5 | at H. Stebbings with 2Bs to recommend future guests for the show and suggest questions for future |
| 0:09.8 | episodes. It'd be fantastic to see you there. But to this week, and this week we're doing a week of |
| 0:14.1 | opposites. So today we'll be joined by one of the world's leading late stage funds. Then on the |
| 0:18.9 | alternate spectrum on Wednesday, we'll have one of the new seed |
| 0:21.6 | funds on the block joining us, and then on Friday, we'll have the contradiction in terms of the founder |
| 0:26.1 | who argues for the benefits of growing slow, not fast. But to the show today, and I'm thrilled to be |
| 0:30.9 | joined by Rahul Meta, managing partner at DST, one of the world's leading late stage venture |
| 0:35.9 | funds with a portfolio including the |
| 0:37.6 | likes of, check this out, Facebook, Twitter, Airbnb, Spotify and Ali Barbar, just to name a few |
| 0:43.6 | from the incredible portfolio. As for Rahul himself, he leads the firm's efforts in the US, Indonesia |
| 0:48.8 | and India, where he led deals in Snapchat, Slack, Ola-cabs, Howes, and Zolando, just to name a few. |
| 0:55.2 | As a result of this incredible portfolio, Rahul was listed to the Forbes Midas list in 2016. |
| 1:00.4 | I do also want to say a huge thank you to Eric at Kleiner Perkins for the intro to Rahul today, |
| 1:04.7 | without which this episode would not have been possible. |
| 1:07.0 | But before we dive into the show today, I want to tell you about WePay. |
| 1:10.2 | WePay helps online platforms |
| 1:11.9 | increase revenue through integrated payments processing, constant contact, equid and GoFundMe use |
| 1:17.4 | WePay. Why? Because WePay uniquely helps platforms offer ROI positive integrated payments to their |
| 1:23.1 | users, within their U.X and without taking on fraud and regulatory exposure, others make you |
| 1:27.7 | trade off between UX friction or fraud, not WePay. WePay also offers award-winning support and can |
| 1:33.0 | even work with your team through Slack or Zendesk. Get the payments revenue you want without |
... |
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