E14 The great hits and misses of venture capital with Brendan Wales of e.ventures
In this episode, Erasmus Elsner is talking to Brendan Wales, general partner at e.ventures on investing in data infrastructure unicorn Segment at the Seed and passing on TikTok (then Musical.ly) at the Series A.
Check out Brendan Wales on Medium: https://medium.com/@brendanwales
2:10 First job running a Golf shop while at college
3:20 First job out of college in 2009 and entrepreneurial ambitions
4:29 'I gotta get to the Valley' finding Zozi's on Crunchbase
6:06 Joining e.ventures in 2012
7:52 History and roots of e.ventures
9:53 e.ventures current fund and global footprint
11:10 Investing in Segment.io at the Seed along with Kleiner Perkins
15:08 Consumer-tech perspective on Segment
16:02 Passing on Musical.ly/TikTok
17:30 Warm introductions vs. metric-based discovery (digital exhaust)
20:30 Metrics requested from Musical.ly/TikTok founding team / key consumer social metrics
22:17 Machiavellian founder perspective on Musical.ly/TikTok consumer retention
24:35 Ex-post reflections why they passed on Musical.ly/TikTok
26:35 Comparison to the recent Clubhouse a16z-led Series A
28:50 Venture capital returns over the lifetime of a fund
31:10 Pattern matching for early markups
32:58 This Week's Seed Companies
35:24 EVA Growth Index / X-Factors
37:37 Nacelle: headless CMS for Shopify stores, backed by Index and Accomplice
39:05 Most recent investment: Airvet, $14m Series A led by Canvas Ventures