Fifty Years’ Seth Bannon: “Passing the Mr. Burns test”

The Times Tech Podcast

Will Morley

Business, Unknown, Technology

4.9 • 654 Ratings

🗓️ 24 January 2020

⏱️ 46 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

The Sunday Times tech correspondent Danny Fortson brings on Seth Bannon, founder of venture capital firm Fifty Years, to talk about targeting the truly big problems (1:00), why it took 18 months to raise $5m (2:40), targeting lab-grown meat (6:30), getting the met lobby on their side (8:30), backing birth control (12:00), taking left-field approaches to climate (13:50), taking advantage of the Silicon Valley cultural crisis (17:15), the need for big winners (21:00), the slow death of the Fridman doctrine (26:00), how he started out as a young idealist (28:30), (33:30), when he faked it but didn’t make it (38:20), confessing his sins (41:05), and his worst day of work (42:15).

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Yeah, technology.
0:03.0	What is it all about?
0:04.0	We have something we call the Mr. Burns test.
0:06.0	So Mr. Burns is this character on The Simpsons.
0:09.0	He's basically the prototype of a greedy industrial capitalist.
0:12.0	Doesn't care about anyone but himself.
0:13.0	We want to see companies that have a path to making a product that Mr. Burns would choose, right?
0:20.0	Because it's the cheapest, highest quality, most convenient, and oh, by the way, it's sustainable.
0:24.6	Because this is really the only way you can pull the lever of capitalism to solve these big problems really quickly.
0:34.6	Hello and welcome to Danny in the Valley, your weekly dispatch behind the scenes and inside the minds of the top people in tech. I am your host, Danny Fortson. Thank you for tuning in. We have got yet another good one for you today. As you may have guessed, I am not in Davos this week.
0:55.4	Obviously, my invite must have been lost in the post.
0:58.5	It's tragic, really.
0:59.8	So instead of traipsing around the frozen alpine conditions,
1:04.6	I chose to walk up a very steep hill in San Francisco instead.
1:10.2	To the headquarters of 50 years, which is a venture capital firm with a difference
1:14.3	in that they are focused on climate change and other very big kind of global problems.
1:21.2	So what they're not looking for is the next social media app or enterprise software startup.
1:27.4	That's not really their thing.
1:29.3	And I had met the co-founder, or rather spoke with the co-founder, Seth Bannon,
1:33.3	on a story I wrote a couple months ago about what Silicon Valley was,
1:38.3	or rather what it was not doing around climate change.
1:41.3	I enjoyed the conversation, so I thought we should just do it
	...

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