Niki Pezeshki of Felicis Ventures joins Nick to discuss Finding Markets with Long-Term Tailwinds; Macro Impacts on Venture; and Robust vs. Fragile Data. In this episode, we cover:
- Background and path to venture.
- Thesis at Felicis and your focus there?
- How has the pandemic affected your approach to investment?
- You’ve mentioned that you look for market tailwinds, especially tailwinds that will be lasting. Right now, we’re seeing a number of shifts that will have lasting effects — which are you watching most closely?
- Why do you think the public markets have, largely, stayed high during a very large health and economic crisis?
- Can you give us an overview on your three-part investing framework for making investment decisions?
- Where do you look for these large shifts, creating opportunity — aside from Mary Meeker’s report?
- How do you make sure you are current on-trend instead of getting anchored on data that’s old or fragile?
- What are you looking for in the business model that indicates to you that it is not only the correct approach but can lead to transformational changes in the industry?
- In which types of businesses do you like to see product-focused founders versus marketing-focused founders, is there a heuristic or systematic way that you think about this?
- You mentioned that business is a formula and that it’s clear early on whether it’s going to work or not — can you give us an example of the formula?
- What’s your approach to coaching and advising founders? There’s this fine line between being overbearing w/ advice and not providing enough insight in an area that could derail a company. How do you strike the balance?
- What keeps you up at night… the ones you invested in that you shouldn’t have or the ones you didn’t invest in that you wished you had?
- 3 Data points: Let’s say that you have a consumer SaaS company that is doing 300K in ARR, growing 20% MoM and that’s all you currently know about the company.
- Which 3 data points do you ask for and why?