E14 The great hits and misses of venture capital with Brendan Wales of e.ventures

In this episode, Erasmus Elsner is talking to Brendan Wales, general partner at e.ventures on investing in data infrastructure unicorn Segment at the Seed and passing on TikTok (then Musical.ly) at the Series A.

0:00 Sand Hill Road Intro 

2:10 First job running a Golf shop while at college 

3:20 First job out of college in 2009 and entrepreneurial ambitions 

4:29 'I gotta get to the Valley' finding Zozi's on Crunchbase 

6:06 Joining e.ventures in 2012 

7:52 History and roots of e.ventures  

9:53 e.ventures current fund and global footprint 

11:10 Investing in Segment.io at the Seed along with Kleiner Perkins 

15:08 Consumer-tech perspective on Segment 

16:02 Passing on Musical.ly/TikTok 

17:30 Warm introductions vs. metric-based discovery (digital exhaust) 

20:30 Metrics requested from Musical.ly/TikTok founding team / key consumer social metrics 

22:17 Machiavellian founder perspective on Musical.ly/TikTok consumer retention 

24:35 Ex-post reflections why they passed on Musical.ly/TikTok 

26:35 Comparison to the recent Clubhouse a16z-led Series A 

28:50 Venture capital returns over the lifetime of a fund 

31:10 Pattern matching for early markups 

32:58 This Week's Seed Companies 

35:24 EVA Growth Index / X-Factors 

37:37  Nacelle: headless CMS for Shopify stores, backed by Index and Accomplice 

39:05  Most recent investment: Airvet, $14m Series A led by Canvas Ventures