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 mom of the house was crying because the diapers were showing up the morning of and she didn't have to carry these giant boxes home from the store. She's like, if you took this away from me, I don't know what I would do. Please don't take this away from me. That is not an MPS score of nine. That is a jaw dropping customer experience. That is incredible. Yeah.
we think of ourselves as very long-term investors. And if you really want to understand how long, I've been on the board for about 15 years, and this is public information, just last quarter, we were buying more shares. So it tells you- More than just five of eight rounds. Yes, exactly. We're still actively investing and helping where we can in the company.
I consider Bomb's development of Coupang and the development of GreenOaks that I've had is they're intertwined. I mean, it was one of the first investments we made and I joined the board pretty quickly and it was a seed investment. GreenOaks is probably best known for its growth investments.
We'd like to lead growth rounds in companies that we think will be a meaningful part of the S&P 500 over time. When we invested in Coupang, Green Oaks barely existed. When I was telling Bon that it was Green Oaks, he's like, I've never heard of Green Oaks. And he's like, don't worry, nobody's heard of Green Oaks. This is what you're hearing about for the first time, and I just made it up.
And he was kind enough to bring us in as an investor. And it's hard to start anywhere but the founder, which is in this case, Bon. And Bon, I would say there's a bunch, it's a lot of the tenants we look for in any great founder, Bon possessed right away. It starts with focus.
Baum had this unique ability early on to identify what was the most important thing in the company and focus all his time on that at the exclusion of everything else. Wouldn't it be unusual if you looked at Baum's calendar on a Sunday night? Everything the next week, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, it would just be blocked out with one single thing he was trying to accomplish.
If it was negotiating cost of goods sold in the diapers division in mid-2014, there'd just be two weeks blocked out to just do that for six hours a day. And he would just assemble a team and go deep on that and let everything else burn if needed. Yeah. That kind of focus is just extremely unusual. People like to say they're focused. They don't really understand what focus means.
Focus means saying no to everything else, everything else at the cost of doing what the single most important thing is. There's two parts to that. It's the ability to prioritize what is most important, not you have to practice it. To be able to intuitively grok what is most valuable and most important.
And then the ability to maniacally do that at the cost of everything else is an intestinal fortitude that just not a lot of people have. Second, just the ambition. There was a lot of clarity reasonably early on that by building this 1P capability, BOM could build the best e-commerce experience in the world. Not the best in Korea, not the best in Asia, the best in the world.
Better than Amazon, better than anywhere else on earth. He has done that today. But at the time, that didn't just ring hollow. There's a lot of people that say that. You meet founders all the time that have very lofty ambitions, but there's a credible aggression to it that you're sort of able to validate along the way. I've never met a founder that doesn't want to climb the tallest mountain.
Of course, I want to climb the mountain. It's the ability to demonstrate that they've mapped out their route. They've shown you how they're going to ration materials. They're going to show you what trade-offs they might have to make along the way. They'll tell you how they built the team to make sure they get there. They'll tell you the steps of what's going to happen along the way.
They've maybe even tried a few paths and come back and said, okay, now I'm going to go this way. There's a credible aggression to it that I think is unique to just pure aggression. Many of the rounds we led in the company were a result of... Baum attacking this mountain. The building of Coupang was over 10, 15 years to where it is today. And there's beds in every delivery camp.
Baum was sleeping on the floor. I mean, there are points where I talked to Baum more than most anybody else in my life. I mean, Benny and my wife. Oh, yeah, still to this day. I still talk to him a tremendous amount. Back then, I don't think there was an hour a day where I hadn't talked to him. 2 a.m. in the morning, 3 a.m. in the morning, 4 a.m. in the morning, 3 p.m. in the afternoon, 10 a.m.
in the morning. His cycle times were 24 hours. There were points of enormous exhaustion for him and the team.
I have a controversial statement, which is I don't think there are many truly amazing founders that are building bad businesses. I've maybe read it to one or two, but they figure it out pretty quickly. I think that truly remarkable founders think in terms of jaw-dropping customer experiences. They think in terms of competitive moats. They think in terms of scale, getting to large TAMs.
So every once in a while, I run into a founder that hasn't figured that all out yet, but usually they're very young and the learning curve is very steep. It always starts with founders for us.
Now, I'm going to come to business models in a second, but if you believe what Green Oaks believes, which is, I don't know, there's been 100 billion people on earth that have lived and something between the number of 10,000 to 100,000 have affected the technological progress of humankind.
Our job at Green Oaks is to find a few hundred more that could join the pantheon of great humans that have driven humanity forward. Then we're squarely focused on that first. I think that where we could generate alpha, where we're sometimes differentially great partners, is by having a deep understanding of the business model.
So in the case of Coupon, in the case of most of the businesses we invested, we made multiple rounds in. It's never up and to the right. Oftentimes in internet and technology, good businesses are hidden in bad P&Ls. Not everything works right away, but things are going really fast. And people sometimes think Green Oaks is looking for momentum or forward progress.
Actually, we're happy with volatility. It's kind of counterintuitive. Volatility is something like we're very open to. And we're open to it because when there's moments of high volatility, it's a lot harder to understand what's happening to a business, what's happening to a market. And so we will follow great founders into their businesses.
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