This Is Series A 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.”

In this special episode of This Is Series A, Talia Goldberg speaks with two visionary founders who have carved out new ways for technology to equalize access—Melanie Perkins, CEO and co-founder of Canva, and Rachel Carlson, CEO and co-founder of Guild Education. Canva empowers the average person with zero design experience to create beautiful graphics. And Guild places adult education within reach for millions of less economically advantaged workers. In this conversation, they share an inside look at what it takes to invent a new billion-dollar category.

Takeaways:


Key differences between tackling early- vs. late-stage problems: “The mistakes or the learnings are constant. There’s no lower volume of them later on than in the early days,” Rachel said. “But it’s different. In the early days, they were problems that cropped up in the morning and you try and solve them by the end of the day. You’re in firefighting mode, you’re figuring out all these various component parts. And then those Lego building blocks build you to a place where now you’re solving much larger challenges. And in Guild’s perspective, the early days, what gave us a competitive advantage and let us be successful is that we were willing to take on the complexities of multiple stakeholder groups and the employers and the universities and the students. Today, we have to make sure that we don’t let that complexity get in our own way. We’re at 700 employees, we’ve got big teams overseeing those three stakeholder groups and making sure that we can optimize for all of them while keeping in mind the needs of our fourth stakeholder group, which are our employees and really thinking about how we are making sure that their jobs are getting simpler, that their ability to work with their colleagues maintains that cross-functional nature that’s really been in the bones of Guild since day one, and that they have career paths and really successful experiences as employees of ours is something we’re spending a lot of our time on right now. And it’s in large part because of the complexities we took on in the early days, which we’re grateful for, but which means you have to keep iterating and building and thinking about how to address those new, bigger challenges.”
How a shared mission and shared vision of the future helps with recruitment: “I spend a lot of my time making sure that the messages that are going throughout the company are really consistent, that we are all working toward the same thing, that everyone has that context and information to make great decisions,” Melanie said. “And I’d say that is a long way of saying I think that actually helps with the recruitment function as well because if a thousand people in the company can speak to the mission and vision as well as I could and knows the values in our culture and the people that would make a really great contribution to Canva and where we’re trying to go, I think that is a little bit of a quasi-way of helping with our recruitment. Because we have a lot of people who are working in recruitment now, a lot of people who are trying to decide is this person going to be a great fit for Canva. And so while I might not be in every single one of those interviews, we need to ensure that culture is spread very, very consistently across the company and that people know what to expect from Canva and who should be able to join Canva and the sort of environment that they should be able to create.”

For more insights go to: https://www.bvp.com/atlas/this-is-series-a

Ankur Nagpal is the founder and CEO of Teachable, the online platform that enables people to sell individual online courses in subjects as varied as programming to cake decorating. A leader in the creator economy, he started the company in 2014, and after raising over $12.5 million in funding, there are now more than 100,000 digital instructors who have reportedly earned over $500 million on his platform. To learn more go to https://www.bvp.com/atlas/this-is-series-a 

Takeaways:


How American thrives on global entrepreneurship: “I do not think I could have built what I built in any other country in the world. And to that, I am very grateful to America, very grateful to my parents for whom my dad saw this as the manifestation of his dreams. In an alternate reality, he would have liked to be here and started a company,” shares Ankur. “For now, America is still getting talented immigrants, but for the first time there's a bit of an existential risk. And I think it's really important for America to not truly blow this in the next 10 years. The competitive advantage this nation has is that it becomes a magnet for the smartest people everywhere to move here. And I really think that's something that America should realize is a privilege, and do whatever they can to maintain it. Because I do think the immigrant experience here is deteriorating. In a truly globalized world, I do think countries will compete for talent and thus far it has not, that has not been a factor, but thinking the next 10 years, I do think there's a very real existential risk that this country could lose that.” 
Bundling education with software to provide customer solutions: “Five years ago, we had this insight that no one actually cares about our software—what they want is a solution in a lot of cases,” Ankur shared. “They want not just the tool, they want also the knowledge. So we started bundling education with software. That was one of our first inflection points and our first realizations. Our conversion rate went up before we started selling, not just Teachable, but Teachable plus training on, ‘How do you build an audience? How do you create a course?’ Even now, our most effective marketing funnels all have to do with, ‘Hey, if you buy Teachable, you also get training on how to set up a business, how to build an audience, how to market your course.’ So we've definitely done that part of things.”
The “business of one” in the future: “I'm a huge, huge believer in a rising class of basically every individual sort of being a business, and it doesn't have to be perfectly one-to-one, where you can recruit the odd person there,” Ankur said. “Historically, sort of everyone got absorbed into the full-time job economy. I do think in the future, there's going to be a lot more individual businesses, whether you think of them as creators, freelancers, or people with multiple streams of income. I'm a big, big believer in the business of one, and I think Teachable definitely plays into that.”