Tae Hea Nahm is co-founding MD of Storm Ventures, a Silicon Valley VC firm investing in tech start-ups all around the world. He’s also a two-time author. His second book, Survival to Thrival: Change or Be Changed explores how all people in a startup – from the executive team to the CEO and the board – need to change their roles and skills as a company grows.
Bob Tinker is a three-time entrepreneur.
Most recently, he was the founding CEO of MobileIron, which in eight years grew from ‘three people and a whiteboard’ to over $150M in annual revenue, more than 12,000 enterprise customers, and IPO in 2014. MobileIron was named the #1 fastest growing tech company from 2009-2013 by the Deloitte Fast 500. Before than Bob was VP Business Development for wireless pioneer Airespace, which was acquired by Cisco for $450M in 2005.
In this episode, you’ll learn:
- What are the 5 stages that a company goes through?
- How does one unlock growth in a company?
- What is the difference between the VC and the CEO perspective of the business?
- How can an investor’s portfolio have synergy among the investments?
- Why are Korean startups ripe for investing right now?
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Learn more about Tae Hea Nahm and Bob Tinker
- Tae Hea Nahm
- Bob Tinker
- Books Website: http://survivaltothrival.com/
- The Company Journey / Change or Be Changed
- https://www.stormventures.com/
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- Email Shawn@thesiliconvalleypodcast.com
Pre-Intro 0:00
You’re listening to the Silicon Valley podcast.
On today’s episode of Silicon Valley. We sit down with Tae Hea Nahm and Bob Tinker. Tae Hea Nahm is the co-founder, managing director of Storm Ventures, a Silicon Valley VC firm investing in tech startups all around the world. He’s also a two-time author. His second book, Survival to Thrival Change or be changed, explores how all people in startups, from the executive team to the CEO and the board need to change their roles and skills as the company grows. His co-author Bob Tinker is a three-time entrepreneur. Most recently, he was the founding CEO of MobileIron, which in eight years grew from a three-person team and a whiteboard to over 150 million in annual revenue. More than twelve thousand enterprise customers and an IPO in 2014. On today’s episode we talk about, what are the five stages that a company goes through? How does one unlock growth in a company? What is the difference between a venture capitalist and the CEO perspective of the business? This and much more on today’s episode. And we have a special gift for our listeners. For those who write a review, we’ll put your name in a hat and raffle off an autographed signed copy of Bob and Tae Hea’s book Survival to Thrival. So, don’t forget to enter for your chance to win. OK, now let’s start today’s show. Enjoy.
Intro 01:25
Welcome to the Silicon Valley podcast with your host Shawn Flynn, who interviews famous entrepreneurs, venture capitalists and leaders in tech. Learn their secrets and see Tomorrow’s World Today.
Shawn Flynn 01:28
Tae Hea and Bob, thank you for taking the time today to be on Silicon Valley.
Bob Tinker
Shawn Thank you glad to be here.
Tae Hea
Looking forward to being part of it.
Shawn Flynn 01:51
Now, Bob Tae Hea, you guys are two-time authors. You’ve just raised your six fund. You guys have this amazing history, this amazing credibility in the Valley. And I know our listeners are going to love to hear your guy’s story, but I got to ask. I mean, you’ve been together 18, 20 years longer than in prior 90 percent of marriages in in the world or at least in California. Can you talk a little bit about the history of how you two met, how you started working together?
Bob Tinker
Yeah, so it is funny you made that joke. Tae Hea and I joke that we’ve basically been work married for almost 20 years now. How we first met was back in 2002 on a company called Airspace and Tae Hea and I built two companies together where he was the main investor and I was the entrepreneur in this case. Tae Hea hired me as one of the first executives into a company called Airspace, which built Enterprise Wi-Fi in 2002. We built that company from zero to about 80 million dollars and then sold it for 450 million to Cisco. And then a couple years later, we started company number two together, company called MobileIron, where I was CEO and he was the main investor. And we grew that from zero to 150 million together and took it public. And it’s still a public company today. Both our wives joke that Tae Hea and I have been work married for almost 20 years now.
Tae Hea
And, you know, thinking back over time, there are really two stories that about Bob remember the most. And that is at air space, Bob had this unenviable task of closing these at the time we thought were impossible, challenging, closes major OEM deals before the company really had no customers product and all that in place. And then it sort of looks like, you know, when you send out a hunter with just a lone dog by himself or herself to go out and do the impossible. But lo and behold, Bob did it. He closed those deals. And that was critical in the company’s success.
Bob Tinker
The key was that I probably just didn’t know any better. And sometimes a little bit of naivete is a very powerful skill.
Tae Hea
Yes. Ignorance is bliss. And then the other was when we were in the early days of MobileIron, very early days, and we were in the process of founding the company and brainstorming with Bob about the idea. I was shocked when Bob basically gave up a large bonus and decided to join the company and founded early on beforehand. And that was critical to the company’s success because otherwise we would have to wait months before getting the company off the ground. And so, we were excited to see that.
Bob Tinker
It’s, reflecting back to this is, let’s see, January of 2008 and I was at Cisco after Cisco bought Air Space and Tae Hea and the two co-founders Seresh and AJ approached me about joining as CEO. And I just had one of those moments after I learned what MobileIron was going to be go do. I just had this. Oh, crap. I got to go do that moment. And yes, if I had stayed in the six months, more equity would be invested and that’s all fine. But sometimes you just look at a situation, say, I got to go do that.
Shawn Flynn 04:45
So, when you just gave that up, what did I mean, did your wife at the time or girlfriend of the time have an opinion on you just given up that much equity for this? I don’t
Bob Tinker
This idea that maybe nothing. Yeah. So luckily enough, at that point in time, I was single. So, my P&L was a little simpler in life.
Shawn Flynn 05:15
And then let’s go to the history of that company. What’s kind of the normal journey of a company from idea to I mean, every phase
Bob Tinker
So, you know, Tae Hea and I built two companies together. And it’s interesting. I think we’ve learned there are some patterns. You know, airspace was zero to about 80 million, sold it. MobileIron we grew from zero to a hundred fifty million took it to public. Now it’s almost 200 million a year and there are some patterns to building startups. So, there’s really sort of five phases, as we’ve seen. The first one is just founding. Let’s get the idea off the ground and get the team together, get some really capital. The second one is the time that it’s called product market fit, which is searching for that intersection between your product value and finding five, ten, fifteen customers that’ll give you money. And that’s where Silicon Valley really shine in terms of helping find product market fit of great products. But what’s interesting is then there’s a gap. And this is where I think we’ve seen a lot of companies sort of fall in the ditch, which is something we call go to market fit, which is how do you really unlock grow? The Silicon Valley is very good at helping companies build products. But I don’t think there is good at helping companies build go to market, go to market fit is the third phase. And then once you figured out that repeatable selling model, it’s really all about becoming a category leader, accelerating growth and then becoming a sustainable industry leader. And those five phases take a company from zero where you have no product, no idea, no team and no capital to hundreds of millions of dollars of revenue where you’re a leader in an industry, enormously valuable company. It’s incredibly hard to pull that off. But if you do it, it’s a spectacular accomplishment and creates an enormous amount of value.
Shawn Flynn 06:51
OK, so you mentioned the five stages, you have to go into more depth on each of those stages.
Bob Tinker
Well, you know, in many ways it’s funny to just try and summarize all the blood, sweat, tears, ups, downs, joy, pain of building a company and to sort of five phases. It feels into like a McKinsey presentation or something like that. It’s, it definitely does not feel like that when you’re in the middle of it. And frankly, as an entrepreneur, sort of overly simplistic one liners end up not being that helpful. So, yeah, I’m glad you asked that question, because I think, you know, for the audience, that’s actually the right thing to perhaps drill into. I think so. Unpacking a little bit. Maybe will sort of drill in particularly on product market fit and something we call go to market fit. And, you know, product market fit is something that if you listen to other entrepreneurial podcasts and the venture capital community, it’s something I think we have pretty well dialed in, which is how do you iterate with customers on your product idea? How do you find that value proposition? How do you find teaching customers that are willing to give you feedback? In a MobileIron in the early days, we spent six months talking to customers before we wrote a single line of code or raised a dollar venture capital, and that was so you could rather than be sort of this company that’s a technology in search of a problem. We really want to understand the problem and the customers and say, then what do we need to go build to solve that? And I think that was one of the core lessons for MobileIron in the beginning is start with your customers and work backwards. And when you do that, it makes the path, the product market fit to find those first five or 10 paying customers that are willing to give you money and say good things about your product. It makes that path much more doable. But then we learned something. I think the hard way, which is that there are a lot of companies in Silicon Valley and venture backed companies that get the product market fit, but then never unlock growth. And it’s maddening for the entrepreneurs, for the investors, super frustrating. The founder could figure out how to win five customers, 10 customers, but they’ve never been able to find repeatability. Growth doesn’t happen. Cash burn goes up, everybody gets freaked out. And the reality is, I think one of our key lessons that we learned is that there’s a missing link between finding product market fit and unlocking growth. And we call that go to market fit. And to give you an example for this MobileIron in the very beginning. We kind of ham and egged our way to 20 customers and I think we could claim product market fit. And that was terrific. But what we figured out was we found a problem with urgency and we figured out a repeatable go to market playbook for how you find and win customers over and over and over. Hire a new salesperson, they do this. And the funny thing about this is as a first time CEO, I made a huge mistake in the beginning, which is that I sort of thought having a repeatable go to market playbook was like, we just need a good PowerPoint pitch and a lot of product centric CEOs, me included. That’s how you sort of translate building repeatable go to markets. Oh, I just need a better PowerPoint pitch. That’s not it. It’s step one, step two, step three, step for step five for how you take a customer from the first time you met them to when they decide to buy your product and you win and being able to nail that down and figure out that repeatable recipe is what I found at MobileIron to be the missing link between product market fit and unlocking grow. And just to give you a sense for sort of the magnitude of that, we went from having 20 customers to then winning 20 new customers a quarter to 50 new customers a quarter to 150 new customers a quarter to five hundred new customers a quarter, which in enterprise software is nuts. But once you figure out that repeatable go to market recipe on a problem with some urgency, magic happens. And that’s really when you can unlock growth and accelerate to become a category leader. And all hell breaks loose inside the company because now you go from this little company just trying not to die, too, like, oh, crap, how did we win? And you go from stingy frugality to calculated recklessness. The CEO has to change. The leadership team has to change how they do their jobs. Everything changes in the company. And if you do that correctly, you can actually earn the right to become a category leader, an industry leader. That’s a rare and spectacular thing when it happens.
Tae Hea
So, I want to go back to this what Bob mentions about the go to market playbook, because obviously was so critical of MobileIron that, you know, we want to replicate across our other portfolio companies. And in doing so, we found that companies were very good at creating it, except they would always lack one thing, which they said, wasn’t that as important, and that’s knowing what their exact wow is. Yeah. And so I thought it would be great. Bob, as you can share, is what was the wow at MobileIron and the early days of the playbook and why had such an important impact on conversion?
Bob Tinker
Yeah, this wow concept is a really powerful one, which is any founder out there or early sales person or any early entrepreneur in any company is going to go meet with customers. And you talk about what you do and you talk about this. You talk about that. And then every once in a while, there’s something you say or show where you can see like the customer’s body language change and they kind of sit up in their chair and they lean into the table like tell me more. That’s a clue. A wow is something about your product, your business, whatever it is that gets customers interested to spend more time with you in order to build that repeatable go to market playbook. You have to find the wows and watch for those things with the customers, change their body link,
Tae Hea
Or they may do is they may like invite colleague.
Bob Tinker
That’s a great example,
Tae Hea
you know. Or they say, I got to try it or I want to show it to my boss. But there is change in customer behavior.
Bob Tinker
And the interesting thing about finding the wow is that what I learned the hard ways. I was sort of a product centric founder and product centric founders. You sort of think, you know, what the wow is going to be is obviously it’s whatever you worked the hardest on most proud of in your product. The reality is, I don’t get decide the wow, the customers get to decide the wow. And for us, what we found, interestingly, was what we thought that wow was going to be, wasn’t the wow. Turned out, you know, rewind back to 2008 MobileIron built mobile security for early mobile devices. In 2008, the world was BlackBerry, the world with Symbian and the world was Windows phone. We can all laugh about that now. But that’s what the world looked like. And there was this new little thing in the world called the iPhone. And people were starting to bring it to work and they were using it, invented this new feature called Selective wipe, and it never been done before. Customers weren’t really using bring your own device at the time yet, but we showed them this capability to basically remove your work content, delete your personal stuff. And people were like wow! Show me more. We had the second capability which we built called an Enterprise App Store, which we sort of think about. Everyone knows the App Store now that Apple has and Google has one. But we built the very first private app store for enterprises. I mean at this time is no customers had any apps yet. We would show this Enterprise App Store and customers would go, wow, and they’d want to spend more time with us and finding whatever those one or two things about which you do that causes customers to lean in. Want to learn point, invite a colleague or want to go to POC. You got to figure out what those things are and one of the classic mistakes I made was is sort of the part of the team who is building the first product, you sort of think, you know what the answer is going to be. And often it’s actually not. It’s something else is the customer the one that gets to decide the wow and the wow is absolutely critical to building that repeatable go to market playbook.
Shawn Flynn 14:45
Is the customer wow, is that what unlocks the growth right there? What does unlock the growth in a company?
Bob Tinker
So, the first thing in unlocking growth for a startup is just finding an urgent problem. Right. Because if the answer to the question twelve months growth is going to be slow. So number one is urgency.
Tae Hea
Number one gives you when you address an urgent problem, you get a lot of leads.
Bob Tinker
Is then customer starts showing up saying, I would like to learn more. I would like to try your product. And then the second key thing is building that repeatable playbook. And I know I probably use that a couple of times, but it was a founding product CEO. Like I said, I mistakenly thought I’d go to market playbook again was just like a good pitch, figuring out that journey for what is step one for engaging with the customer. Step two, step three, step four really nailing that down like is key to unlocking growth.
Shawn Flynn 15:41
Wait, so, Bob, you talked about the customers wow. Now, is that what happens when you’re able to unlock growth? I mean, what happens? How does one unlock growth in a company?
Bob Tinker
So the wow is not the one thing that needs to unlock growth, but it’s an important part. The key thing to unlock growth is, again, sort of solving that missing link or that gap between winning your first 20 customers and how do you build a repeatable recipe to find and win customers over and over and over and over again. Number one is you need to have an urgent pain that you’re solving. If there’s not, then everyone will be going to say, I will wait six months, I’ll wait twelve months. It’s really hard to unlock growth when you have urgency because then you’ve got inbound leads, you’ve got more opportunities. You can then go after them. And if you then have a repeatable playbook, which includes your wow. But then also the step one, step two, step three, as soon as you link all of those things together, you start to have your repeatable recipe. So if you hire more salespeople or invest more in marketing or go talk to more customers, the flywheel of growth starts to happen. And when you find that recipe and achieve good a market fit, it’s magic. I remember when we got it figured out of MobileIron, we went from winning, you know, 10 or 20 customers a quarter to fifty, One hundred to five hundred. It was crazy. But basically the effect is if you hire a new salesperson or spend more money on marketing, people know what to do in order to find and win customers. And that is what unlocks growth.
Tae Hea
A common question that comes up is especially for people that have worked in hypergrowth company in a company that’s unlocked growth before is what is go to market fit feel like. And one metaphor that conveys is the difference of going from paddling to surfing. You know, when you paddle, you’re burning a huge amount of energy to go a short distance. In other words, small growth or low growth efficiency. Whereas if you’re surfing, you have the wave that’s carrying you.
Bob Tinker
That’s a great metaphor, because if you think about the exercise of catching a wave and surfing, you have to build a surfboard. So you get a good surfboard. You then have to paddle to start to pick up a little bit of momentum. And then you have to pick the right point on the wave that starts to push you and then catch it and go like there’s a great metaphor in there that you can’t just be sitting there still in the water and expect to catch a wave like you got to already be moving. And then magic happens.
Shawn Flynn 18:08
Just remember how much effort it was to start the paddle in. But if you got that wave out of nowhere, you just feel this push from behind you and takes you all the way to shore. So that momentum from now, you put the initial, I guess, fire in and then just.
Bob Tinker
You just said the exact right word, which is momentum. When you say what is go to market fit feel like. All of a sudden things start to move.
Shawn Flynn 18:34
So, I got to ask, though. So, the company is moving so fast. You’re hitting all these stages that was just talked about when you’re hitting these stages. Is it the same people at the company at each stage? I mean, the same V.P. of sales, the same CEO. How do people adapt when you’re going from a company of five people to a company of a thousand?
Bob Tinker
That is a great question. And, yeah, Tae Hea and I have been through this together twice and, you know, he’s obviously as an investor, worked with a lot more companies than I have. So to share that through my lens having been a CEO taking company from three people on a white board, almost a thousand people. And the thing I learned is that as the company changes, your job changes and therefore you have to change yourself or be changed. Actually, that’s the title of our book we just released. Change or Be Changed. And if you look back on my time as CEO at MobileIron and I in effect had three really different CEO jobs, my title didn’t change. Not like somebody woke up one day and said, Hey, Bob, your job is different now. Kind of sneaks up on you. I’m number one in the early days was more like sort of Captain America or Wonder woman and the platoon. It’s you and the platoon in the woods throwing punches, getting punch, digging ditches and into trees. It’s a blast. But then you get to sort of 50, 60 people. And now you have to hire a leadership team of great executives. And it’s no longer about captain America. Woman. It’s like The Avengers where you’re like Captain America, Wonder Woman in Avengers and you need to hire a band of superheroes, each of whom has a special superpower that’s like better than yours. A marketing superhero, product superhero, sales superhero, port superhero, engineering superhero. And when you do that, you have to let go. And what’s the first thing a great a superhero is going to do when they join your team is they’re going to look at all the stuff you’ve built so far and be like. That’s terrible. I can do better. And so, it creates this massive sense of insecurity where all of a sudden, you’re hiring good people and they’re basically calling your baby ugly. But that’s exactly the point of why you bring people like that. When we got to about 450 people, my job changed again. And the analogy here to continue with the superhero analogies is more like Professor Xavier in the X-Men, where you’re almost more like the dean of a university, where your professors are your warriors bringing up the next generation. You have to do a lot fewer things, but for a lot more people and repeat yourself over and over and over and over and over again, which drove me absolutely nuts. So, you know, I went to really different CEO jobs all in the same company. And the hardest thing for me, interestingly, was not learning what the next job was. And I think we spend too much time talking about learning. And that’s part of the equation. I think actually the harder part for me and for most leaders and companies that are going through these fast growth scenarios is unlearn what made you successful before, because the things that actually helped me be a successful CEO and we are zero to 50 people, many of those things actually get in the way when you’re trying to grow a company from 50 to 250. And the things that make you successful at 50 to 250 affect you and get in your way growing at the next stage. So, for me, the hard lesson there was it was less about learning what the next role was and it was much more about unlearning what used to work and wasn’t going to work at the next stage. And I think it goes back to the old adage, what gets you from A to B is not necessarily what’s going to get you from B to C. And that applies to the CEO, applies to every executive on the team company changes your job changes would therefore I had to change and we had to change. And sometimes people can make those adjustments. They can adapt. They can unlearn. They can really deliver on what the company needs. The next role or sometimes the answer is not. And in that case, the right answer is to change the people and bring in new leaders or in some cases, change yourself and take yourself out. You know, those are the big, hard decisions as a leader and as CEO and as executives in the team that because at the end of day, it’s about what’s the right thing for the company.
Tae Hea
Just adding to what Bob was saying about the three different CEO profiles. You know, the application of that will be to something as like how does the CEO control the company’s operations and manage all that. The Captain America Wonder woman, a profile would be managing every task. So, it’s like super project managers. And it’s a great micromanager at the next stage. When you’re dealing with The Avengers, instead of being a managing by all the tasks you want to control through goals and metrics. And so you’re empowering executives. But at the same time, holding them accountable with the key metrics and goals. And then as the company gets even bigger and the Bob was saying about Professor Xavier and Dean University, the way that a CEO would really establish control would be through vision and culture.
Shawn Flynn 23:32
And you’d mention a lot of unlearning right there. How does one kind of unlearn? Did you have a mentor or a coach to teach you to unlearn and then taught you the next steps? Or was it just kind of an introspective Siddall and think what needs to be done kind of lesson kind of development?
Bob Tinker
Unlearning is counterintuitive. The number one ingredient for unlearning is actually self-awareness, which is developing some self-awareness about what’s working and candidly what’s not working or what’s not working anymore. And for me, the types of things that helped with unlearning was feedback from my team. Right. If there are things that the company needed or the team needed from me at the next stage that they weren’t getting. They’ll tell you, listen to your team and you start to get that feedback. And if you take it seriously, it gives you some clues about places where you may need to unlearn. The second thing was the best mentors were people that were three or four or five years ahead of me, not 10 or 20 or 30 years ahead of me. People that were sort of more recent enough where I think their experience felt a little more relevant, a little more immediate to me. And the third thing that helped me with unlearning and the trick on that is there a lot of mediocre executive coaches out there. My experience on this one was that I had a very good executive coach that really kind of got my head. And it was a deeply uncomfortable experience, actually, because in some levels unlearning because you actually have to let go of the things that actually got you, where you are and the things that you’re comfortable with and the things that you’re good at and got to where you are and you have to actually stop doing something else. It’s inherently a very uncomfortable, very insecurity generating experience. But on the other side of it, it’s a really powerful personal and professional growth experience. And you know, those three things of self-awareness, getting the feedback from your team. Finding a mentor and a coach, all those things add up to give you the signals and the information and the tools to be able to figure out how to unlearn. And the punch line is it’s really up to that individual. It’s a very personal decision that you have to be willing to growth journey and say that’s something I want to do, either professionally or personally. And when you do, you get to the other side. And it’s a lot of fun.
Tae Hea
And you know, another part of to help people unlearn and also transcend in their careers is really understanding how their role and their job is going to change. And what we found this is that they’re obviously experienced investors, executives who’ve gone through this and can personally share their journeys and be their mentors. But it’s relatively small number. And so that’s actually one of the reasons why Bob and I wrote the book is that we couldn’t find other resources that people around the world can go and just read to understand how and why their jobs are going to change, because only by doing that, you get the motivation to go through this very uncomfortable process of unlearning.
Bob Tinker
Yeah, the three steps that we’ve seen are one is understand what your job looks like at the next stage to anticipate it. Two is go through the pain and insecurity of unlearning what used to work for you that you need to let go of. And three is then learn what you need to do to be able to be successful at the next stage. And that process repeats itself over and over again. As the company. And what’s interesting is the very things I went through at certain stage in the company. Fast forward 18 months. My team was now going through their own personal version of that because now the sales team was growing to the scale where the VP sales had to go through his own or her own version of that. And so, this cycle of unlearning and learning happens over and over and over again, over the growth of a company and the evolution of leadership.
Shawn Flynn 27:18
I really want to ask a couple questions about your guys, fund your investment. But I still there’s so much more I still want to learn about this. I have a question about the unlearn and learn. Now, does this also happen for the investors of the company or the board for the company where they have to learn, unlearn kind of their role with the company or what’s going on?
Bob Tinker
Oh, that is a great question and unlearning applies to everybody in the company. It applies to the CEO. It then applies to the leadership team. It then applies to every employee in the company. And it definitely applies to the board. Tae Hea you want to sort of take it on from here.
Tae Hea
Absolutely. You know, the company in the early stages, many times the board member feels like a member of the team. You know, you’re helping solve specific problems. Let’s say find go to market fit, help give advice on product market fit and so forth. But then as the company grows, and especially as you go from survival to thrival, doing that kind of involvement, actually slow the company down is when you force seven type role and as a board member, you are on the other boards. You are not a full-time employee, the company. And so that kind of involvement is counterproductive. And as a board member, it what you need to do is to step back and take a longer view of the company and in terms of providing the right guidance.
Bob Tinker
The there’s a great metaphor that one of our board members of MobileIron used, had a motorcycle analogy, which is that when you’re first starting on a motorcycle and this is sort of the board’s role, you’re kind of looking at the ground and the potholes like right in front of the motorcycle and you’re getting going. And then you need to change your visual horizon as the motorcycle starts to accelerate and look out sort of maybe a couple hundred yards, just sort of anticipating traffic, navigating around. And once the motorcycle starts going really fast, your eyes are more on the horizon. So, I think shifting of visual horizon ends up being sort of the biggest unlearning exercise. They have to then stop focusing on the problems they used to focus on and focus on the next set of things that are going to be important for them.
Shawn Flynn 29:28
I love that metaphor. The motorcycle and horizon. I’m thinking right now about a company that, you know, when they first start off, they plan just literally the next few days, the next week.
Bob Tinker
Just try not to fall into pothole
Shawn Flynn 29:40
Exactly. And then, as you know, it’s big corporation. They have their one year or two year plans and everything’s laid out. So, I love how visual that is. Now, to go back or to start. I got to ask you a little bit about six fund successful. How do you go about finding potential growth companies to look at? I mean, I’m guessing everyone else is trying to get that same few ones out there.
Tae Hea
Right. You know, this whole process of finding companies has really changed in the last five years. It used to be that the primary companies were here in Silicon Valley. And the way of sourcing deals was through your network or through referrals. What we’re seeing, though, especially with the cloud, is, is that great companies can emerge from anywhere around the world and become very successful in the United States. We’re seeing great success with like our European investments. And so, the way to source deals is change, where thought leadership and building a brand becomes really important. But especially thought leadership in the ability to sort to help people, even if you’re not there physically.
Bob Tinker
I look at the choice as a former entrepreneur for how you choose to work with as an investor. Everybody’s money’s green or I guess depending what country you’re in. You know, it’s really about the people. The thought leadership or the value that gets added along with the investors. You know, and I you know, as an entrepreneur, I work with Storm Ventures twice. And the reason was that I could learn from him as an entrepreneur, you want to be building a bench of investors that are adding value beyond their money, whether it’s helping you with recruiting, helping with leadership team, helping you with big decisions, helping you with advice. And, you know, from the point of view of an entrepreneur. The things I sort of discovered by accident is that when you think about building your board over time of your different investors, you want each one of your board members to play a position. If you think about your management team, like I had a head of sales, I had a head of marketing, I had a head of people, and everybody played a position. Many ways over time you start to build your board of investors. You want each one of you also play a position. You don’t want to have a bunch of board members who are all product geniuses and nobody does anything else. And so his point about thought leadership, that if you think about, you know, brand building or venture capital firms and generating leads and finding great companies, you know, it’s going to be about the value they bring to the table sort of beyond the money. And I think that comes exactly to thought leadership.
Shawn Flynn 32:13
We’re going to end part one of this two-part episode right here. So don’t forget to listen to next week and read a review. Take a picture and e-mail me at Shawn@ TheSiliconValleyPodcast.com or find me on social media for your chance to win a signed autographed copy of Tae Hea and Bob Tinker’s newest book. And stay tuned for next week. Where we will talk about what should entrepreneurs look for when deciding and what V.C. to work with, what would be considered a normal fun structure. And has this changed over the years? And much, much more. Stay tuned for next week’s episode on the Silicon Valley podcast.
Outro 32:54
Thank you for listening to The Silicon Valley Podcast. To access our resources, visit us at TheSiliconValleyPodcast.com and follow our host on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn @ShawnFlynnSV. This show is for entertainment purposes only and is licensed by The Investors Podcast Network. Before making any decisions, consult a professional.
