Nabeel Hyatt
speaker
205 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Apr 2025
last heard Apr 2025
Nabeel Hyatt’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
And the industry moves fast enough that they're not going to wait until an exit or cash to get that other job. You're giving them a promotion or you're giving them more respect in two years or they're going to try to go somewhere else that's better, right? So what does that mean? Well, that means if I want to get a promotion and I'm inside of schmooby schmooby VC firm, then I need markups.
So if I need markups, how do I quickly get markups? I figure out what the guy one stage after me is interested in. And so my job is not really to go figure out what the future is, but to go figure out how to be aligned with a founder and do great work, or figure out how to get really deep with AI and figure out.
It's to go have a dinner with KOTU or whoever else and figure out what they're into this month, and then invest in it one month earlier, get the markup four months later so they can get a promotion. And that's basically the entire industry right now.
Well, to a certain extent. You understand it. You just hate it. I understand it. I don't think it's good for startups and I don't think it's good for founders. And I also, maybe more importantly than just some kind of value judgment, I think it's a losing strategy when no one knows what's about to be hot in nine months without being very, very deep in the work.
Some of the hardest sports are the ones where the things you say out loud are easy to say, but hard to execute.
Yeah, but principles and associates don't even solve that problem, right? You have 100X increase in number of startups and you added like nine principles. I'm sorry, you didn't cover the industry suddenly unless you're doing pattern matching. And I think the more fundamental question is, can you pattern match in this market? I don't,
know that the Brita filter version of investing is the right way to evaluate, or at least I'm not executing the way that I want to do my job and the way that I think my partners should do their jobs together in that kind of like trying to win the coverage game. What's the Brita filter of investing?
You know, take all the founders, put them in the top, and then you hope you sift out a handful of the good ones at the bottom. And that's a very inbound inbox oriented view of the world.
And if you do that, then your job is to tweet as much as humanly possible, market as much as humanly possible, bring everything into the top of the filter, and then do a really, really fast job filtering this incredible amount of inbound in order to be very, I would say, call it like transactional nature.
Get through the funnel as quickly as possible, say no as quickly as possible to move on to the next one.
Have you had to change? No. I also think I was really badly shaped to be an investor in 2021. I mean, I think we got lucky. Spark was started in the early Web 2.0 era, like right at that age, in the same cohort as USV and Benchmark 2.0 at the beginning of the girly era, and a handful of other firms that I think all treated mobile really well and did mobile really well, which felt similar.
You didn't know what the metrics were supposed to be. It was a wide open, crazy world. And you're like looking at something that was maybe a fart app in the morning and then Uber in the afternoon. Like it was an insane situation. I think our DNA was very fixed by that. Our values were set by that navigation.
And I'll be the first to say that I don't know that we navigated the B2B SaaS era four years ago, this kind of industrialization. We didn't do the things that a lot of our peer firms did. We had been very successful. We could have very easily raised $5 billion. We could have very easily tripled or quadrupled the size of the team. We didn't do that. We stayed seven people, six people partnership.
We all write checks. We all do work with our founders. We like the service work. I would argue that made our job a lot harder four or five years ago, to be honest. And it makes it a lot easier now because we feel very well shaped for this phase.
I think he is executing the strategy of Sequoia as if that is true and still trying to keep the rest of it compact and true, right? They're trying to execute a strategy where they're doing all the things, right?
I think when we look back at this specific era right now, it will not feel that way. Why? Most of the firms are executing strategies that are not particularly effective to this market. That means you're actually only competing with a smaller subsegment of people on any given deal.
Yeah.
I'm not a value investor. No, I get you.
Like I reject that notion. This industry is all about exceptions. That's literally the industry we're in. Why are we building a bunch of playbooks if the whole thing is about exceptions? Like you have to build a firm and as a founder, you have to be okay with the idea that there's going to be an exception next week to all the things you knew before or else you wouldn't be doing this.
Do they have some competitive barrier to entry, some reason that they might be a lasting institution, or is it an iceberg in the sun? Lots of boats in the sea. They all have their own individual slice, but it's a data provider like all the others are. that one feels like an easy no. If you just don't feel like they have a competitive edge, then that's hard.
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