The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20VC: Accel's Brian O'Malley On The Prioritisation Of Growth, The Metrics That Show True Customer Retention & Why The Most Interesting Companies Create A Market
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC) interviews the world's greatest venture capitalists with prior guests including Sequoia's Doug Leone and Benchmark's Bill Gurley. Once per week, 20VC Host, Harry Stebbings is also joined by one of the great founders of our time with prior founder episodes from Spotify's Daniel Ek, Linkedin's Reid Hoffman, and Snowflake's Frank Slootman.
If you would like to see more of The Twenty Minute VC (20VC), head to www.20vc.com for more information on the podcast, show notes, resources and more.
Show Notes
Brian
O'Malley is a Partner @ Accel Partners, where
he spearheads Accel's work with next-generation marketplaces and
consumer-focused companies. He led the firm's investments in
Amino, Gametime, HotelTonight and Luma, as well as disruptive
software-as-a-services businesses Duetto and Narvar. Brian joined
Accel from Battery Ventures, where as a general partner he led
investments in companies like Dollar Shave Club, BazaarVoice
(public), Coupa, Skullcandy (public) and TradeKing (acquired by
Ally). Prior to Battery, Brian led sales efforts and built some of
the first web service-based API integrations for Bowstreet, Inc.
(acquired by IBM).
In Today's Episode You
Will Learn:
1.) How did Brian make his way into one of the world's
leading VC firms? What were Brian's biggest takeaways from being in
the trenches during the bust of the dot com bubble?
2.) What is the macro economic view to value compression?
How should startups being approaching and dealing with this?
3.) How can startups maintain growth as the priority whilst
maintaining investor expectations on burn rates? What is Brian's
approach to the growth vs retention theory?
4.) What retention metrics would Accel look for indifferent
products? How does this vary from category to category? What
are the commonalities Brian has seen in products that have insane
retentive ability??
5.) Where does Brian stand on market size and the potential
for market transition down the line? Does the market even need to
be there today for it to be investable today?
Items Mentioned In Today's
Episode:
Brian's Fave
Book: Zero To One By Peter Thiel
Brian's Most Recent Investment: Luma: Fast,
Reliable Wifi
As always you can follow The
Twenty Minute VC, Harry and Brian on Twitter here!
If you would like to see a more colourful side to Harry with
many a mojito session, you can follow him on Instagram here!
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