The Venture Mindset | Ilya Strebulaev

0:06Welcome to the Talks at Google Podcast, where great minds meet. I'm Lauren, bringing you this episode with Ilya Strebelev, award-winning author, professor, economist, and speaker. Talks at Google brings the world's most influential thinkers, creators, makers, and doers all to one place. You can watch every episode at youtube.com slash talks at Google. Ilya has devoted two decades to studying how venture capitalists approach decision-making and the reasons behind the successes and failures of corporate innovations. He joins Google to discuss his book, The Venture Mindset, which he co-authored with Alex Deng.

0:45The book shares how to adapt to a rapidly changing world, make smarter bets, launch new ventures, and transform traditional organizations into hubs for innovation. Ilya is an international expert in venture capital, private equity, and financing innovation. Among his many achievements, he's been a professor at Stanford University's Graduate School of Business since 2004. He is also a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research and the founder and faculty director of the Stanford GSB Venture Capital Initiative. Here is Ilya Strebelev, The Venture Mindset.

1:29Hi, Ilya. Welcome. Piyush, it's a great pleasure to be here with you. Yeah, it's a pleasure of all hours. As I said, this is a fascinating book. I really enjoyed learning a lot. Why don't we take some time and talk about both how some topics here apply to large companies, like the one which we are at, right? How does it apply to companies which are trying to innovate, but are actually large and established? And also, how does it apply to founders who are trying to build great companies themselves or people who are trying to spot other unicorns out in the wild and how to invest in them? So let's take the time to cover the entire landscape.

2:14But to start with, I would love to, you know, talk about a lot of... So large companies, they always were like, you know, they were great companies once upon a time, right? but now they're here. So how can they benefit from it now? And what should established companies take away from the venture mindset? What should the founders of those companies, what should the new employees in these companies, what the managers of these companies, what should they take away from the book now that they haven't? Thank you, Piyush. It's really not just a great question, but I think it's a very timely question.

2:57You know, I work with a lot of traditional companies around the world. I work with a lot of innovative companies around the world. And really, the Venture Mindset book is intended for them, for those leaders who make decisions in those companies. So when I work with those leaders, you know, many of them ask me, so what is the secret source of Silicon Valley? And more specifically, they asked me, why do venture capitalists manage to find and fund future giants like Google, Amazon, NVIDIA, Zoom? I'm sure you can supply many other names. While so many larger corporations often don't. And indeed, let's just look at a couple of facts.

3:45So if you look at the largest top 10 companies in the United States today, seven of them were venture-backed. Seven of them were quite recently small startups. Now, half of all the companies, every second company that went public in this country in the last 50 years were VC-backed. Also, I follow every single unicorn. That's a kind of a company recently founded with a reported valuation of at least$1 billion. And there are now more than 1 ,000 of them, more than 1 ,000 of those unicorns. And at the same time, up to four out of five companies, and likely more, in their original Fortune 500 list are either no longer with us or no longer on the list.

4:39So too many of them have failed to produce their internal unicorns. And many of them, as a result, have not survived. So that is, I think, the worry, but also the opportunities behind the question that I'm often asked. And this is what really the book is about. And if you think about this, these facts are paradoxical. I mean, they are kind of ironic because these large, established, successful companies have way more resources, more support, more funding, more experience than those small startups. So the story of Zoom, I think, is quite illustrative, which is Eric Yuan worked at Webex. And some people might still remember Webex, a video conferencing company.

5:28Now, Cisco, a Silicon Valley giant at the time, a very large, successful, profitable Fortune 500 member, acquired WebEx back in 2007. But Eric Yuan left Cisco, or had to leave Cisco, after Cisco's management turned down Yuan's pitch to develop a smartphone-friendly mobile -native video conferencing tool. Now, there are lots of lessons that could be learned from this example, but just think, Piyush, that. had Cisco's management at the time acted differently, Zoom could have become Cisco's internal product. Now, our life, I think, would be quite different today as a result of this. But more importantly, Zoom's story, while well-known, is not unique.

6:27So think of Airbnb, think of Salesforce, think of Tesla, think of many, many other companies that now are quite well-known, but used to be recently very small, completely unknown startups, all of which took on big, successful incumbents, even though they initially had less funding, fewer resources, less support, and less experience. And I have studied dozens, if not hundreds of examples, when the small startups gain over large established companies. And so this has then led me to study large companies and how they make decisions and why they so often miss the boat. Okay. So now what do I tell the leaders of these large organizations who ask me all these questions?

7:14And I give them three basic answers. The first answer is a different mindset. So start with the first principle in our venture mindset book. And the first principle is, home runs matter, strikeouts don't. Or put simply, staying focused on winning a jackpot is far more important than fearing losses. Now, for smart venture capitalists, it's much better to make mistakes and wrong bets than to miss on one unicorn idea that could return for them their entire fund. You can also think of this principle, and in fact, if you're a leader of a large organization, I would prefer to think about this principle as 20 to 1.

8:0320 to 1 comes from my research. Now, venture capitalists make many bets, most of which we never hear about, most of which are failures. Statistically, just about one out of 20 early stage VC bets result in a great success and a home run. So if you're the CEO of a large company, you should think of your organization as a portfolio of existing lines of businesses, but also portfolio of bets. And some of these bets may result in exceptional success, but more importantly, most of those bets should be unsuccessful. So if you really would like new business lines, if you really would like new successes, you have to embrace those unsuccessful ones.

8:51So the true failure is missing your internal unicorn for a large company. So the worst nightmare of a venture capitalist is to be the first investor to meet the founder of future NVIDIA, Microsoft, or Google, and only to discard these opportunities. So that should be the worst nightmare of executives too. The second thing I tell leaders is that adopting the venture mindset is not easy. and in any organization, it should start from the very, very top. Now, here's a story. Once when I was explaining the venture mindset to the CEO of a large company and some of his lieutenants, the CEO, and I will not name him or the company for the reasons that will become apparent in a moment, so the CEO was suitably impressed by my statistics about the failure of venture capitalists.

9:43And again, as I mentioned to him, as I emphasized, without understanding and embracing failure, you will not have success as well. Then the CEO turned to his right and looked at the head of his corporate innovation. And he asked, so how many failures do we have in that corporate innovation unit or part of the organization? And the CEO received a very proud and somewhat patronizing reply. Almost none. We're doing a really good job. So if the corporate innovation part of your organization does not experience or own up to a lot of failures, most likely its innovations are not very innovative. So the sad truth is that I think many companies, too many large established companies, for a number of reasons, are intolerant of failure.

10:42And that has led them to pursue risk-averse, marginal, incremental innovation. And in the course of doing so, they also have become unwelcoming to anything invented outside. They have become inflexible. And I think, like the example of Eric Yuan shows, they might have become unwelcoming to big, risky projects that are being generated inside as well. So luckily, there is a way out. There are ways to acquire the venture mindset. And I've seen this with my own eyes, and I've worked with companies that have become venture-minded. So established organizations can do this. But this really means you need to reconsider your entire decision-making process.

11:30You have to make tough decisions. You have to change your culture and your incentive structure as well. So what I find is that one venture-minded organization after another takes risks, makes many bets, but they all do so using a three-pronged approach. So the way I really think about this very often is a pyramid. And you have your main lines of businesses, you have adjacent businesses, and then you have at the top of the pyramid a small, maybe small part relative to the entirety of your organization that is in charge of that innovation that might change your organization, might generate those internal home runs.

12:17And that part consists of three possibilities. And some organizations use all three, and some use maybe one or two. So the first approach is to design your internal innovation process work differently. And I call it, and I think this is useful, jargon sometimes can be very, very useful. I call it building racetracks for your entrepreneurs. So in the book, in the Venture Mindset book, we give an example about Google, about how Gmail originated within Google 20 years ago. There was an intrapreneur, but he did not really work completely on his own. There were racetracks at the time within the Google structure that facilitated this process.

13:12now it doesn't need to be in Silicon Valley this is how 3M commercialized the post-eat notes that I think all of us use these days this by the way how Nestle revolutionized the coffee industry with Nespresso it all came through the entrepreneurs but also through the racetracks designing specific racetracks that allowed them to commercialize to profit from those internal ideas. Now, another approach is acquiring and then integrating acquisitions in a venture-minded way. The truth is that too many acquisitions fail because they are not really integrated properly. And specifically when you acquire for innovation, integrating is specifically a challenging task.

14:09But YouTube, going back to Google, I think would be a classical example. The third approach, and the one that is becoming really fashionable these days, is building a corporate venture capital unit, CVC, Corporate Venture Capital. And, you know, my team at Stanford Venture Capital Initiative and I track CVCs. Well, there are thousands of them now. And we started in depth hundreds of those CVC units. And here is my, I would say right now, a sad conclusion. But hopefully that conclusion is a wake-up call for many leaders. What I find, unfortunately, is that too many of those CVCs are designed poorly without understanding the venture mindset.

15:03And so as a result, they are unlikely to have a sizable impact on their organizations, either financial but more importantly strategic long-term impact. But this can be done. I mean, large organizations should aim to become unicorn hunters, not just status quo preservers. And I actually have a great belief in the future of corporate venture capital, but only if you design properly. Okay, the final thing I tell leaders is that good intentions are not enough. Very often you hear the CEO says, you know, we are all about innovation. And there's a great intention. It is not enough. You need mechanisms, specific mechanisms.

15:50In the book, in the Venture Mindset book, we outline 30 of these specific mechanisms. And of course, there are more that I have studied over the years. Now, some of these mechanisms can be very tactical. Like, for example, how you conduct meetings. Who speaks first in a meeting when you discuss a project? How many people should be present in the meeting? Who should they be? Whether you encourage agreement or disagreement. So this seems like very small things, but in fact, they are critical, especially when you're in the world of uncertainty, in the world of disruptive innovation. Let me give you an example from my Stanford class on venture capital that we teach every year.

16:37There are a lot of students, and they're very smart Stanford students. and many of them would love to become founders of successful unicorns. So one of the, what we call the future unicorn life case study, we invite real life companies, startups, that are raising money right now. So they're raising their, we call it the VC jargon series A, millions of dollars. And they come to students, to the class, and they pitch. And typically, we have between four and six startups. And they pitch, and students play the role of venture capitalists. And in their teams of six, which, by the way, is more or less the median number of partners in the VC firm.

17:31So in their teams of six, the students have to make a decision. Which startup to back? and again there are four five or six of these startups okay and we filter them so that in fact they're all interesting startups and of course there's a huge amount of uncertainty around them okay what do we find oh and by the way let me mention there are 24 teams so there are 424 student-led kind of venture capital teams making decisions so what do we find year after year after a year? Well, there are two findings that seem to be inconsistent with each other. The first one is students generally within their six team groups, six person groups, agree with each other.

18:23We find that on average, maybe only 10 % of students, one out of 10 will tell us, I actually have a different opinion than my group. So the group comes up with, you know, we have to back this startup and we really think that that startup kind of is dumb, a dumb idea to invest in. So there's a large degree of agreement within a group. The second finding, there's a huge degree of disagreements between groups. So when we reveal the results and say that, you know, here are the students that decided to invest or give an offer to invest to this startup, then many other students, wow, why would they ever decide to do so?

19:07Because we discarded that startup right away. And of course, those students decided to back startup that other students decided to discard it right away. So one of the biggest lessons of that exercise is not which startups to back. but how do you discuss potential investment opportunities within a group? And in my experience, when I studied venture capital, the most successful venture capital firms, this is what sets them apart. It's not the amount of money that they have under their command. And this is not even just their access to great startups. This is how they make decisions, including how they make decisions in groups.

19:59And so this is transferable, and you would think easily transferable to large companies. But when I work with large companies, I find so often that the small tactical mechanisms need to be really, really slowly understood by all the leaders around the table. So this is just one small example. And again, we outline many, many of these mechanisms. And again, there are many more. But I think this is where you have to start. Intentions are not enough. Okay, that's fascinating. I also want to discuss how can startups really build themselves into very valuable companies and investing. But just to recap what you said, for large established companies, it's almost a matter of survival in the long term for them to continue to produce unicorns internally.

20:51And for that, they have to empower the entrepreneurs inside. And they have to have a mindset of taking risk, not count the failures and shutdowns, but look at the wins and really increase the home runs. And if they don't see a lot of failures, they're probably being too cautious. And in order to do that, I think you said like three different things. One is create the racetrack for these entrepreneurs. Second is, if you are setting aside some funds, have a venture mindset. in deploying those funds as opposed to not having one. And the third is really the culture of the group and the company has to be one which results in a venture mindset kind of like, you know, innovative environment.

21:36A classic example he gave was like how not to do group think and like, you know, be able to disagree and debate things, right? So this is fascinating. I really appreciate, I think a lot of large companies out there. And, you know, I'm sure many of myself and our peers also will look at this and like, oh, yeah, we can see positive examples when we have taken this and we have produced good things and the times when we could have done better. This is fascinating. Well, you mentioned over there, right, that you have studied like almost every unicorn which is out there. So maybe we can shift gears a little bit and talk about unicorns.

22:10You know, a lot of us, especially in the tech industry, are like, you know, entrepreneurial in nature, want to go and build new solutions to problems, which we see out there. But building a unicorn is a non-trivial thing. Otherwise, you know, everybody would be doing one, right? So the question really is, maybe it's two parts. What does it take to go build a unicorn? If I'm a founder today, what should I keep in mind if I want to build a very valuable company today? And from an investor point of view, if I am an angel, if I'm a seed investor, how do I spot in the wild that these companies are likely to become like that, highly valuable, the one out of 20 you were talking about, compared to the others?

23:00So how do you, you know, what is your advice on these two particular situations? Yes, Pius, you're right, because not surprisingly, this is the question that I'm asked all the time by investors and by founders. And investors is, well, how can I identify the next Amazon, Google, DoorDash and so on, when there are still very small companies? And aspiring founders, of course, always ask me, so what should I do or can I do anything to increase my chances of founding and then building a unicorn? Okay, just to step back for a second. Indeed, my team and I follow every single unicorn. But more importantly, what we do is we compare these unicorns to startups that had a chance but did not become unicorns.

23:52And then for every unicorn we study, we also study their founders. And for every unicorn founder, we take a founder of a startup that had the chance but did not become a unicorn founder. Okay. And by the way, as a result of this simple fact, you know, most of the future trillion dollar companies that already exist today that will make a generational impact likely already in my in my database of either unicorns or non unicorns. So what do we find? Well, there are many, many insights, okay? And I will not have time to discuss all of them. So maybe let me concentrate on five, okay, on five insights.

24:36By the way, I post all these findings on my LinkedIn profile. It is my LinkedIn profile, but those are the findings of my team. and also I published the unicorn report so that you can in fact see hundreds of factors that we study at play in one document and we update this all the time. So some of these insights are just confirmations of what many people already know but while others are surprising and could be counterintuitive and also if there are insights that you already know sometimes the quantification of those insights and ranking of those factors is, I think, important. Okay, so I think I promised five.

25:26So the first one is most of successful startups are venture-backed. And by the way, many of them are backed by angels before they're backed by venture capitalists. So first of all, for founders out there, bootstrapping is a great idea to start. But unless you are willing to take on investors, the probability of building a unicorn is very low. And the question really for you becomes is what kind of investors to take on. because we do find that the identity of investors is important for increasing the chances of which company would eventually become a unicorn. Now, venture fundraising. In fact, it takes these companies, on average, five rounds of funding, five rounds of venture funding before they become a unicorn.

26:33As I tell my Stanford students in the VC class, many of whom, of course, would love to, and many of them will become founders, you are constantly in the fundraising mode as startup founders. That's what I tell them. So when a former student, actually it happened just yesterday, when a former student pings me to say, I've just closed Series A, which is typically the first or the second venture round, And my reaction is always the same. Congratulations. Start thinking about raising Series B right now. And Series B in the VC parlor is the next round of funding. So these companies raise funding all the time.

27:16On average, they raise the next venture round in 14, 15 months. And so you're constantly in the fundraising mode. So if you're a founder, unless you're prepared to dilute yourself by getting on board investors, it's unlikely you will become a founder of Unicorn. For investors, I think, look at with whom you're investing. If any of your core investors already backed a Unicorn, your probability suddenly goes up. The second insight that might be not surprising, but with a lot of surprising themes, is that geography is destiny in the world of innovation. Now, it is true that many unicorns, most unicorns right now in the US, are based in California.

28:12but more importantly you as the founder and you as an investor really have to be in what I call innovation cluster or innovation hub to have a high chance of becoming a unicorn so by the way a cool fact California is not the number one state when it comes to the probability of becoming a unicorn if you're a VC backed startup this honor belongs to Utah, and Utah is quite ahead of California. But our evidence shows that there's a growing number of clusters in the US and also around the world. In fact, my conjecture, Piyush, is that the future will likely be shaped by a bunch of such innovation hubs that will emerge over the next five to 10 years.

29:04So founders, you have to bring your startup to an innovation cluster, like you took Silicon Valley or California, but not necessarily. And investors, maybe in fact, investing outside traditional innovation classes such as California, increases your chance of finding a unicorn if you find your way inside that innovation cluster. The third insight is that the single most important factor behind both success and failure of startups is the startup team. And note, by the way, that I said team. I didn't say founders. Of course, team includes founders for early-stage startups. So most companies scale and become successful because they can attract talented employees.

30:06And they do so early in their life. In fact, even though many VCs that I talk to have their own secret sauce about how they try to filter through the startups, how they do due diligence, etc. One common thread I noted is that they always analyze the team behind the founders. And that's, by the way, I think is useful also for seed investors, for angels, for pre-VC investors. because they tend to meet only with founders. But I think very often thinking about or trying to meet the team, thinking about how those founders will build the team is very important. So VCs try to analyze, try to see the team, because at the end of the day, if the founders do not have an impressive team, if the founders cannot attract the team exactly at the time when they're at their most vulnerable, they have no resources, they have no product, They have no customers.

31:09It is unlikely that they can win. Okay. Let me give you a quick example about the team, which I find fascinating. But again, let me preface by saying it is not unique. Okay. So about maybe 12, 13 years ago, Andrew Bratcher, who is a partner at Excel, a well-known venture capital firm in Silicon Valley, invested in a gaming company called TinySpec. And unless you read the Venture Mindset book or unless you're a historian of the venture capital industry, you're unlikely to have ever heard about TinySpec. So TinySpec was a gaming company. They developed a game called Glitch. And kind of to pun a bit, Glitch was glitchy.

32:02It was an unsuccessful company. And effectively one day, the company founders told their investors that we have bad news and good news. And the bad news is TinySpec failed. We're going to close the shop. We're going to lay off employees. The good news is that we still have some money left on the banking account. And so we will kind of send you the money back. And if you look at the investment memo that Andrew Bratcher shared with his partners at Excel, you'll find out what he said about the team, is that the team of TinySpec is our main bet. They have failed together. They have succeeded together.

32:51And everything in between. okay and i think i'm more or less quote from that investment memo and so excel and some other investors told tiny spec founders we do not want your money back by the way thinking back to large organizations how often do you think an executive would would would tell so to your to um an underling who just would come to you and say you know i've just i i failed i failed the project but i still have a couple of million dollars on my balance sheet. And the founders of TinySpec and the remaining team sat around and sat together and they asked the question, so have we learned anything from this failed game that we built?