This Is Series A

Many companies claim they’re a rocketship—but few mean it literally. As a young child growing up in New Zealand, Peter Beck, CEO of Rocket Lab, spent a lot of time stargazing. His fascination in space inspired a passion-driven career of building a billion-dollar rocket company. Today, Rocket Lab touts the highest launch success rate of any rocket company in history—and was the first private company in the southern hemisphere to go to space. In this conversation, he shares founder lessons on how to build an unlikely business, driven by passion.
Listen to all the Wish I Knew episodes: https://www.bvp.com/wish-i-knew

Failure. It's no fun, but it's a part of life — and big failures can often be the springboard to even bigger successes. That's why we're launching Wish I Knew, a new show from Bessemer Venture Partners about the revelatory, life-changing, "a-ha" moments that founders, CEOs and leaders discover along their business journeys and why taking risks leads to growth. Season 1 premiered on November 14th, so tune in.

The concept of compiling the world's knowledge in a single location dates back to the ancient Libraries of Alexandria and Pergamum, but the modern concept of an encyclopedia originated with Diderot and the 18th-century French encyclopedists. In this episode of This Is Series A, Talia Goldberg and Jeremy Levine speak with Jimmy Wales, co-founder of Wikipedia and Fandom. Jimmy Wales shares his journey building the internet’s encyclopedia, the challenges along the way, and what other entrepreneurs and creators can learn from his experience.

Takeaways:

• Why a focused mission is everything: “Collecting reliable, neutral, and verifiable information is paramount to our project.” says Jimmy. “That purity of mission kind of keeps the organization on the straight and narrow.”
• What it takes for a community to build something for free: “[Contributors are] doing it because they love the topics they write about. And there's a community of people who value their knowledge deeply,” he shares. Jimmy explains that his platform offers a fundamentally different kind of acclaim than Instagram influencers. Prestige in the Wikipedia community is far more localized in a niche. Jimmy explains the Wikipedia contributor mentality like this: "Here's a community of people I want to be respected by because I love this thing. I know a lot about it and I want to share. I know nobody in the world cares except for these thirty people, but these thirty people value me so much."
• What for-profit businesses can learn from the success of Wikipedia: “A lot of for-profit businesses need to think harder how not to piss off their own communities.” He cites the example of Digg, an early precursor to Reddit. When the company made substantial changes to the product to make it more profitable, the community was livid. Jimmy continues: “Even if you do need to figure out your monetization problems, you cannot give up this crown jewel of a fantastic internet community that's really passionate about the site,” he says. “Because if you lose that, you're going to lose the whole thing."

For more on This Is Series A, go here: https://www.bvp.com/atlas/this-is-series-a-podcast 

In this episode of This Is Series A, Talia Goldberg and Jeremy Levine speak with Adam Dell, American venture capitalist, early investor and board member in OpenTable, and founder and CEO of Clarity Money, a personal financial management tool that helps people bring more transparency to your spending. The company was acquired by Goldman Sachs in 2018. Adam Dell is now a Partner and Head of Product at Marcus by Goldman Sachs.

Takeaways:

Why digital neo-banks are beneficial for consumers: “The internet and its reach will reduce the need for regional and local banks. The notion that you need a traditional branch to walk into is going away in the mind of the consumer. (Somebody has to pay for those marble columns and that burden has been on the consumer.) If a consumer can get a digital experience that allows them to do the things they need to do without having a physical branch, there's an enormous cost advantage.”

The future of US banking is seen in APAC: “I look to Asia as an example of what is to come in terms of personal finance trends. Ant Financial demonstrates the power of gamifying finance — Ant Financial offers rewards to its consumers for good financial behavior and also puts incentives in place to drive better habits. It’s a win-win for the company and the consumer. The most direct and important competitors in the personal finance ecosystem will not be traditional incumbent banks, but will be the Googles, the Apples, the Amazons of the world.”

Financing advice from someone who’s been on both sides of the cap table: “I raised money from people who knew me well and who were essentially making a bet on two things, the market and me. Many venture investors distill their investment thesis to those two things. Is this the right individual and is this the right opportunity within the market? I had some advantages there because the folks who backed me, again, as I said, have known me for a long time and have seen how I operate and how I try to tackle problems. The other thing I would say is that momentum is a very powerful thing when you're raising money. There's a fear of missing out on the next big thing and entrepreneurs can leverage that. The other thing is that I priced the Series A in a very reasonable way. (We raised three million at nine-pre.) It was a very modest, appropriate size of capital for the problem I was trying to solve in the first stages of the business." 

Advice on how to bring others along your entrepreneurial journey:  “It’s important to not be greedy with equity with your fellow teammates in this endeavor. I was very fortunate to find a VP of engineering, a head of data science, a head of data engineering, a head of mobile engineering. And I was generous with them from an equity standpoint because I knew that I needed them. One of the things that I fully believe is that spreading the equity-wealth gets people to feel as though this is part of their journey as well. And this is not a job, this is a mission. If they feel like an owner, they will give you more than you would get if they are just a salaried employee.”

Daniel Lubetzky is the founder and executive chairman of Kind, the multi-billion-dollar food company that’s become a household name. The Kind brand is known as a healthier snack food with a social cause. In this episode, Jeremy and Talia dive into Daniel’s entrepreneurial journey, the lessons other founders can gain from his experience, and how he built a food empire with a mission. 

• How failures of his previous venture (PeaceWorks) led to successes at Kind: “PeaceWorks was a decade, which you could say was the lost decade, but it was a decade of lessons. So many mistakes that I made were two steps forward, two steps back,” Daniel reflects. “I held onto those lessons, some of them very painful. Right now, I can wax poetically about it, but I literally cried in my basement or in my studio apartment many times when I felt that I just had a huge defeat, but eventually, I had the idea for Kind about 10 years later, and I absolutely attribute a lot of the successes of Kind to the early failures of PeaceWorks. A lot of the mistakes that I made in the early years helped me make sure I didn't make them again with Kind.”
• Fundraising for a consumer packaged goods company: “By the time we did our first private equity investment, we kind of skipped the Series A,” Daniel said. “We got the friends and family angel investment, and then we didn't have an investment until Kind had already $30 to $50 million under its belt, and it was like a very, very exciting company for a lot of investors. All the private equity firms were lining up that they wanted to invest in Kind. So the total that we ever invested in Kind, in the company, in the life of our company was $5.2 million. The $100,000 from my friends, and the $5.1 million from my investor BMG. Ever since then, whenever we brought in investors it's more to sell our shares to them, but Kind has never needed it.”
• The value of immigration in America: “I would not be alive today were it not because of not just the immigration policies, but the courage of Americans who rescued a continent. My father was liberated by American soldiers, and I immigrated to the United States as a 15-and-a-half, 16-year-old kid. So were it not for that, I would have not been able to provide thousands of jobs to Americans, and my story repeats itself across the board to the point that the number's stunning of the number of Fortune 500 founders or CEOs that are immigrants or children of immigrants is enormous. [As immigrants], we are an important addition to the makeup of society because we see things. We don't take democracy for granted. We don't take freedom for granted. We don't take rule of law for granted, so those of us who came from countries that had much less perfect democracies, that had no rule of law, really, really appreciate and cherish, and will do everything we can to defend those values. I do think that for all us Americans it's really important to not take these things for granted.” 

To learn more about the show go to bvp.com/atlas/this-is-series-a

This Is Series A is a podcast about the builders and businesses that shape tech and internet culture, and the inevitable challenges and lessons that come out of early-stage entrepreneurship. In each episode, Talia Goldberg and Jeremy Levine, partners at Bessemer Venture Partners, talk to founders, CEOs, and internet philosophers about building startups and what keeps them inspired every day.