Neil Mehta
speaker
321 appearances
2 recordings
2 series
first heard Apr 2025
last heard 4 May
Neil Mehta’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 1.
Appearances
The second would be some higher priced rounds that look like really crazy on the outside. They don't make any logical sense. Why did you do them? We have some logic for why we did them, but we could be wrong. Benny and I as founders, we've pushed our organization really hard. One of the other pieces of feedback might be like, are you pushing too hard? We can't always hire while we can fire fast.
We run a very tight team. We're reasonably intense in the way we run that team. You can make an argument that you should not run at this intensity level. You could run at 70% of this intensity level and things would be just fine. I just don't think we'd be that happy if we did it. So it probably is the right feedback, but I don't value it that much.
I'm going to have a controversial answer. I think it's Yuri Milner. The easy answer is Masa. Most people, I think the Mike Moritz's and phenomenal, Peter Fenton's, phenomenal investors. It's hard to argue against Masa. I will in a second. Have you spent time with Masa? He gets made fun of a lot. He is incredible. First of all, step back for a second.
This guy came from Japan when he was in his teens. He didn't speak a word of English. was ostracized for not speaking a word of English, studied his butt off. It goes back to Japan, creates one of the largest enterprise value companies in Japan over the course of 20 plus years. Along the way, decides to become an accidental investor. At one point, he was the richest man in the world.
One thing I think is underrated is Silicon Valley is a fairly insular culture and has never really been that nice to Monsanto.
They make fun of his PowerPoint slides. They make fun of the investments he makes. There's almost like a twinge of, I don't want to call it racism, but xenophobia to him. Like, what is this guy doing coming out of nowhere? The guy's multiple times made $100 billion returns. I remember when he invested in Arm. I have a lot of respect for Mosse.
I don't think Green Oak should emulate the way they invest. I think Mosse is an N of one. But when he invested in Arm, I had a friend of mine who runs a large investment bank call and say, could you believe how stupid this guy is? I can't believe he bought Arm. That thing is tanking. It's never going to work. This guy had his semiconductors analyst on a call with me.
Semiconductor analyst runs out a list of reasons on why this investment's never going to work. Mosse and another entrepreneur And I decided I'm going to give all the reasons. I'm like, here are all the reasons the semi-analyst from one of the big investment banks thinks you're going to fail on arm. Listen, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, 10. Listen to him.
He's like, ah, but he fails to realize that the market's growing. And he was right. I've seen him multiple times. And by the way, underrated for how great he is with entrepreneurs at times. He's come up and stepped into the plate. Sometimes you can measure investors not by figuring out where the momentum's going,
But when the going gets tough, how they stand up for entrepreneurs, and I've seen him three or four times step up to the plate in a meaningful way, whether it's Tony at DoorDash or the Obama coupon, pay off most times, not all the time, most times. I think that's really remarkable.
The reason I say Yuri is when I was at T. Shaw and Yuri made the investment in Facebook, I didn't know you were allowed to make investments like that. I remember going to my boss and saying, are we allowed to invest in money-losing internet companies at $10 billion in enterprise value that are still private?
I know the growth investing of buying things at four times revenue that's a software company and adding a couple of bolt-ons into it. That to me was growth investing and private equity in growth companies. Yuri broke that mental model for me.
And he was the first one I remember making a large scale category defining investment in a category defining company that was so obviously going to change the world. The way he built DST, the number of correct decisions he's made compared to the number of bad decisions he's made. it really is a remarkable ratio. I can't name, I think the total impairment in all of DST is like very low.
The quantum of money they've made as a firm, and then also with his personal investing in things like ByteDance and Xiaomi, You just take one of those and that's all of the firm's returns. By the way, who do you think is the best?
Yeah. I've only gotten to know Mike a little bit better recently and not a lot of people would know this. I don't know if he would describe us as a competitor when we were coming up, but I certainly think about them. I think they're an amazing firm. And Mike recently retired.
When I was going through all the San Francisco stuff, when politicians were holding my face on a picket, Mike emailed me and I was like, can I help you a little? Any help? What you got? And he recommended that I write an op-ed. And he's like, I know you don't want to do anything publicly. I know you wouldn't like this, but I think it's the right thing to do.
You should be transparent and direct with what you're doing. And I was like, sure, I'll try doing it. He helped me and he was on the phone with me helping me. Outside of this conversation, it would have gone unsaid. What a remarkable thing to do for a young kid that he doesn't need to help in any way whatsoever. He's a really amazing human being.
I think the thing, if you were with us at Green Oaks and you just sat with Benny and I for like a day, I think the thing you'd probably be most surprised about is how much we care about beauty. Like we love spending time on a P&L, but the reason we like this so much is we like beautiful businesses. We love beautiful relationships. We care about beauty in the world.
We want to make the world a little bit better tomorrow than it is today. And we think Reno's could be driving enormous impact doing that. That's why we invest in the companies we invest in. That's why we don't care about finding a software company in Minnesota and buying it three times revenue and flipping it five times. Don't care about that at all.
It's probably a better business than the one we're in. We're okay leaving that on the cutting room floor. I manifest in a bunch of different ways. I'm born and raised in San Francisco. So I dedicated a reasonable amount of money to trying to fix just my street in San Francisco. How effective is that? Oh, gosh. It's not a story I expected to have come out or ever talk about, frankly.
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