Special: Ho Nam from Altos Ventures — A Different Approach to VC

Acquired

Ben Gilbert and David Rosenthal

Venturecapital, Ma, Investing, Acquisitions, Startups, Vc, Investment, Business, Technology

4.8 • 2.9K Ratings

🗓️ 21 June 2021

⏱️ 110 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

What do you get when you combine Berkshire Hathaway's approach with early-stage venture capital? Altos Ventures. We're joined by Altos's wonderful Ho Nam to discuss their highly unusual approach to VC, which has resulted in them becoming significant shareholders in great companies like Roblox, Coupang, Woowa Brothers and Krafton (makers of PUBG). This episode is an absolute must-listen for anyone in our industry — Ho is one of the best and most under-the-radar thinkers in Silicon Valley, and has many lessons to offer us all!

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Topics covered:

Altos's 13-year+ journey with Roblox, and how they deployed over $400m into the company out of an $86m fund
Altos's heritage in Jack McDonald's Investments class at Stanford GSB, and the influence of Jack, Phil Fisher and Warren & Charlie
How Altos successfully "value invests" in venture capital, and reconciling cashflow potential with growth
"Good fundraisers" vs. "bad fundraisers" and correlation with returns
Altos's unique fund structure and how they're architected to stay with companies longer than a typical venture capital firm
Ho's Twitter presence and how (and why) he went from de minimus followers to one of the top FinTwit accounts in a few months

Links:

Ho's amazing Twitter presence: https://twitter.com/honam
Ho's "Foxes and Hedgehogs" post: https://altos.vc/blog/foxes-and-hedgehogs
Ho's "How do you know?" post: https://altos.vc/blog/howdoyouknow
Ho's "Venture Lotto" post: https://www.altos.vc/blog/venture-lotto
Sam Walton's Made in America: https://www.amazon.com/Sam-Walton-Made-America/dp/0553562835

Transcript

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0:00.0	I feel like I know you guys because I listen to you guys on your podcast and it's really fascinating
0:05.4	because I think the three part series on Berkshire is kind of like is your signature piece because
0:11.6	I think you guys said it's like oh geez you know you never thought you could go beyond two hours
0:15.6	and I know you guys have to cut a whole bunch of stuff out just to fit it into six hours right now
0:21.1	but there's nobody who goes into the depth like you guys and so it's great to talk to you guys here
0:30.6	welcome to this special episode of acquired the podcast about great technology companies and the
0:41.8	stories and playbooks behind them I'm Ben Gilbert and I am the co-founder and managing director
0:47.1	of Seattle based pioneer square labs and our venture fund PSL ventures and I'm David Rosenthal
0:53.5	and I am an angel investor based in San Francisco and we are your hosts
0:59.7	on today's show we have a guest that both David and I have looked up to for years
1:04.8	ho nom from alto's ventures without giving too much away in this early intro I will say that
1:12.0	this episode could be summed up as what if you tried to be a value investor with Berkshire
1:18.0	Hathaway's principles but for early stage technology companies this episode is the perfect cousin
1:24.2	to everything that we talked about on the Berkshire trilogy now before we dive in I want to say
1:30.0	first if you are new here join us in the acquired slack we'll be talking about this episode and
1:36.2	everything going on in the tech and investing news of the day that's acquired.fm slash slack
1:42.8	this is a great time to tell you about one of our very favorite companies crucio so
1:48.5	crucio as listeners know by now is a clean compute cloud provider specifically built for AI
1:54.8	workloads in video is one of their major partners and literally crucio's data centers are nothing
1:59.9	but racks and racks of a 100s and each 100s and because crucio's cloud is purpose built for AI
2:06.0	and run on wasted stranded or clean energy they can provide significantly better performance per
2:11.1	dollar than traditional cloud providers. Yes we talked about that on our acq2 episode with
	...

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