Getting2Alpha
Getting2Alpha
Jim Scheinman on the evolution of social software
Intro: [00:00:00] From Silicon Valley, the heart of startup land. It's Getting2Alpha, the show about creating innovative, compelling experiences that people love. And now, here's your host, game designer, entrepreneur, and startup coach, Amy Jo Kim. Jim
Amy: Scheinman is a lifelong entrepreneur who's been working at the cutting edge of social software for two decades.
An early employee of Friendster and Bebo, Jim rode the ups and downs. The first big social media wave now is on the investing side, helping the next generation of founders invent the future. Jim's approach is grounded in operational reality, and he's got a passion for a vision worth fighting for. Most of all, Jim appreciates the power of a truly compelling experience to draw people in and keep them engaged.
Jim: When do you focus on top line growth versus engagement? And I think it's really important early on to have a culture of [00:01:00] focusing on engagement. You've got a thousand people using your product and do they love it? Are they using it every day or multiple times a day? Is it changing their life? You know, are you focused on engagement?
Making sure that this product is great for them. And then you can expand and scale from there.
Amy: I had a great time hanging out with Jim. Listen in and learn how a successful early stage investor chooses who to work with and how to help his company succeed.
Welcome Jim to the Getting2Alpha podcast.
Jim: Thank you. Uh, delighted to be here with you.
Amy: For those who aren't familiar with you, how did you first get started in design and tech? And then what were the key pivot points along the way?
Jim: Well, I was an entrepreneur, uh, since high school, I guess. And then in college started a company, was successful in building that after school, uh, sold my shares and then decided to go to law school, which was kind of a different track.
[00:02:00] Luckily for me, I ended up practicing in Palo Alto in 95 when Netscape launched. And then I realized that you know, the internet and the technology space was where I wanted to make the rest of my career. And so I left the law firm after a couple of years and joined a small startup within a big company called Snap.
It was within CNET and we ended up building that business. It was just 30 of us sold it, uh, to NBC merged with his company called zoom went public in 99. We were a 6 billion company, fifth largest website in the world. So it was kind of a, a nice fun run and jump into the internet space. And then from there, I've just had a various career as an entrepreneur, founder, executive in, in a whole bunch of different, uh, internet, mostly consumer software, mobile startups, highlights of those would be Friendster was the fourth employee at the first social network, uh, left that to help start a company called Bebo, which was the largest social network in Europe before Facebook took over, but fortunately for us, we sold it to AOL for almost a billion dollars in 2008.[00:03:00]
And then my career changed a bit and I decided that I was going to continue doing tech, but from an investment, uh, angle. And so I became a venture capitalist in 2008 and I started Maven Ventures, which is where I am today. We're in our third fund and things are going well.
Amy: That's awesome. So you've really worked at the forefront of innovation for many years, both as an operator, an entrepreneur, and now as an investor.
Yeah. What do you wish that you'd known earlier about how to innovate successfully along the way that you know now.
Jim: You know, you learn as you go along? So for me, one of the things that I, I know now as I invest is that you have to have what we call a vision worth fighting for to be successful in bringing to this world a new product or a new vision.
I guess one of the things I wish I had known early on is that you can work really hard and put everything. Into, you know, your product, [00:04:00] your vision, have the right team and all that. But a lot of success, frankly, comes down to luck. And so sometimes you're in the right place at the right time and you get lucky and you have a billion dollar exit.
And sometimes it's unfortunately unlucky and things didn't, uh, you know, one thing went wrong. I just splintered in and there's just not much you can do to control that and you just got to move on. But you know, one of the things that we focus on today when we do our investing is, is vision worth fighting for, and that will help you on the right path to success, being a creative person and really help you continue moving forward when times are tough.
And if you're an entrepreneur and you're doing startups, times are going to be tough most of the time. And so you really do need that vision we're fighting for a great team to keep going and to execute and to build something meaningful.
Amy: You look at a lot of teams now, you talk to a lot of teams, you have them pitch you, but you choose only a few to work with.
So along with [00:05:00] that vision worth fighting for, what are some of the other signals that you look for when you're investing?
Jim: For us, we have nine filters. Three major buckets. So the first thing is we only do certain kind of investing and, you know, tip to entrepreneurs know the VCs you're pitching and what they do.
So we have a specific focus here, which is consumer software We also do in particular Autonomous technology. We'll talk about that a little bit and transportation Well, you know, we don't do SAS enterprise. We don't do big data, right? So we have a sort of expertise. It's got to fit into that bucket. But you know, many companies do.
In fact, we see about 3000 business plans a year. It's just a team of three of us will meet about 350 of those companies in person. And we'll do about six to eight investments a year. So it's a very stringent filter. What gets us excited is if it does fit into our investment thesis, Then the two things that [00:06:00] we focus on are the team and the vision and again, the vision we're fighting for.
So on the team, we look for clearly a founder who's passionate about this product they want to bring to the world. One of the things that we've noticed is that most of our successful companies in our portfolio over the last, since I started investing in 2008, uh, have. a team of two founders. Now, we've invested in companies with single founders that have done well.
We've invested in companies with three or four founders that have done well. But most of these companies end up with two founders. One's technical and visionary. One is sort of business minded, marketing, sales driven. whole bunch of different iterations. But that's generally when we find that two people, they know each other, they like each other, they're going to work hard together and they have a vision worth fighting for that we're excited about helping them bring to the world.
Then we really dig in. And when we look at the market opportunity and a whole bunch of other [00:07:00] filters, uh, and then we look at competition and why these folks will succeed versus others, then we'll make our investment.
Amy: Along the way, what are some of the red flags and stumbling blocks that make you kind of stop in your tracks?
Jim: Well, most of these companies fail is they either don't have a vision worth fighting for, you know, it's just a great team, they built a little, some technology, they have some interesting design, but they don't really know why a hundred million people would ever want to use this product, you know, or how it's going to change the world, how it's going to improve my life, so that I want to come back and use it every day, or, you know, like Snapchat 20 to 30 times a day.
Sometimes companies get lucky and sort of pivot into it, but usually the successful businesses had that core vision to start with. You know, Facebook is a great example. When I was at Friendster, I was fortunate to meet Mark Zuckerberg, you know, when he was still at Harvard and college students. But even back then, when he looked at what we were doing at Friendster and decided he could do [00:08:00] something even better and built Facebook to connect the college students on his campus and college students around the world, he had this sort of Nugget of a vision, which today Facebook fulfilled, which is connecting the world at the time must've sounded absurd.
And to most people it did, but he had that vision and that's why it's a hundred billion dollar company. Obviously they got really lucky along the way. They had great people that the right investors or everything kind of went right, but without that core vision, it wouldn't be what it is today. We look for that from the very, very start cause that's how you can actually build a company like Facebook one day.
Amy: So when you look back over your career and think about all the jobs you've had in these amazing places, you've worked, was that a common theme, the vision worth fighting for in the ones that took off and succeeded?
Jim: You know, in hindsight, yes.
Again, you know, it's one of the things you were asking earlier. What, what's something that I w you know, would have been nice to know [00:09:00] earlier in my career as I was sort of picking which companies to work for, to help start or join early teams. The first inkling I got. Of this notion was at Friendster when Jonathan Abrams the founder of Friendster came to me and said, hey, I launched I built this website You know, he kind of hacked JDate a dating site to make it more open and easier to meet girls for himself and other friends It didn't really speak to me because I was married with two kids at the time, but I had someone who was single Uh used my alpha Credentials to test out the the website for me and there were only a couple thousand people on it at the time You Yep, remember this is before Facebook.
This is before social networking was even a term, right? She was single and younger and she was on the website on the weekend came back on Monday I said, what'd you think? She said it changed my life. Okay, this is interesting How could a website in a week can change your life? She said you're not gonna believe it, but I met a long lost friend.
I [00:10:00] hadn't talked to in 10 years And here's someone who's like 22, right? So before that was super powerful and meaningful and I got a date next weekend, I'm like, okay, this is a big vision. This is a big idea. I don't know what you call this thing, but this is going to change the world. And so then I joined as like the fourth employee, you know, and again, Jonathan started this for practical purpose to create an environment.
It didn't feel kind of creepy to date, have to say I'm dating so you can meet friends on the internet. And that's really what social networking, that's where Friendster and Facebook was born from. Um, it's taken on different iterations from there, but still ultimately was to connect people in a meaningful way.
And that's really, that's a massive vision worth fighting for. You know, if you think about solving the problem of loneliness and boredom, that's a massive problem that affects billions of people. And, uh, obviously was a hundred billion dollar vision worth fighting for.
Amy: That is amazing. Fantastic advice and it's great that you're able to really bring it into what you're doing [00:11:00] now as a result of the patterns that you learned along the way.
You're in a position now where you invest in these promising teams and then you provide them counsel and support and guidance and connections and all those great things as well as capital. What are some of the most common mistakes that you see first time product owners who are great entrepreneurs, but maybe they're doing it for the first time?
What are the common mistakes that you see them making in the earliest stages of bringing their ideas to life?
Jim: Well, let's presume that we found a team of two founders, one who's technical, one who's a compliment to that person, whether it's marketing or design, you know, product. BizDev strategy. So we, assuming we find that now, this is where most companies fail.
You know, the two founders are both really bright and MBA students, but neither of them are technical. And they want to build this, uh, consumer software kind of product. And they outsource the technology team. [00:12:00] That's, that's a red flag for us. We just don't invest in those companies because as much as it feels like, ah, you don't really need to, these are very, very challenging technical.
Businesses to build one of the main reasons why you know a friendster failed and a facebook one is because One scaled and one had a great technical team and the other, we've made some mistakes, right? And so it was all about technology. That's a huge, you know, red flag for us. If we don't have early technology and product folks who are the founders of the business, again, assuming that we have a vision we're fighting for then, and we spent a lot of time on that with the founders.
A lot of the pitfalls here and a lot of our companies that we end up not investing in have the same mistake, which is they think they're solving a vision we're fighting for, but they're not. Um, here's an example. We get pitched every day about, you know, Craigslist has been around forever and it's terrible and we can do a better Craigslist.
And the truth is you probably could, or Yelp, you know, like you can look at these products. Some have been around for a while that have never been necessarily designed great, or they always have issues, but [00:13:00] they're good enough. And if you're. If you're trying to attack a massive company that's already established with tens of millions or hundreds of millions of people using it, and it's good enough, it's going to be really hard for you to build a consumer software business that will succeed competing with that.
Let's assume again that now we've got a great team and there's the vision we're fighting for and it, there isn't really anything out there that's good enough or it's a new idea like a Snapchat, a new way for young adults and everybody frankly to communicate with each other. So then along the way, you know, there are a bunch of issues.
One is, you know, there's a balance of focusing on, again, this is from our lens of consumer software, but when do you focus on top line growth versus engagement? And I think it's really important early on to have a culture of focusing on engagement. You've got a thousand people using your product, and do they love it?
Are they using it every day or multiple times a day? Is it changing their life? You know, are you focused on, you know, Making sure that this product is great for them. And then you can expand and scale from there. Um, [00:14:00] with that said, it's also, you have to be thoughtful about how are we going to distribute, get distribution?
How are we going to get to reach hundreds of millions of people? Do we have to spend money to try and attract that kind of audience? If we do, we better raise a lot of money or try and figure out revenue. But if you're trying to figure out a revenue too soon, you're likely not going to be able to succeed.
So there's this sort of balance of when to start focusing on. Top line growth and hyper growth and viral marketing. And a lot of the clever guys that we meet are really good at that, but they're using viral marketing and top line growth for a product that's just not sticky. It's just not really solving a problem for people.
So they get to millions and millions of people and it just. Sifts through and, uh, you know, after a year or two, they burned through their seed money and they're out of business. And so, you know, we're very careful about not investing in those kinds of companies as much as we can. And if we see that happening, redirect them to engagement and focusing on the core value proposition and that those early customers and make sure they're delighted and coming [00:15:00] back.
We really don't love investing in businesses that have to spend a lot of money to acquire customers. We love businesses that sell itself. You know, that people will use because it makes their life better, and their friends tell them about it, and their family tell them about it, and all of a sudden everyone's using it.
And we look, that's sort of one of our filters that we look for. There's a company that we helped start called Sunshine, and it's a weather app. And you would say, why do we need another weather app, right? I mean, we've got the Weather Channel, and Yahoo Weather, or Apple Weather, or whatever, you know, and it's just the weather.
But here's, here's the thing. The weatherman has been lying to us. We actually don't get accurate weather data. And you know, if you really think about it, you never really trust the weath like especially it says 42 percent chance of rain tomorrow. What does that mean? Why can't it just say it's gonna rain from 3 to 6 tomorrow and actually be right?
And the truth is, with technology today, there are barometers in our smartphone, and now that all of us have these smartphones, and the [00:16:00] concept that we have with Sunshine is we use technology and barometers to get accurate weather data, and we get our community to input data, just like Waze. Right. Well, before Waze came along, we were just sort of guessing on with the 101 or 28, which highway should we take, which one do you think will have more or less traffic?
Now we don't have to guess anymore. We have accurate traffic data. Same thing with weather. And we have now over a million people using sunshine, a million sunshiners. Uh, we've never spent any money marketing advertising. It's just word of mouth. Because when you find it, you love it. It's a top 10 weather app now.
And 70 percent of the people come back every day. So it's now a daily habit, right? Why? Because it works. It tells you when you're going to be cold or warm or when it's going to rain and it's accurate. And what's amazing is you have 20 percent of our community inputting data. And it's, and we were creating like a little bit of a weather community around the product.
It, it's a product that's changing lives and improving lives. And over time, millions and [00:17:00] millions of people are going to realize it. And just use it as a default weather app. That's an exciting story. Uh, and we're bringing something valuable to the world. That's improving people's lives. And those are the businesses that we love.
You know, we, we have a choice to work with any company we want to, uh, but we choose the businesses that we're proud of bringing to this world like sunshine.
Amy: That's an awesome example. What's the revenue model there?
Jim: So it's, it's interesting thing for our consumer software companies, uh, we have advertisers that would love to spend money.
Imagine Coca Cola or Pepsi. It's a warm day. We know when it's 101 degrees and you know, wherever in Midwest, we can have Coke or Pepsi ads or, you know, whatever. You know, Gatorade, you name it, we are choosing not to do any advertising or branding and marketing right now. We're just really focused on delighting our million sunshiners and making this the best product we can, you know, at scale, weather data is very, very valuable.
So imagine. Well, I'll give you the example. Climate [00:18:00] Corp was acquired by Monsanto, which is like a chemical company for a billion dollars a couple years ago. And they didn't really have very accurate weather data. It was okay. We have much more accurate weather data. Last year, IBM paid two billion dollars for the weather channel data.
Again, Not really that good a data. It's okay. They had scale that 20 million people using the product So you can imagine if we have the world's most accurate weather data in a couple years That's worth billions of dollars and it's because you know for agricultural needs and for the government Knowing when tornadoes are gonna hit.
Amy: And for forecasting because...
Jim: Forecasting and weather stations, media companies.
Amy: Yeah, yeah, so totally.
Jim: You gotta be careful about when you turn on the revenue machine, but we have a massive revenue model there just to scan.
Amy: Right. Well, I've been doing more work in machine learning and AI recently, so the value of data is just increasing. As those algorithms get better, just the possibilities of what [00:19:00] a big data set brings to the party is, you might even say, increasing exponentially.
Jim: Yeah, I agree.
Amy: So that's fantastic. So the other question is, tell us about the early, passionate, active community that's grown up around this service.
Because one of the things that's so interesting to me about innovation is that the interesting innovations get this early, passionate community first. They don't just sort of get mainstream people right away. It's the innovation diffusion curve. They, successful innovations attract the early adopters, but they have this deep need that needs to be fulfilled.
So what's that community about in this weather app? What are they like? What's driving them?
Jim: Yeah. It's a great question. The most challenging part, often, of bringing revolutionary products to the world is educating the world that they need this. In other words, we're so conditioned to think of the weather as like, always wrong, [00:20:00] that we never can be right or traffic.
You know, I mean, why would I ever use ways? Traffic is just guessing anyway. I know. Actually, you don't have to guess anymore. Facebook, the social networking, it took years and years and years for people to say, all right, I'm comfortable enough now to put my photo and my information online because the value that I get out of that is worth taking the risk to learn a new habit, right?
And so it's the same thing for weather. It's like, God, but I already have like a weather app. It's good. And I know is it, the truth is our early sunshiners. Are heavily skewed to young and women the founder of sunshine katarina. Um had this insight In particular, microclimates, like here in the Bay Area, you can live in Palo Alto and it's 75 and sunny, and then you're traveling to a business meeting up in the city and it could be like 55 and drizzly.
And as a woman in particular, you have to, you know, think about what you're going to wear and dress, which is what we're hearing from our customers. You don't have to guess anymore with [00:21:00] sunshine. We make your life so much easier. And so women know what they're going to wear. wherever they're going. We even tell you how you're going to feel today.
We get to know you personally because we know you're inputting data. Oh, I'm feeling cold right now. I'm feeling chilly. This is really windy, whatever. Then we know exactly how you're gonna feel when you get there, right? Which is interesting because we still tell you it's 70 degrees or 55 degrees, but we tell you you're gonna be cold.
Make sure you bring an extra sweater. That's changing lives. And so, our rabid fans now are women ages, you know, teenagers through 40s, 70 percent of our sunshiners right now. It, you know, it's great for men too, but those are our early adapters who are telling all their friends, like, you have to use sunshine, it's amazing.
Amy: So who's creating data of that group? That some of them are just consuming the sunshine data. Who's actually inputting the data? What are those people all about? What's driving them?
Jim: Yeah. The 20 percent of the community. It's, you know, [00:22:00] it's, we make it easy, push a button and it's sunny today or it's windy or it's raining here.
You know, there's a little gamification, they get rewarded, but that's not really why they're doing it. They're doing it because they know that there's huge value add to the community and they appreciate it. What's interesting is these numbers are off the charts. When you look at a company like Waze, you know, it's like one to 2 percent of the population usually inputs data.
So 20 percent is amazing.
Amy: Yep. It really is. This is a great story because you and I both know how tricky it is to build something innovative. Yeah. And just get it out there and navigate all that craziness and luck and, you know, opportunity. You've been talking about it all along. You need this blend of really strong vision, but also lots of smart feedback that you're navigating to.
So how do you help teams navigate through that? And in particular, how do you help them identify who you listen to and who you don't?
Jim: So a couple of things, one of the things on sunshine, which I think is relevant to your listeners, [00:23:00] they're very good on design. If you look at the way that sunshine app is designed and functions is very different than a weather app.
Often people like, Oh, I use dark sky, especially men. Men like to use dark sky. If you look at dark sky, it's like a number, you know, in black, like tell me the temperature sunshine is. Like just the colors and the feel and there's a slider bar that you can scan what it's going to be like over the next four hours or a whole 24 hour period.
It's just, it's beautifully designed. So I think in this case, design was really, really important to the success of the company. And that's part of the DNA of this team. Often, especially for consumer software companies, design is critical for success and we love having like a product technical design person on board early, if not one of the founders, you know, but listening to advice is one of our filters.
We only invest in teams that are coachable. Now it doesn't mean they have to listen to everything we say and do what we want to do, but. And I've built five unicorns or billion dollar businesses. So I've [00:24:00] seen those companies succeed and understand some of the things that got them there. And I've also worked at companies that could have been a billion dollar business that went to zero or, you know, or big failures.
And I've seen all the mistakes along the way. And so if I share that, okay, I was at this company and this is the same thing they did and it led to failure, I'd hope that they would seriously take that in consideration. Now, I'm also a lot more credible. Giving advice to these teams. Cause again, I've been doing as an entrepreneur and investor for 20 years.
These kinds of businesses, if I was trying to give advice to someone building a big data SaaS enterprise company, most founders might look at me and go, you know, it's no, thank you, but you never really built a business like this. So we always tell our founders and we frankly bring a lot of these folks on board.
You know, listen to the mentors and investors who have built these kinds of companies successfully in the past, who've also seen failures like these businesses in the past, who have built, you know, who didn't do A healthcare clean tech business or something that's totally irrelevant [00:25:00] And now I wouldn't totally discount their advice because you know, there may be smart people and they're it's running a business at the end Of day, but there are specific nuggets that will only apply to your specific business that we know right?
This is what we've done It is a big challenge for startup founders because they often have multiple investors and we call it mentor whiplash And so one of the things that we like to do is be one of the first if not the first investor And help shape that mentor, you know angel Uh, seed investment group that will be very helpful in giving advice.
And I think it's been one of the reasons why our companies have been so successful. Uh, we, we really helped bring around the table great people who are going to be helpful to them.
Amy: You're a real blend of a very creative and passionate person with very strong analytics and you know, grounded in reality.
What's your superpower? What kind of projects light you up the most? What's your sweet spot?
Jim: And I'm fortunate to be in a position where I don't have to be doing what I'm doing, but I'm doing it because I want to. And so just like the [00:26:00] founders that we invest in, I want to be just as excited as they are in bringing this vision, this new product to the world.
And so one of our filters is it might be a great team, it might be a great vision we're fighting for, but we're personally not that excited about this business and we're just not going to do the deal. We're not going to invest, we're not going to help out this business. We've passed on companies that have been wildly successful and no regrets, it's just not something that we'd be excited about.
I feel like I need to be as passionate about bringing these companies to the world as my founders. And we're not a founder, we're an investor, we're a mentor, we're an advisor. Sure. Uh, we're not a founder, but we're still early. We do have to be as passionate about these companies, uh, as the founders. And that's one of our superpowers, you know, that we really want to bring to the world.
These companies, we really feel passionately that they're going to improve lives, tens of millions of lives. And we think they're going to be massively successful.
Amy: Passion, focus, and deep experience to draw [00:27:00] on, it sounds like. So I think your companies are lucky to get to work with you. What are you seeing that's new and exciting in design and tech these days?
What trends are you following? What's exciting to you?
Jim: We see a lot of trends and we're actually very public and blogging about these, but I'll mention what we're looking at, you know, because of my background. We are always looking for new communication platforms and social networks. Uh, we just closed our most recent investment in a company called monkey.
It's a very young, talented tech product team based in New York. We do most of our investing out here in Silicon Valley, but we do some outside of New York, LA, we This company is building a new platform for teens to communicate via video communication technologies. Nobody's really doing what they're doing.
There's been some attempts, and there's a couple of companies in the video communication space, uh, whether it's live. You know, or tape or streaming and we love the [00:28:00] angle that they're taking the product today doesn't have the full vision we're fighting for, but we, we believe in their vision we're fighting for.
We think this notion of connecting to your internet friends again. This speaks to teens, not necessarily to our demographic today, although I think one day probably will. To meet new friends using a quick, easy to use video chatbot, it's really interesting. We're excited about, you know, video and teen communication platforms, so we did the monkey app investment, um, working very closely with Ben and the team.
We are excited about healthcare. We did our first deal in consumer health. It's really consumer health that's Going through enterprise company called HelloHeart, which is helping people lower their blood pressure and live a healthier life, you know, heart disease is number one killer in America. And if we can help even a little bit, we will save.
thousands, if not millions of lives.
Amy: Is it an app or hardware?
Jim: Yeah, it started out, it's an app. It's a software company. We [00:29:00] don't love hardware companies.
Amy: Yeah, me either.
Jim: It's tough to build those businesses.
Amy: Oh, it's really tough.
Jim: We work with off the shelf blood pressure cuffs. We don't care which one it is.
And it's really great. I mean, they have thousands of customers now through massive businesses that are using it. Um, the self insured companies love it. Again, what a great, if we can at scale save tens of millions of lives, wow, that's amazing. And it's working and people are paying us for the software.
product. So what we're looking at more in health, we did a company in VR called AltSpace, which is like, almost like the future of social networking. It's social networking through virtual reality. We did that deal two years ago. It was a little early. Fortunately, they're doing well. We raised enough money to last for a while.
But we're still very excited about VR. We think that's going to be a massive consumer trend in the next year or two. And so we're looking for more companies there. We are excited about. What we call women population shifts. There's a trend that we've spotted, and I'm sure this is going to be massive. It's already big, but it's going to be massive where women are getting married later [00:30:00] in life.
Many are not getting married. Um, or there's sort of alternate life, you know, choices as far as marriage or kids. They're well educated, wealthy, successful, and often on the move. And we don't really have software products built for them. And we're talking about a massive trend that's continuing to go this way.
And there's a couple of books, like all the single ladies have written about something, uh, this kind of issue a couple of years, a year ago, recently, there was an article that came out about how more single women own homes than single men now. Just massive. So there's a lot of opportunity around that.
We're not sure yet what that means, how do we invest there? But we're going to, and we're going to build some great businesses to help that. That new population shift and we're really excited about and be personally the most excited about autonomous technology. We were early investors in cruise, which was the first big exit in the space in 2012.
I thought self driving cars is going to be here much faster than most people [00:31:00] thought. And so in 2013, we invested in cruise and last year we sold the company for over a billion dollars to GM because that returned our fund one. Uh, we've also invested in a self driving truck company, which is going to be announced.
This this month and self driving last month delivery vehicle, which is a little bit on the hardware side There's no way to get around that one But imagine these little robots walking the streets like four miles an hour Delivering your lunch or your amazon orders to your home at your office That's going to happen and we've got a great company in that space We're still looking at a couple of other autonomous vehicle technology plays But what people don't understand yet is it's going to happen self driving cars are going to come You They're going to come in our lifetime.
It's going to be here much sooner than we think. So we're excited about the future of autonomous vehicles and self driving cars, and we're looking to do more investments there.
Amy: I love this, Jim. One of the threads that really runs through everything you say and your whole career and your investment thesis is how [00:32:00] grounded you are in customer needs and these larger scale social trends.
And not every investor is. When you talk about autonomous technology, you're talking more about tech trends. And so I want to dig in a little and see where you think that burning customer need plays into all this autonomous technology.
Jim: Sure. Um, I've actually written a blog on why we need autonomous vehicles and why it's going to happen much sooner than we think.
And I have 10 reasons. I debated gentlemen in Lisbon for the Web Summit a couple months ago. And so I had to really think through all these issues. And so I'll refer your readers to the, to our Maven blog. They can read all the detail, but you know, here's some highlights. Every year, a million people die because humans make mistakes driving cars.
That doesn't ever have to happen again in a world where there's only self driving cars. And then this is a, this is a mind shift here. You have to picture the world [00:33:00] where there's only Uber, like a ride sharing services and self driving cars, you don't ever have to own a car again. Well, think about that.
One of your major purchases in life goes away and you know, it saves us a lot of money, so it creates, you know, New opportunity for garage space to have another room or a whole another area in our house Parking goes away being late anywhere you push a button and you know when the cars coming and when it's gonna get you there and there's no traffic and you never have to worry about commute because you could just kick back and sleep or do this call or watch a video or do a zoom video call for work while you're getting driven to wherever you're going. You know, productivity goes up dramatically and think about this as our population is aging, especially with baby boomers, people, it's going to get even more.
I mean, they shouldn't be driving. And so we don't have to worry about that anymore because it's safe for everyone. And it's going to be enabling the aging population to be driven around wherever they [00:34:00] want to go safely. And people with disabilities, blindness, issues around reasons why they could never have driven before, that goes away.
So it creates these massive opportunities for people, and the truth is that there's so much money at stake here, that it's gonna happen much faster. This is the reason why if now that you're sort of tuned into it and some of your listeners are tuned into it every single day There are articles about how ford just invested a billion dollars in this company gm bought a cruise for a billion dollars toyota's spending a couple billion dollars hiring all these engineers from mit and you know, it's like everyone understands how this half a trillion dollar industry is going to change the oems auto manufacturers They get it.
They see the writing on the wall. They don't want to be completely disrupted. They want to be part of this discussion, but it's a game changer. The only question is like, how is it going to iterate? How are we going to go from where we today own cars to one day we don't own cars? And does that [00:35:00] happen city to city and what happens in rural areas?
We could dig into that. I don't want to get into details, but there's answers for all of this. And there's a bunch of different iterations. It's just a matter of how it's going to happen and how quickly.
Amy: Well, that's an inspiring vision. I love hearing that. So who inspires you? You're clearly inspiring and helping a lot of people.
Who inspires you? Whose work do you read and follow? And who, where do you get your inspiration?
Jim: You know, there isn't like one person. I, I read a lot. I like to invest in founders who read a lot. I read a lot of different things. I like to read books. I like to read trade journals. I like to read newsletters or the news every day.
I read a lot of things. Sometimes it's science fiction because a lot of the stuff we're doing, we're making up. Based on ideas for what the future could look like. And so I love science fiction. I love, I love getting ideas from history, but the people who inspire me the most are founders and we meet like [00:36:00] hundreds of founders a year who have incredible ideas and the ones that get me the most excited, the craziest ideas.
So you just wonder. You listen to a pitch and you go, really, that's crazy. What would happen if they were able to execute that? How does it improve the world? And at scale, could that be a billion dollar company? I love those businesses. And then it sticks in my mind. And then I keep thinking and iterating on it.
And then maybe one day we do an investment and something similar happened. We invest in a company called foodworks, uh, which helped bring to the world this idea of, you know, all of us being able to cook home cooked meals for our neighbors. So it's, it's a, think of it as a mixture of like eBay and Airbnb, but for food.
Where you could literally cook a home cooked meal for your family, yourself, and extra for your local community who can come and buy it from your home, 5, 6, 7 a meal, or you can deliver it, especially in a world with autonomous vehicles. So you can just push a [00:37:00] button, car can come pick it up and deliver it around the neighborhood.
This is going to happen. It already happens. Around the world by in local communities or families that cook for other families all the time. And so we're thinking at scale It's such a great idea because you can imagine a world where we get to meet our neighbors through food It's a natural way to meet your neighbors, which is a good thing that we meet our neighbors that we we bond different tribes over food, which is great and We enable people to earn an extra couple of bucks or maybe a full living on this.
And we bring healthier food into the world, which is a real problem. When people are overweight and have diabetes, this could at scale, solve all these massive problems and be a billion dollar business. So company called food works is doing this and a shirt. It's crazy idea. But at scale, if it works, it's definitely a vision worth fighting for.
Amy: That's great. Thank you so much for joining us today. Now, before I let you go, is there anything coming up on the horizon for [00:38:00] you that you're particularly excited about that you'd like to let us know about?
Jim: Just closed our second fund, our second, uh, Maven fund too, I should say. And I had a previous angel fund before, so I guess it's our third fund in a way.
We invested in five companies so far and we've got another probably 11 to 12 more investments. We'll be doing a fun three down the road. My partner, Sarah Deshpande is looking to invest in healthcare and any great consumer software companies like myself, uh, easy to reach us through Maven Ventures, and we'd love to talk to any founders who have a great vision worth fighting for.
Amy: We'll be sure to put all those links in the episode notes when we publish it. Thank you so much for your time and your wisdom and your amazing stories. You are an entrepreneur at heart and it's wonderful talking to you.
Jim: Thank you. Great talking to you as well.
Outro: Thanks for listening to Getting2Alpha [00:39:00] with Amy Jo Kim, the shows that help you innovate faster and smarter. Be sure to check out our website. getting2alpha.com. That's getting2alpha.com for more great resources and podcast episodes.