Matt Huang
speaker
205 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Apr 2025
last heard Apr 2025
Matt Huang’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsNo recordings in the last 12 months.Older appearances are listed below; set an alert to hear about the next one.
Appearances
It's a two-sided market where one side is extremely concentrated and the other side is super lazy, low willingness to pay. Just how you draw it up. Yeah, exactly. So we went to YC and raised some angel and seed money and continued to build and eventually it just wasn't working the way we wanted. So we pursued acquisition of opportunities and ended up getting acquired by Twitter.
And that itself was an interesting chapter. What did you learn in that M&A? In the M&A process? This was the era when they weren't acquiring the business, they were acquiring us. It was a talent acquisition. We interviewed there, Airbnb, and Palantir. Ended up choosing Twitter, probably the least well-run of the three companies.
I would say the most important takeaway for me, I don't think there's a lot of things to learn from failure or a failed startup on a substantive level. But I think there are certain lessons. I certainly learn this now much more or experience this now much more as a parent. Some things you have to learn by experiencing them. You can read all you want. You can think that you understand them.
But the aha doesn't really happen until you're in it. And I think the ambiguity of trying to create something new from scratch and the loneliness of the founder journey and kind of all the founder empathy stuff was probably the main takeaway. And I think that's the biggest thing that has helped me from that experience.
Well, I knew I wanted to be in technology and building things. I was definitely not sure whether tech Silicon Valley was the ideal place to do that. That actually connects to, I toyed with the idea for a little bit of going to build something in China. Because this was 2012 now, Silicon Valley, I felt at the time was somewhat saturated. Obviously, it wasn't. But the iPhone was released in 2007.
You had a lot of mobile apps get built. I think 2012 was the year Instacart and Snapchat were started. Those were probably the last two big consumer outcomes that were mobile first. I'm probably missing something. And that's what I was interested in. Enterprise is not really, I think it's super interesting for some people. It's not interesting for me.
And so China felt like the place where you could have that level of compounded annual growth of the underlying space. And I thought, hey, I'm Chinese American. Maybe I'll have an advantage there. When I took the trip, I realized, no, I'm not actually Chinese. It's a very different thing. But that ended up leading me to the ByteDance investment. And we can unpack that.
But when I came back, the next time I felt like there was that underlying multi-decade potential to compound with Tailwinds was crypto.
If you visualize back in 2012, every U.S. venture capitalist and company was trying to go to China. China was entering Hollywood. It was very much a globalization at the forefront. And I thought maybe that's where I should spend time. I took vacation from Twitter. So this was like a week-long vacation. I had some mutual friends with folks who were VCs or tech people in China.
And so they helped me set up a bunch of meetings. And so I land in Beijing. And I had been there before. The summer before MIT, I went to do some language learning. But even in just that time, which was basically six years, the whole city was transformed. Like you land and it's a massive, massive city, very gray.
But I just remember feeling the energy on the ground of this is a culture that feels like it's experiencing hyper growth. Whereas Silicon Valley at the time, there's like a lot of enthusiasm about startups. But even then the culture was a little, in some ways, complacent. And so that was very inspiring. And so I went from meeting to meeting,
not expecting to make any investments, but just trying to learn. And I'm at the Dropbox of China and the X and Y of China. And I remember rolling up to the ByteDance, this apartment complex split across two apartments. I had a translator with me. We go up the elevator and very unassuming wood floors. I get pulled into like a little kitchen and
where you imagine like a really old refrigerator looks like it'd be dirty inside and a very simple Ikea-like kitchen table with some stools. And I'm sitting there with the translator and the founder of ByteDance, Yiming. One thing that's really interesting, we have a mutual friend, Graham Duncan, who talks about interviewing and referencing and kind of observing people.
And Reflection is a very unique experience where he would say something and I wouldn't really understand what he was saying. And then the translator would translate and I could understand. But while he was talking, I could just internalize all of the nonverbal. Yeah.
I remember having this very deep sense of this is an extremely competent, obsessed person that is also somehow balanced and not crazy and going to blow himself up, but also extremely aggressive and take over the world. I think that's a rare mix to find. I also hated the idea, which was a personal news. This was pre-TikTok Douyin, so pre-video.
And their primary business and what built the company was a personalized news app. And I just remember that being an idea that basically hadn't worked in the U.S. Lots of people tried it. I have like a post hoc understanding now of why it worked in China. But at the time, I hated the idea.
But I came out of that meeting feeling like, holy crap, I got to figure out some way to get behind this person.
We left the trip and I chatted with a handful of other folks who were mutual friends with the investor who set us up. And the takeaway I had from the trip was that's the one. And so then that group basically begged the existing VC to figure out some way to let us in. They were really kind. What was the valuation that you invested in? There was a mix of shares, but $20 million and $30 million.
Okay.
I think at that point in my life, he might have been the most, and you must experience this a lot, the most impressive single person I'd ever spent physical time with. Would read about a lot of impressive people. And that was very inspiring and kind of addictive now as a venture investor. You basically get to do that all day.
Showing 21–40 of 205 · page 2 of 11
← Previous
Next →