20VC: Nuzzel's Jonathan Abrams on Why The Top VCs Do Not Have A PlayBook For Startup Success, Why Most Boards Are Not Successful & Why He Is Bored Of Hearing "I Fell Into VC"
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
The Twenty Minute VC
4.4 • 637 Ratings
🗓️ 25 August 2017
⏱️ 29 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Jonathan Abrams is the Founder and CEO @ Nuzzel, the startup that offers personalised news discovery and curated newsletters for busy professionals. They have backing from some of the investing greats including Marc Andreesen, Naval Ravikant, Homebrew, SoftTech and Lowercase just to name a few. Prior to Nuzzel, Jonathan was the Founder of early social media machine, Friendster attaining funding from Benchmark, Kleiner and Reid Hoffman. Jonathan is also a prolific angel investor counting AngelList, Docker, Front, Instacart, and Slideshare amongst his portfolio.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Jonathan made his way into the world of startups and came to found Nuzzel?
2.) Why does Jonathan dislike it when he hears that a VC "fell into the industry"? Why does that not resonate with entrepreneurs? How can it be better phrased to align with operationally minded people?
3.) Why is Jonathan tired of hearing the word conviction from investors? Why does it not make sense to say you invest with conviction? How would Jonathan like to see the use of data to prove conviction-driven (high ownership) is optimal for fund returns?
4.) Does Jonathan believe there are too many seed funds in market today? Why does he believe we have seen a reduction in the numder of $'s going into seed companies? Does Jonathan believe the future is thematic for seed funds?
5.) Why does Jonathan believe the majority of boards "are just not very successful"? What does Jonathan believe makes a great board member? Likewise, what can entrepreneurs do to most effectively manage their board? Why do we need more operational people on boards?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Jonathan’s Fave Book: Beggars in Spain by Nanacy Kress
Jonathan’s Fave Blog: Strictly VC
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Jonathan 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 in a very special episode today as we welcome back a previous |
| 0:04.5 | guest and long-term friend of the show. Therefore, I'm thrilled to be joined in the hot seat today |
| 0:08.4 | by Jonathan Abrams, founder and CEO at Nuzzle, the startup that offers personalized news discovery |
| 0:13.9 | and curated newsletters for busy professionals. I do have to put our hands up here and say it is |
| 0:18.5 | one of our favourites. And they have backing from some of the investing greats of the day, including Mark Andresen, Naval Ravikant, Homebrew, SoftTech and |
| 0:26.0 | Lurcase, just to name a few. Prior to Nuzzle, Jonathan was the founder of early social media machine, |
| 0:30.6 | Friendster, attaining funding from Benchmark, Kleiner and Reid Hoffman. Jonathan's also a prolific angel investor, counting angel lists, Docker, front, |
| 0:38.2 | Instacot and slide share amongst his incredible portfolio. I'd also want to say a big thank |
| 0:42.4 | you to Matt Mazzeo for the intro to Jonathan today. It was a long time ago but so appreciated |
| 0:46.6 | and the start of a great friendship. So huge thanks for that, Matt. But before we head into today's |
| 0:51.0 | episode, Pendo helps companies create products that customers love. |
| 0:54.6 | It was founded when alumni from Raleigh, Google, Cisco and Red Hat combined their heads |
| 0:59.2 | and their hearts to build something they wanted but never had as product managers, a complete |
| 1:03.9 | platform for product teams. With Pendo, you can understand product usage and rapidly make |
| 1:08.5 | data-driven decisions. Survey users in-app for NPS and feedback. |
| 1:13.1 | Deliver contextual help to improve UX and user onboarding. |
| 1:16.4 | Promote new features in product to drive adoption without requiring any engineering |
| 1:20.5 | resources. |
| 1:21.4 | Pendo is the proven choice of innovative product leaders at Salesforce, optimizely, Citrix, |
| 1:26.3 | and many more leading companies. Learn more today at |
| 1:28.7 | go.pendo.io.io slash harry. That's go.pendo.com. But what if you're starting out in the industry and |
| 1:35.8 | want to learn to code? Like I was four years ago. I went to Treehouse, the online school where you can |
... |
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