20VC: What Is The Big Lie To Silicon Valley, Why Silicon Valley Is No Longer Optimised For Deep Tech Investing & Why AI Will Lead To More Business Model Innovation Than Technology Innovation with Tim Harris, Founder & CEO @ Swift Navigation
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
The Twenty Minute VC
4.4 • 637 Ratings
🗓️ 1 September 2017
⏱️ 24 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Tim Harris is the Founder & CEO @ Swift Navigation, the startup focused on building a world-class organization that will power the next generation of GPS-enabled robots and autonomous vehicles. They have raised over $45m in VC funding from some of our favourites including the likes of First Round, Felicis, Lemnos Labs and NEA. As for Tim, prior to Swift Tim held numerous roles from supply chain consulting to corporate finance encapsulating strategic partnerships and M&A.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Tim made his way from supply chain consulting to providing navigation for an automated future with Swift?
2.) Why does Tim believe that Silicon Valley is no longer optimised for deep tech creation and investing? Why does Tim believe we have seen the transition in Silicon Valley from technology innovation to business model innovation? Is this a problem?
3.) Tim has said before "there is a big lie to Silicon Valley", what is that lie? How does Tim assess unit economics with regards to deep tech businesses? How does he look to evaluate the viability of a deep tech business model? What are the core components?
4.) From the VC perspective, does Tim believe deep tech is an attractive investment opportunity for the current investor class? How does Tim respond to the longer exit cycles and higher capital intensity of deep tech? Does this create inherently frothy environments for valuations given the dilutive element?
5.) How does Tim view the working together of incumbents and deep tech startups? Is this an environment of consolidation, partnership or over arching disruption? What are the core questions founders must ask when considering a partnership?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Tim’s Fave Book: Meditations by Marcus Aurelius
Tim’s Fave Blog: First Round Review
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | It's Friday and we're back with another episode of Founders Friday here on the 20 minute VC |
| 0:03.9 | with me, Harry Stebbings, at H. Stebbings 1996 on Instagram. |
| 0:08.2 | Oh yes, we've gone for a different platform today with Instagram. |
| 0:10.7 | But to the show today, and my love of deep tech is really coming to the fall with this show, |
| 0:14.4 | as I'm thrilled to welcome Tim Harris, founder and CEO at Swift Navigation. |
| 0:18.3 | The startup focused on building a world-class organization that will |
| 0:21.5 | power the next generation of GPS-enabled robots and autonomous vehicles. They've raised over |
| 0:26.4 | 45 million in VC funding from some of our favorites, including the likes of first-round, Felisysis, |
| 0:31.7 | Lemnos Labs, and NEA, just to name a few. As for Tim, prior to Swift, Tim held numerous roles |
| 0:36.6 | from supply chain consulting |
| 0:37.9 | to corporate finance encapsulating strategic partnerships and M&A. I'd also have to say a huge |
| 0:42.9 | thank you to Jonathan Downey at Airwear and Renata Quintini at Lux capsule for the intro to Tim today, |
| 0:47.8 | without which this episode would not have been possible. But before we head into today's episode, |
| 0:51.9 | Pendo helps companies create products that customers love. |
| 0:54.9 | It was founded when alumni from Raleigh, Google, Cisco and Red Hat, combined their heads and |
| 0:59.8 | their hearts to build something they wanted but never had as product managers, a complete platform for product teams. |
| 1:05.9 | With Pendo, you can understand product usage and rapidly make data-driven decisions. |
| 1:10.3 | Survey users in-app for NPS and feedback. |
| 1:13.4 | Deliver contextual help to improve UX and user onboarding. |
| 1:16.7 | Promote new features in product to drive adoption without requiring any engineering |
| 1:20.8 | resources. |
| 1:21.8 | Pendo is the proven choice of innovative product leaders at Salesforce, optimiz, Cytrics and many |
... |
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