Interview with Alex Taussig from Highland Capital Partners

Interview with Alex Taussig from Highland Capital Partners INTRODUCTIONMartin: Hi, today we are in  Menlo Park,  in the Highland Capital Partners office with Alex. Alex, who are you and what do you do?Alex: Haha Hi, good to have you guys here. My name is Alex Taussig, Im a ventures capitals partner at Highland Capital Partners. We are a 26 year old venture capital firm with offices all around the world, and we invest in early stage technology companies. So, thats both enterprise companies, everything from infrastructure software to application software to consumer internet companies, market places, social media, all that kind of stuff. So, weve been around, as I said, for a while.In  Boston,  we have our offices where we started the firm. We also have our office out here, as well as in  Geneva  and in  Shanghai.Martin: Great! Awesome.Martin: Can you tell us a little bit about your background? What did you do before you started being a venture capitalist?Alex: So I have a bit of unconventional background in some sense. For a long time growing up, I thought I was going to be a professor. So I was on an academic track for the most of my life. Started labs when I was a teenager and did a lot different types of research expose into a lot of different technology in bioinformatics, computer vision. I ended up doing physics and materials engineering. Physics is an undergrad and then materials engineering as a grad student at MIT.It was some point during the grad school days, I got a little bit bored of research. Its a bit of a slower pace than we find in the startup world. And at the same time, Ive known a lot of folks that I went to college with at Harvard, who had come out to the Valley to start a companies or a lot of them at that point of time, theyre actually going to Microsoft and then come to the Valley. That would seem to be a lot of pattern. And I was at Harvard when Facebook started, so it was part of this generation of sort of new entrepreneurs and decided that I wanted to be part of that in someway. And at the time , someone had told me about venture capital, which is sort of this of interesting intermediary between people that make the technology and the financial markets. And having grown up in New York City, and been in around the finance community in my whole life, I thought it would be a nice marriage of my passions for sort of helping capitalized businesses and then also working with technologists to help bringing their stuff out of the lab, out of the confined of small, little dimly-lit rooms into the real world and serving customers. So I decided to venture capital, Id like to  learn more about what that was.So I ended up going to business school. I left MIT, got out of PhD program and decided to get a Masters instead, so I wrote my thesis. And then I went over to HBS,  Harvard  Business  School  and joined  Highland  out of business school.So Ive been with  Highland  for about 5.5 years now. And started working in our  Boston  office with one of our founders very closely. So that was sort of my apprenticeship, if you will. I worked very closely with him on a number of companies in the security software space, dataware housing. We invested in a robotics company, which I’m happy to talk about. Its pretty cool stuff.So we like really technically complex problems and really amazing engineering founders. And thats really what Ive been doing pretty much ever since. And I moved out here about 2.5 years ago to help build our West Coast office. And thats kind of what Ive been doing. But Im sort of a career venture capitalist and Im inspired by great innovations and great engineers. Id like to help them explore their transition from inventing great technology and moving it to the real world.Martin: Actually from my point of view, there are a lot of similarities between being a professor, entrepreneur or venture capitalist by building up hypothesis and testing them. The only thing is that, as a professor maybe you can only do the theoretical stuff, but as an entrepreneu r and a VC you also see the consequences.Alex: Well in a laboratory, you’re still isolated from the real world, you know. I worked on a project that was trying to create computer chips that ran on light. So, instead of electricity, the computer chip that runs on light. Thats a big idea, right. We were totally, I mean as a student I was totally unaware that Intel would just like totally control this market. Theres no hope for commercializing this technology as a small company.Had I known, had I come from the business background, I probably would have figured out earlier, right. But with that being said, you know, you do a lot of really cutting edge stuff in the lab, but you do it as sort of scale and with a sort of mentorship that doesnt really guide you down to the commercial route.  I think that we still have a lot of work to do on a model that transitions a laboratory research out into the real world. You know, Stanford over here has done a great job at it. MIT is doing a  good job, Harvard is doing a descent job, but there’s  still a lot of work to do. And I think coming from that world, I can I kind of walk in both pair of shoes if you will.I see some similarities, there’s a good amount of   hypothesis-driven testing you refer to, but the practicality is quite different. The emphasis here if its not valuable to customer, its not valuable to work on. Which is very different than academia.HIGHLAND CAPITAL PARTNERS INVESTMENT CRITERIAMartin: Let’s talk about Highland Capital Partners. What are the typical selection criteria for you to invest in a company? And maybe you can build some kind of matrix, depending on  ticket  size, industry, at what stage is the company, etc.Alex: Lots of different venture firms have different approaches. I think, we can talk about different stages of investing. At  Highland,  we are predominantly Series  A  investor. So were usually coming in as the first largest institutional investor in the company. Were usually the fi rst outside board director, thats not always the case, but its usually the case. We like to think that we have a mark on the early formation and growth of the company.  And at some point, more capital comes in and other board members come on board, but we like to be the trusted, kind of first person that makes a bet on a group of entrepreneurs.As such our criteria, different firms think about it differently. There are firms on this road here that focus a lot on market or they focus very much on the specifics of the product. I would say that my focus, and I think most of us here, tend to focus a lot on the team. We very much believe, that we want to be backing great founders who can really take it the whole way. So anytime, sort of a difficult exercise, cause youre thinking maybe 8, 9 years in the future, but we think that we have over 26 years to develop a decent pattern recognition on what makes founders really, the kind of people who can lead the whole way.  That doesnt mean that they always do, but we try to find those criteria. And if we look at our own history of our biggest wins as a firm, theyre usually the ones where the founders did go the whole way.So, what does that tell? For us, I think, in some sectors you need to bring to the table some sort of relevant expertise from that industry. Some sort of insight that you would have that a lay person thats walking into that business wouldnt have. I do think that having fresh perspective in some businesses is helpful. But if youre building a security software company, having a good history of knowing what features are valued by customers is really helpful because once you shipped your product, that  mission  is critical stuff, right.  So having the experience from the industry is very important.We often talk about magnetism, like with founders. Theres some people that, I dont know if youve met, but you just go, I really would love to work with that person. Theres a certain amount of optimism, a certain amo unt of what I call unflappableness. Someone who cant be taken off their path. And those types of people are very rare to find, but they believe in it so much themselves that other people are willing to take the risk and go with them on the journey. Thats something we look for.In some ways of shapes and forms that might be called leadership. But actually leadership has also some other characteristics as well. Leadership isnt just the ability to guide, get people to go on the journey with you, but its the ability to actually organize those people into a functioning organization.And so, even with very young founders, we look for people who have the ability to manage, who have the ability to partition the work and motivate and really help developed their employees.  This is not easy stuff. And its helpful if youve worked in a high function organization before and have seen these patterns, but even first time founders sometimes have a knack for that.If its a highly technical project, we look frankly for brilliant, world class engineers. The last company that I kind of let the investment for  Highland  is, the CTO is one of the guys who helped write Java. One of the other founders helped create MapReduce at Google. So we really look for people with world class technical talent, because what weve found is that there is, between a good engineer and a truly great engineer, theres like a whole order of magnitude in productivity. Its not just their productivity, its the other talent that they can attract to the team.  So when you back truly great people, they actually form this sucking sound in this industry where they get the best talent into that company. And that of course reinforces the companys success.Martin: How do you test this magnetism and on the other hand industry knowledge, given that you often times invest in companies that are trying to reshape an industry and which is most of the time you dont have direct insight in the industry as well?Alex: I mean the w ay we test the team aspect is, we do a lot of references. Ideally, the ideal situation is youve already worked for this person for 20 years, right. And you already have the evidence. It happens occasionally, every now and then. But a lot of times, teams come out of companies that were successful and start a new company. You may have known them by reputation, or you may know them socially, but youve never worked with them before.What we do there is, we do heavy, heavy deep reference checks. And we talk to lots of people that have worked with them, we talk to people that have work with them even like 20 years prior and we form in our own heads, a narrative about that persons career. And we try to understand what makes them successful, what are their strength, what are their weaknesses. And we form a thesis around the team.And, like I said, were not always right. But more often than not, we are. That often, when we are right, we actually find that those are the best companies. And so, personally when I go very deep on the team, and try to really understand, what theyre good at and what they need from us. And frankly, it helps us thinking about how we can be helpful as a partner. If this is a very strong technical team, but they dont really have a good business development sense, thats something we can try to bring to the table. We can try to find them someone. First of all, we can advice them on that. But we can also go try to find them someone to work in that function.So thats kind of how we  set that out.  I think the only thing you can do is, talk to people who have worked with them before and form an opinion about what they need.Martin: And how can you find out if some founder is really able to manage pivots? Like before, most of the time, the first year wont be the final idea when you execute a company.Alex: So that another great reason to back teams instead of  market sales. There is this idea that a great team will find a great market. The people that beli eve in the market say that, you could put Bill Gates and have him sell ice cream, and hell never build a 100 billion company because the market size for ice cream is only so big. Right.  So, its more of a religious  conviction,  but I think that great teams tend to find new opportunities.Weve had  companies in the past that started down on one direction and have made pivots into several, maybe several times, to the point where I think the good ones tend to stick in the same market, but they try to change the business model.So, a good example would be a portfolio company of ours called thredUP, which is an e-commerce company. When they started out, the idea was to basically to be able to exchange clothing with one another. So, you and I can trade our shirts, if we want to. That only has so much upside, because theres just not that many people whore willing to dig through other peoples closets and judge, I like that shirt has a little bit of stain on it, I really dont want that one, b ut Ill take that one. Its a lot of work for a consumer, right. And its actually a lot of work for a seller, because they have to figure out, they have to go take everything, photos and put it online.So, that company pivoted to become an e-commerce company. So meaning that theyll actually just buy things from you and they know what they can buy and what they shouldnt buy, and then they go sell it on the Internet. So for the consumer, it just looks like a normal e-commerce store. And for a seller, all they do is just put all their stuff they want to sell in a bag, and you send it in. They dont have to worry about it.  And thats when the business really took off. And thats when we invested.But the founders are 2 guys I went to business school with, and Ive known them for 5.5 years now. It took many years to really figure out what the right model was. But these guys, by the time they got there, they were experts on that market. There’s no one who knows that market better than these gu ys. And you have to be willing to support founders, while they figure that out because it sometimes not everything takes off right from the get go.We tried to back great people, who weve believed have the ability to figure what the right business is.Martin: Alex, Im very sure that you see so many pitches a year. Can you tell us a little bit about what makes a great pitch and then maybe tell us a little bit of some examples where you say, this was a great pitch because of X and this wasnt a good pitch because of Y?Alex: So any great pitch is a great story, right. The best pitchmen and pitchwomen are the best story tellers. So the best pitches Ive seen, have taken me through this opportunity. Youve got to get peoples attention right away. One of the things that kills me is, when people don’t tell you what the product is until half way through the deck. Tell me what youre building, tell me why youre building it, tell me why the world needs it. Take me on the journey, tell me who you are and why you guys are the most relevant people that actually go on this journey and convince me that its a journey worth going on together. And if you take that attitude as oppose to just kind of giving me a bunch of facts, I think that youre probably half way there. We of course, we decided if its a fit for us, but youll be surprised of how many people come in here and just regurgitate a bunch of facts about a market size and about product matrix  and stuff. And that works for later stage investors, whore more interested in just, I want to invest a dollar and get 3 dollars out.For us, were signing out for 8-9 years of work potentially, and we have to believe that this is going to change the world. We have to believe that any investment that we make is going to return our fund. Thats multi billion dollar company and to do that, you have to believe that its a generational type of opportunity. And for that, youll need to be able to tell us that story.Its not very specific feedback , but to be more specific, I think one of the most interesting thing Ive seen in the slide deck that I really liked, I really dont see this that often. It is the same company actually, thredUP. I remember when the CEO was pitching us, he said, heres what you have to believe to want to invest in my company. He said, if you dont believe these things you should not invest, and he listed them. And the interesting thing by doing that is, you kind of go through one-by-one, you go, Okay I believe that, I believe that, I believe that. And so like, then I should invest in the company.So he led me down this road and it was a very logical argument. I think more founders should take  that type of approach, where they are like, Look, theres a lot of risk in this venture. Heres what we believe. And if you believe what we believe, clearly theres a massive opportunity here. And it doesnt mean that were going to get there, we have to execute on it, but what we see is, look for is the optionality.Th ey look for, if the execution is good, can we actually have a huge opportunity? Its a huge upside. So thats what its all about. Its not about necessarily convincing them that theres no risk. Smart investors know theres risk. Its about convincing them that the upside is there. And for that, you need to believe in a certain set of things. If you dont believe them, youre not going to believe theres the upside.Martin: And when youre saying that, entrepreneurs tell you stories, do you mean that they should give you a big picture in terms of, Okay, in 5 to 10 years we would like to own that and that on that market, or do you want to say, This is what we want to do in the next 2 years?Alex: Theres the story, theres a combination, so heres what I say. Theres a 10 year road map. Like this is a 10 year vision, thats what I say. A 10 year vision and theres like a 6 month plan.  So youve got to believe in the 10 year vision, and you have to believe in the 6 month plan. Like whats the next logic al miles  from here to here.  So youve got to simultaneously sell both of those things.I remember when we have a company in our portfolio called 2U, which is an online education company that recently went public. I remember, the very first meeting with them, one of the founders said that, look theres plenty of online colleges you can go to, but they have the wrong incentives system. Like if you are, I dont know if you have this in Europe, but this for-profit education like  University  of  Phoenix, or Capella.Martin: Open university in the  UK, I guess.Alex: You borrow money from the government via Title IV, to go to school and then, so you load yourself up with debt as a student, and then you come out with a degree thats not that valuable actually, in a lot of cases. Or you may not even finish. Why is that an endemic problem? Well, its because they actually dont really have that much incentive for you to be a great, like have a great job and a great profession. Theyre kind of in a business of signing you up and covering their acquisition cost and then moving on to the next student. Thats how they make their money. And sure theyd like to keep paying your tuition, but if you ultimately not a successful in job market place, it doesnt really affect them.Whereas if you look at non-profit schools, like Harvard, or MIT or YALE or USC, or  Georgetown, whatever, great schools, theyre non-profits and their mission is just to educate people wholl go out into the world and have great careers. And they build their reputation on the fact that people are educated, and also can have a great career with the degree they get.And in particular with graduate degrees, its very, very tied to your career, because youve already graduated from college and youre going back to school because you want  to get to the next level in your career.So, instead of building another online school, lets go build a company that helps bring these non-profits on the internet, because then they can tak e their mission and take it global. You can go from being the number 10 program in your field to being the number 1, and we can help give you those tools to go online.  Were now align with our school partners. So to me, it was a very compelling vision of the future. I think in every vision of the future, where it actually ends up in retrospect working, its always a bit controversial when you first hear it.Like today, this was like 2009 or something when we first heard this. Today, online education is like, kind of going mainstream. Back then, it was not. So there was a lot of controversy. Will school sign up for this? Will school want online students coming to their universities? Will that dilute our brand? And it turns out, it was the best thing in the world for their brand. Because they basically, you know, there are students around the world that never heard of these guys and now theyre getting degrees and now theyre going into workplace and  people are seeing that on their resu me.So, its a transforming of a company but it was very controversial at the time, and require you to think differently, but the story made sense. If you believe this, if we can get there, this is a massive opportunity because were the first online education company that actually aligns with the students for outcomes.ADVICE TO ENTREPRENEURS FROM ALEX TAUSSIG In Palo Alto we talked with venture capitalist Alex Taussig about the investment process and investment criteria at Highland Capital Partners. Furthermore, Alex shares his learnings and advice for young entrepreneurs.The transcript of the interview is provided below.INTRODUCTIONMartin: Hi, today we are in  Menlo Park,  in the Highland Capital Partners office with Alex. Alex, who are you and what do you do?Alex: Haha Hi, good to have you guys here. My name is Alex Taussig, Im a ventures capitals partner at Highland Capital Partners. We are a 26 year old venture capital firm with offices all around the world, and we invest in early stage technology companies. So, thats both enterprise companies, everything from infrastructure software to application software to consumer internet companies, market places, social media, all that kind of stuff. So, weve been around, as I said, for a while.In  Boston,  we have our offices where we started the firm. We also have our office out here, as well as in  Geneva  and in  Shanghai.Martin: Great! Awesome.Martin: Can you tell us a little bit about your background? What did you do before you started being a venture capitalist?Alex: So I have a bit of unconventional background in some sense. For a long time growing up, I thought I was going to be a professor. So I was on an academic track for the most of my life. Started labs when I was a teenager and did a lot different types of research expose into a lot of different technology in bioinformatics, computer vision. I ended up doing physics and materials engineering. Physics is an undergrad and then materials engineering as a grad student at MIT.It was some point during the grad school days, I got a little bit bored of research. Its a bit of a slower pace than we find in the startup world. And at the same time, Ive known a lot of folks that I went to college with at Harvard, who had come out to the Valley to start a companies or a lot of them at that point of time, theyre actually going to Microsoft and then come to the Valley. That would seem to be a lot of pattern. And I was at Harvard when Facebook started, so it was part of this generation of sort of new entrepreneurs and decided that I wanted to be part of that in someway. And at the time, someone had told me about venture capital, which is sort of this of interesting intermediary between people that make the technology and the financial markets. And having grown up in New York City, and been in around the finance community in my whole life, I thought it would be a nice marriage of my passions for sort of helping capitalized businesses and then also working with technologists to help bringing their stuff out of the lab, out of the confined of small, little dimly-lit rooms into the real world and serving customers. So I decided to venture capital, Id like to  learn more about what that was.So I ended up going to business school. I left MIT, got out of PhD program and decided to get a Masters instead, so I wrote my thesis. And then I went over to HBS,  Harvard  Business  School  and joined  Highland  out of business school.So Ive been with  Highland  for about 5.5 years now. And started working in our  Boston  office with one of our founders very closely. So that was sort of my apprenticeship, if you will. I worked very closely with him on a number of companies in the security software space, dataware housing. We invested in a robotics company, which I’m happy to talk about. Its pretty cool stuff.So we like really technically complex problems and really amazing engineering founders. And thats really what Ive been doing pretty much ever since. And I moved out here about 2.5 years ago to help build our West Coast office. And thats kind of what Ive been doing. But Im sort of a career venture capitalist and Im inspired by great innovations and great engineers. Id like to help them explore their transition from inventing great technology and moving it to the real world.Martin: Actually from my point of view, there are a lot of similarities between being a professor, entrepreneur or venture capitalist by building up hypothesis and testing them. The only thing is that, as a professor maybe you can only do the theoretical stuff, but as an entrepreneur and a VC you also see the consequences.Alex: Well in a laboratory, you’re still isolated from the real world, you know. I worked on a project that was trying to create computer chips that ran on light. So, instead of electricity, the computer chip that runs on light. Thats a big idea, right. We were totally, I mean as a student I was totally unaware that Intel would just like totally control this market. Theres no hope for commercializing this technology as a small company.Had I known, had I come from the business background, I probably would have figured out earlier, right. But with that being said, you know, you do a lot of really cutting edge stuff in the lab, but you do it as sort of scale and with a sort of ment orship that doesnt really guide you down to the commercial route.  I think that we still have a lot of work to do on a model that transitions a laboratory research out into the real world. You know, Stanford over here has done a great job at it. MIT is doing a  good job, Harvard is doing a descent job, but there’s  still a lot of work to do. And I think coming from that world, I can I kind of walk in both pair of shoes if you will.I see some similarities, there’s a good amount of   hypothesis-driven testing you refer to, but the practicality is quite different. The emphasis here if its not valuable to customer, its not valuable to work on. Which is very different than academia.HIGHLAND CAPITAL PARTNERS INVESTMENT CRITERIAMartin: Let’s talk about Highland Capital Partners. What are the typical selection criteria for you to invest in a company? And maybe you can build some kind of matrix, depending on  ticket  size, industry, at what stage is the company, etc.Alex: Lots of diff erent venture firms have different approaches. I think, we can talk about different stages of investing. At  Highland,  we are predominantly Series  A  investor. So were usually coming in as the first largest institutional investor in the company. Were usually the first outside board director, thats not always the case, but its usually the case. We like to think that we have a mark on the early formation and growth of the company.  And at some point, more capital comes in and other board members come on board, but we like to be the trusted, kind of first person that makes a bet on a group of entrepreneurs.As such our criteria, different firms think about it differently. There are firms on this road here that focus a lot on market or they focus very much on the specifics of the product. I would say that my focus, and I think most of us here, tend to focus a lot on the team. We very much believe, that we want to be backing great founders who can really take it the whole way. So anyti me, sort of a difficult exercise, cause youre thinking maybe 8, 9 years in the future, but we think that we have over 26 years to develop a decent pattern recognition on what makes founders really, the kind of people who can lead the whole way.  That doesnt mean that they always do, but we try to find those criteria. And if we look at our own history of our biggest wins as a firm, theyre usually the ones where the founders did go the whole way.So, what does that tell? For us, I think, in some sectors you need to bring to the table some sort of relevant expertise from that industry. Some sort of insight that you would have that a lay person thats walking into that business wouldnt have. I do think that having fresh perspective in some businesses is helpful. But if youre building a security software company, having a good history of knowing what features are valued by customers is really helpful because once you shipped your product, that  mission  is critical stuff, right.  So having the experience from the industry is very important.We often talk about magnetism, like with founders. Theres some people that, I dont know if youve met, but you just go, I really would love to work with that person. Theres a certain amount of optimism, a certain amount of what I call unflappableness. Someone who cant be taken off their path. And those types of people are very rare to find, but they believe in it so much themselves that other people are willing to take the risk and go with them on the journey. Thats something we look for.In some ways of shapes and forms that might be called leadership. But actually leadership has also some other characteristics as well. Leadership isnt just the ability to guide, get people to go on the journey with you, but its the ability to actually organize those people into a functioning organization.And so, even with very young founders, we look for people who have the ability to manage, who have the ability to partition the work and motivate a nd really help developed their employees.  This is not easy stuff. And its helpful if youve worked in a high function organization before and have seen these patterns, but even first time founders sometimes have a knack for that.If its a highly technical project, we look frankly for brilliant, world class engineers. The last company that I kind of let the investment for  Highland  is, the CTO is one of the guys who helped write Java. One of the other founders helped create MapReduce at Google. So we really look for people with world class technical talent, because what weve found is that there is, between a good engineer and a truly great engineer, theres like a whole order of magnitude in productivity. Its not just their productivity, its the other talent that they can attract to the team.  So when you back truly great people, they actually form this sucking sound in this industry where they get the best talent into that company. And that of course reinforces the companys success.M artin: How do you test this magnetism and on the other hand industry knowledge, given that you often times invest in companies that are trying to reshape an industry and which is most of the time you dont have direct insight in the industry as well?Alex: I mean the way we test the team aspect is, we do a lot of references. Ideally, the ideal situation is youve already worked for this person for 20 years, right. And you already have the evidence. It happens occasionally, every now and then. But a lot of times, teams come out of companies that were successful and start a new company. You may have known them by reputation, or you may know them socially, but youve never worked with them before.What we do there is, we do heavy, heavy deep reference checks. And we talk to lots of people that have worked with them, we talk to people that have work with them even like 20 years prior and we form in our own heads, a narrative about that persons career. And we try to understand what makes them successful, what are their strength, what are their weaknesses. And we form a thesis around the team.And, like I said, were not always right. But more often than not, we are. That often, when we are right, we actually find that those are the best companies. And so, personally when I go very deep on the team, and try to really understand, what theyre good at and what they need from us. And frankly, it helps us thinking about how we can be helpful as a partner. If this is a very strong technical team, but they dont really have a good business development sense, thats something we can try to bring to the table. We can try to find them someone. First of all, we can advice them on that. But we can also go try to find them someone to work in that function.So thats kind of how we  set that out.  I think the only thing you can do is, talk to people who have worked with them before and form an opinion about what they need.Martin: And how can you find out if some founder is really able to ma nage pivots? Like before, most of the time, the first year wont be the final idea when you execute a company.Alex: So that another great reason to back teams instead of  market sales. There is this idea that a great team will find a great market. The people that believe in the market say that, you could put Bill Gates and have him sell ice cream, and hell never build a 100 billion company because the market size for ice cream is only so big. Right.  So, its more of a religious  conviction,  but I think that great teams tend to find new opportunities.Weve had  companies in the past that started down on one direction and have made pivots into several, maybe several times, to the point where I think the good ones tend to stick in the same market, but they try to change the business model.So, a good example would be a portfolio company of ours called thredUP, which is an e-commerce company. When they started out, the idea was to basically to be able to exchange clothing with one another . So, you and I can trade our shirts, if we want to. That only has so much upside, because theres just not that many people whore willing to dig through other peoples closets and judge, I like that shirt has a little bit of stain on it, I really dont want that one, but Ill take that one. Its a lot of work for a consumer, right. And its actually a lot of work for a seller, because they have to figure out, they have to go take everything, photos and put it online.So, that company pivoted to become an e-commerce company. So meaning that theyll actually just buy things from you and they know what they can buy and what they shouldnt buy, and then they go sell it on the Internet. So for the consumer, it just looks like a normal e-commerce store. And for a seller, all they do is just put all their stuff they want to sell in a bag, and you send it in. They dont have to worry about it.  And thats when the business really took off. And thats when we invested.But the founders are 2 guys I went to business school with, and Ive known them for 5.5 years now. It took many years to really figure out what the right model was. But these guys, by the time they got there, they were experts on that market. There’s no one who knows that market better than these guys. And you have to be willing to support founders, while they figure that out because it sometimes not everything takes off right from the get go.We tried to back great people, who weve believed have the ability to figure what the right business is.Martin: Alex, Im very sure that you see so many pitches a year. Can you tell us a little bit about what makes a great pitch and then maybe tell us a little bit of some examples where you say, this was a great pitch because of X and this wasnt a good pitch because of Y?Alex: So any great pitch is a great story, right. The best pitchmen and pitchwomen are the best story tellers. So the best pitches Ive seen, have taken me through this opportunity. Youve got to get peoples atten tion right away. One of the things that kills me is, when people don’t tell you what the product is until half way through the deck. Tell me what youre building, tell me why youre building it, tell me why the world needs it. Take me on the journey, tell me who you are and why you guys are the most relevant people that actually go on this journey and convince me that its a journey worth going on together. And if you take that attitude as oppose to just kind of giving me a bunch of facts, I think that youre probably half way there. We of course, we decided if its a fit for us, but youll be surprised of how many people come in here and just regurgitate a bunch of facts about a market size and about product matrix  and stuff. And that works for later stage investors, whore more interested in just, I want to invest a dollar and get 3 dollars out.For us, were signing out for 8-9 years of work potentially, and we have to believe that this is going to change the world. We have to believe that any investment that we make is going to return our fund. Thats multi billion dollar company and to do that, you have to believe that its a generational type of opportunity. And for that, youll need to be able to tell us that story.Its not very specific feedback, but to be more specific, I think one of the most interesting thing Ive seen in the slide deck that I really liked, I really dont see this that often. It is the same company actually, thredUP. I remember when the CEO was pitching us, he said, heres what you have to believe to want to invest in my company. He said, if you dont believe these things you should not invest, and he listed them. And the interesting thing by doing that is, you kind of go through one-by-one, you go, Okay I believe that, I believe that, I believe that. And so like, then I should invest in the company.So he led me down this road and it was a very logical argument. I think more founders should take  that type of approach, where they are like, Look , theres a lot of risk in this venture. Heres what we believe. And if you believe what we believe, clearly theres a massive opportunity here. And it doesnt mean that were going to get there, we have to execute on it, but what we see is, look for is the optionality.They look for, if the execution is good, can we actually have a huge opportunity? Its a huge upside. So thats what its all about. Its not about necessarily convincing them that theres no risk. Smart investors know theres risk. Its about convincing them that the upside is there. And for that, you need to believe in a certain set of things. If you dont believe them, youre not going to believe theres the upside.Martin: And when youre saying that, entrepreneurs tell you stories, do you mean that they should give you a big picture in terms of, Okay, in 5 to 10 years we would like to own that and that on that market, or do you want to say, This is what we want to do in the next 2 years?Alex: Theres the story, theres a combinatio n, so heres what I say. Theres a 10 year road map. Like this is a 10 year vision, thats what I say. A 10 year vision and theres like a 6 month plan.  So youve got to believe in the 10 year vision, and you have to believe in the 6 month plan. Like whats the next logical miles  from here to here.  So youve got to simultaneously sell both of those things.I remember when we have a company in our portfolio called 2U, which is an online education company that recently went public. I remember, the very first meeting with them, one of the founders said that, look theres plenty of online colleges you can go to, but they have the wrong incentives system. Like if you are, I dont know if you have this in Europe, but this for-profit education like  University  of  Phoenix, or Capella.Martin: Open university in the  UK, I guess.Alex: You borrow money from the government via Title IV, to go to school and then, so you load yourself up with debt as a student, and then you come out with a degree that s not that valuable actually, in a lot of cases. Or you may not even finish. Why is that an endemic problem? Well, its because they actually dont really have that much incentive for you to be a great, like have a great job and a great profession. Theyre kind of in a business of signing you up and covering their acquisition cost and then moving on to the next student. Thats how they make their money. And sure theyd like to keep paying your tuition, but if you ultimately not a successful in job market place, it doesnt really affect them.Whereas if you look at non-profit schools, like Harvard, or MIT or YALE or USC, or  Georgetown, whatever, great schools, theyre non-profits and their mission is just to educate people wholl go out into the world and have great careers. And they build their reputation on the fact that people are educated, and also can have a great career with the degree they get.And in particular with graduate degrees, its very, very tied to your career, because youve a lready graduated from college and youre going back to school because you want  to get to the next level in your career.So, instead of building another online school, lets go build a company that helps bring these non-profits on the internet, because then they can take their mission and take it global. You can go from being the number 10 program in your field to being the number 1, and we can help give you those tools to go online.  Were now align with our school partners. So to me, it was a very compelling vision of the future. I think in every vision of the future, where it actually ends up in retrospect working, its always a bit controversial when you first hear it.Like today, this was like 2009 or something when we first heard this. Today, online education is like, kind of going mainstream. Back then, it was not. So there was a lot of controversy. Will school sign up for this? Will school want online students coming to their universities? Will that dilute our brand? And it turns out, it was the best thing in the world for their brand. Because they basically, you know, there are students around the world that never heard of these guys and now theyre getting degrees and now theyre going into workplace and  people are seeing that on their resume.So, its a transforming of a company but it was very controversial at the time, and require you to think differently, but the story made sense. If you believe this, if we can get there, this is a massive opportunity because were the first online education company that actually aligns with the students for outcomes.ADVICE TO ENTREPRENEURS FROM ALEX TAUSSIGMartin: Alex, imagine a friend of yours or a friend of friend of yours comes to you and says, Alex, I would like to start a company. What would be the best advice that you would give him, in terms of financing the company or maybe setting up a team, or later on, after he finds a managing relationship with the board?Alex: First thing Id say is, why do you want to start a company. So starting a company is really, really hard. Its almost impossible to describe it, how hard it is to most people.I guess starting a venture backed kind of company is extremely hard. You have no resources, its incredibly difficult for people to hear your cause, its hard to get that initial traction, and you devote so much of your life to actually making this work. And you put yourself and your ego and all that stuff into it, your blood, sweat and tears. For something that will, you know, probabilistically not worked out. And by the way, if you are really good, youre probably leaving some job that was very high paying and some lifestyle that youre really accustomed to go and do this.So, its like a very, very difficult thing to do and I actually think that starting a company is not the right choice for most people. I don’t believe that most people are founders or have the ability to be founders. But I also believe, that in this culture we have right now, what seems to be very popular to romanticized people whove founded companies, that a lot of people think they are that person.So the first thing I tell people is just do a  gut check. Its just to basically say, am I willing. Here’s what I would tell people. Are you willing to work on this idea for 2 years with no traction. Like if youre willing to do it for 2 years with 0 traction, then you probably have the grid and the fortitude to actually make it the whole way. Because I have a lot of friends who have started a very successful companies, for which the first 2 years of that, they had nothing.What separates them from everyone else that went by the way side, was the fact they actually stuck with it. So youve got to be able to do that. If you can do that, youve a  higher chance of being successful. So thats the first thing I would say to them is, do you want to spend 2 years of your life on something that potentially have 0, 0 traction and still want to go for it. So thats what I would say.Martin : Okay. Great! And in terms of financing, what would you recommend to your friend? He is very young and he’s trying to set up a not that much capital intensive business.Alex: The first round should honestly, I mean, I had some good advice from a professor in business school. Business school is funny. You dont remember a lot of the stuff youre told, but every now and then, theres a little nugget that sticks in your head. And this one is always stuck in my head. Which was, the person who is likely to write you the first check, is not going to do it because of your business, theyre going to do it because of you.So theyre going to do it because they want to see you succeed. So I think the first thing you should do if you are financing a company, when youre just starting it, is go find the people who want you to be successful and will back you because its you. So get those people. Then, the next people you get, should be extremely high profile and have a great reputation in the industr y youre focused on.So instead of trying to go out and  raise money from like 100 random people, focus on like the 10 highly relevant people. Because it turns out the way fundraising works is once you get 1 or 2 of those people, everyone else will want to be in the round. So you spend 80% of your effort on the really relevant, highly visible people.  Once you get them, its like going bowling. All the other pins will just start to fall over.So thats usually the advice I gave people at that stage.I would honestly take money from as few individuals as you can and still be able to raise enough. The more people you add to the cap table, the more angry phone calls you have to deal with, Wheres my money? Oh, how you guys doing? Often times the most annoying ones are the angry ones, its the, Hey, how are things going? can I come and check it out? You dont want to manage a lot of, a lot of people. You want to have a low maintenance investors and have as few of them as possible, in my view.Ma rtin: Because you want to focus on the building the business and not on managing the investors relationship.Alex: Fundraising for most entrepreneurs is a nuisance. There are some that actually enjoy it. They tend to also be very good at it. But most people I know, really dislike fundraising and would prefer not to spend a lot of time on it. And I think thats probably right.When I meet people and interested in investing in the company, I tell them, look heres what I need to do to get to the point where were going to decide were going to make an investment, and I want to use your time as judiciously possible, because I know this is not the fun part. The fun part is building the business. And then when I go on the board, were going to have a long, long relationship to work together. So right now is the time where we need to fill each other out and I need you to answer some questions. So I think good investors will be judicious with their use of your time and bad investor will waste you r time.Martin: Alex, you have seen so many startups. What learnings or mistakes have you seen when young entrepreneurs are trying to scale the company?Alex: Ill tell you a couple of things.I mean theres the classic trying to scale your company before you’re really truly a product market fit. Investing a lot of dollars behind, say, a paid marketing campaign, when you really dont even know what your contribution margins are, or if thats not the relevant matrix, when you dont know the type of users youre trying to acquire. Doesnt make a lot of sense. Theres always, test you can perform but really scaling on those efforts prematurely that can burn through a lot of cash very quickly.  Ideally, when youre in that early stage, the cash youre spending is really should be going to support your team, not in much else.One other thing is, Ive seen is relying on business development to drive early traction. It turns out that other people are never going to be as good at selling you product as you will. If youre going to rely on channels or partnerships to push your product through, its really, really chunky and its really difficult to motivate those parties to actually work hard for you, because they have a ton of other parties as well.  So, Im not a big fan of channel businesses early on, Im not a big fan of businesses that are driven by business development partnerships early on. I think, you need to find a way as a startup to control your own destiny in some sense. Develop direct relationship with your customers or your users and figure out how to get those people to actually help you grow.So, Ive seen those mistakes probably most often with regard to scaling.Martin: Alex, thank you very much for your time. Next time you are pitching Alex, now you  know  how great  pitch looks like and please consider that. Thank you very much.