Uber's First Investor, First Round Capital's Rob Hayes on How The Deal Of The Decade Originated and Why Product Orientated VC Is The Future
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
The Twenty Minute VC
4.4 • 637 Ratings
🗓️ 21 March 2016
⏱️ 29 minutes
🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS
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Summary
Rob Hayes is a partner at First Round Capital where he opened up the firm's San Francisco office. Over the past eight years, he has led investments in companies such as Mint.com (acquired by Intuit), Gnip (acquired by Twitter), Square, Uber, eero, and Planet Labs. Prior to joining First Round, Rob became the first venture investor at Omidyar Network, the investment firm started by eBay founder Pierre Omidyar. While there, he led most of the initial venture capital deals and later built and ran the technology investing group. Before that, Rob worked at Palm, where he product managed Palm OS and started the company's corporate venture fund.
1.) How Rob made his move into the VC world from working with Palm in the heyday?
2.) Question From David Hornik : How did Rob's seed investment in Uber originate? What made Rob invest? Did Rob realise the potential for Uber when he invested? When did Rob realize it was going to be huge?
3.) Has the investment in Uber changed how Rob views seed investing? Talking of the Uber’s of the world, how do you ensure that you find and decide to invest in the next Uber, when it raises a seed round?
4.) In terms of deal closing, how does Rob approach that element of the deal and what was the competition and closing environment around the Uber deal?
5.) Question from Satya at Homebrew: Stepping back and looking at First Round, what has changed in FRC’s approach as the firm has grown? How does the firm think about managing generational transition?
Items Mentioned In Today's Episode:
Rob's Fave Book:
Rob's Most Recent Investment:
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello and welcome back to another fantastic week of guests on the 20 minute VC with your host |
| 0:04.9 | Harry Stebbings. And if you cannot get enough of me, God, that sounds bad. But you know what I mean? |
| 0:10.4 | Then check out the official SaaS to podcast on iTunes, brought to you by Godfather of SaaS, |
| 0:15.5 | Jason Lentgen and I, where we have guests from the likes of Index, social capital and the world's leading SaaS companies. |
| 0:22.8 | However, back to today's show and I would like to thank our friend Bradfeld at Foundry Group |
| 0:27.1 | for the introduction to our guest today. So joining me, I'm thrilled to welcome Rob Hayes, |
| 0:32.1 | partner at First Round Capital, where Rob was actually the man who opened up First Round San Francisco |
| 0:37.4 | office. |
| 0:38.4 | And over the past eight years, Rob has led their investments in the likes of mint.com, acquired |
| 0:43.0 | by Intuit, Uber, Square, NIP acquired by Twitter, and Eero, just to name a few of their |
| 0:49.0 | incredible portfolio companies. |
| 0:51.1 | And prior to joining first round, Rob was the first venture investor at Omidyar Network, |
| 0:56.2 | the investment firm started by eBay founder Pierre Omidyar. While there, he led most of the |
| 1:01.4 | initial venture capital deals and later built and ran the technology investing group. Before that, |
| 1:06.6 | Rob worked at Palm, where he product managed Palm OS and started the company's corporate venture fund. |
| 1:12.7 | Before we dive into the show today, how many emails do you have in your inbox right now? |
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| 1:38.0 | Visit Sanebox.com forward slash 20 VC today and they'll throw in an extra $20 credit on top of the two week free trial. |
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... |
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