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This Week in Startups

E981: Roy Bahat, Head of Bloomberg Beta, shares the myths of venture capital, the great value of founders turned investors, why VCs reject startups, searing insights on fundraising & valuations, and predictions on the future of enterprise, AI, work & automation @ LAUNCH Accelerator

This Week in Startups

Jason Calacanis

Technology

4.41.3K Ratings

🗓️ 27 September 2019

⏱️ 72 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

1:00 Jason Demant intros Roy Bahat
3:14 Roy's thoughts on raising venture capital
4:14 Debunking the myth of pitching VCs
9:24 Two questions VCs ask themselves after hearing a pitch, and how founders can apply them
15:33 The startup paradox
18:04 Does Bloomberg Beta keep up with companies they passed on?
19:51 Selection bias in Silicon Valley
25:32 Why Angel $ from venture-backed founders is so valuable
28:30 Top reasons Roy rejects companies
31:38 Importance of trust founder-investor relationships
34:41 How Roy thinks about valuation & pricing
40:13 Understanding how investors make money
44:18 Roy's thoughts on pitch decks
47:45 How to tell if a VC is interested based on emails
49:40 Pre-qualifying VCs based on your business
51:04 Importance of Founders taking secondary
54:00 How does Roy process upside?
55:40 Roy's views on the future of work regarding creatives
1:01:10 Difficulty of raising different rounds
1:02:00 Investment thesis of Bloomberg Beta
1:05:50 Dealing with rejection from VCs
1:07:40 Raising children in the technological age

Transcript

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0:00.0

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0:33.0

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0:39.0

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0:45.0

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0:50.3

launch scale in San Francisco October 7th and 8th, at LaunchScale.net slash tickets.

1:00.0

Roy is, as I'm sure you heard earlier,

1:02.0

the head of Bloomberg Beta, so they focus... Roy is, as I'm sure you heard earlier,

1:02.7

the head of Bloomberg Beta.

1:04.2

So they focus on investing in the future of work,

1:06.4

specialty in machine intelligence.

1:08.8

75 million dollar fund, at least according to LinkedIn,

1:11.2

so who knows if that's right.

1:14.0

If you haven't checked out their site, I highly recommend it.

1:16.5

It is the only VC firm that I know that redirects to GitHub

1:20.5

and then has a bunch of documents and a little repo around what they do.

...

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