So I asked Charles and Steve to come in the podcast and I'm now starting to regret that decision. But I asked them because we have some great news to share with everyone.
Hi everyone, I'm Charles Moldown General Partner at Foundation Capital. First, for anyone not very familiar with foundation, here's just a quick tour. We're an early stage venture capital firm we were founded almost 25 years ago and we manage about three billion dollars of committed capital, which by the way we've helped convert into over three hundred billion dollars of market cap.
Woohoo. Yeah, we've got a record of 28 IPOs which feels really good, including a real whopper and Netflix. Some people don't know this, but it's only one of five companies started in the past quarter century with a market cap greater than a hundred billion. But let's not forget some of the more recent successes like Sunrun, Lending Club, Two Mogul and Cheg.
Now the big news we're really here to talk about today is that we're announcing that we've raised our ninth fund, a three hundred and fifty million dollar fund that are highly paid brand new experts have coined, wait for it Foundation Capital. Fun nine.
Steve, do you want to tell folks what we plan to do with the three hundred and fifty million?
史蒂夫,你想告诉大家我们打算用三亿五千万做什么吗?
Cowboy hats from Gucci. No wait, that's that other firm up on Sandhill. So I'm Steve Vassalo, the third general partner in our Foundation Capital Triumbrut. With Foundation nine, the plan is to continue our laser to the moon focus on partnering with extraordinary early stage entrepreneurs who are trying to build the greatest companies of our time.
古驰出产的是牛仔帽,不对,那是在山丘上的另一家公司。我是 Foundation Capital Triumbrut 的第三位总合伙人 Steve Vassalo。Foundation nine 的计划是继续我们“瞄准月球”的重点关注,与那些试图建立本时代最伟大公司的非凡初创企业家合作。
We do this one thing and we do it well, the Kentucky fraud strategy. We make 10 to 12 new investments a year to ensure that each of our startups gets the attention and assistance that they need to break out. And Steve, let's not forget that in addition to the three of us, we've got a pretty amazing investor team and operations team sitting right behind us. With some very impressive additions that we plan to announce real soon.
And let's not forget, huge thanks to the killer LPs who've trusted us with their money. And do any entrepreneurs out there? The whole reason Foundation Capital exists is to support remarkable women and men who are working to build transformative businesses.
So if you're someone who dreams big and wouldn't stop, if you have the ambition and daring to build a generationally important company right on. And if you're working an idea that's a fit for investment thesis, then come find us at foundationcapital.com.
Well said, Ashu. Well said. Thanks guys for joining me to podcast. Thanks, Ashu. Thanks as you. Is that it? Yeah.
说得好,阿舒。说得好。感谢大家加入我一起播客。谢谢,阿舒。也谢谢你。这就是全部内容吗?是的。
You know, Ashu, you sound a lot taller on this podcast than in real life. You're a Charles. You look a lot older in person. What do you guys want to order for lunch? You know, I hope that didn't sound too much like a commercial. Totally.
Anyway, anyway, guys, how about that great company? We saw earlier today. Why don't we spend some time talking about that? A robot renegade company. We really need to get back to our nature. I really better.
From foundation capital, this is how to be to be a CEO. They'll show about how to scale your enterprise startup and how to grow from founder to CEO. I'm Ashu guard, general partner at foundation capital. Joining me today is Jan stoica, who's a professor at Berkeley. He was the co director of the amp lab at Berkeley and is now the director of the RISE lab. In addition to that, he also has co founded two very successful companies.
Jan is the co founder of Conviva, one of the early pioneers in applying machine learning and AI to the video infrastructure space. He also co founded and was CEO of Databricks, which is really the pioneer in building out the next generation infrastructure platform for machine learning.
So Jan, you've gone through a founding journey twice. Tell us a little bit about that. What motivated you start two companies?
所以,Jan,你已经走过两次创业之路。简单介绍一下吧。是什么激励你创办了两家公司?
I think the main things motivates you is sometimes to have impact, to change the world at some degree. And for instance, in the case of Conviva, we started all the way back in 2006. And at that point, the video was starting to become a content which is distributed over the internet. It was, we look at that like many others at that point as a big potential and at the future in which the video will be, all the video will be distributed over the internet.
And then we look at the challenges and the problems which are faced by the internet at that time to handle that massive data distribution. And as others at that point, we started to be here to peer technology. Yes, we do. To move, to not congest the core of the internet and keep as much as possible data at the edge of the internet or the aggregate bandwidth was higher. So that's kind of the start. And you know, it was very exciting and we are thinking that we can make a huge impact because it was forecast and today this is true. The majority of traffic in the internet is video.
So if we can move the needle about improving the quality, reducing the cost of distributing the video traffic that would have significant impact over the entire internet traffic. So that was Conviva. We respect the data bricks that was, we started, it come from the research we've done in Amblab and there was starting actually pretty soon, you know, it's around 2006, we started to work on the big data area.
It's very early on. It was after Google published their MapReduce papers and GFS Google file system and then Hadoop was introduced to the first open source, a realization of these Google tools. And then again we started to like academic started to look at the systems, starting to look at the challenges or early systems and try to solve some of these challenges in terms of better scheduling and resource management and things like that.
这是很早以前的事情了。在 Google 发布了他们的 MapReduce 论文和 GFS (Google 文件系统) 之后,Hadoop 被引入到了第一个开源平台上,成为了这些 Google 工具的实现。接着,学术界开始关注这些系统,并尝试解决一些早期系统中的问题,例如更好的调度和资源管理等等。
And then we started to develop software systems to make it easier to process these huge amounts of data and to use a cluster more efficiently. One of the first project was Mesos, which now it's also a company Mesosphere, which allows you to multiplex a cluster to run at the same time multiple workloads, data workloads. And then on top of that we build Spark.
So this project started in 2009 in the spring actually Mesos was a class project and Spark soon after that. And Spark was to perform big data at very high speeds and interactively and also to support very well machine learning. So then we developed Spark and we released it in 2010 and it started to become you know quite good get traction because the way we solve the problem is to is to keep to optimize it for in memory data processing.
So if and it's that's one aspect and the other aspect was has a more powerful APA's and just map areas. So we can do iterative computation much faster the data identifies at this and of course if the data is in memory you can also do query much faster.
Yann having been the founder of two companies you've had to deal with two very different boards. What are the lessons you've learned from dealing with half a dozen different VCs?
Well I show it's including myself. I do things I suppose of all let me say that I was first you know to have very supportive boards in both cases especially with conviva events through ups and downs and the word those very supportive. I think that one thing to keep in mind is that in terms of decisions and what to do is a company and so first of your sleep you need to listen but you have to make the decisions as CEO and the way to think about is that you know you are in the best position to know your business to know your technical assets to know the market you spend 24 by seven doing this right.
So no matter how smarter people in the board they will not have the same size they are not so close to the ground. And they come with a sliver of time when they jump in and jump out. They have a sliver of time so if the board member makes that a decision for you then it's something very wrong right. Now of course you need the board members are very you know invaluable because it's also they've seen a lot so they have a pattern matching you know many of us you want to company so you didn't see a lot. So but you can use that as an additional information you know what how a particular company you can learn more about how a particular company what did it do in particular case or in the other case which are similar to yours.
You can use the information to make the decision on but you own the decisions and you are accountable for the decision. So ask a lot of questions take a lot of input but own the decision and make it yourself. There is no question. Even if you believe that and you can never can go to the board oh I make that decision because you told me so. It's always your decision. That makes it an assist.
The other thing Jan you've had the privilege of having choices in both companies of investors because there have always been multiple term sheets and multiple options. So one or two things that were the most important to you when you were trying to decide who is the right investor and the right board member for you. You know there are many many dimensions but one it's about four members who you know who knows obviously the market you are in who can because they can help with that you can help with introduction as of ours. Customers, relationships and the other thing is you want investors which will not overreact. It's easy you know some of the investors maybe you don't want the investor who are basically saying when things are going well they are disengaged when things are going a little bit bumpy they are going to overreact and so you want someone who you know have seen enough so is going to you know leave you some room.
I think you were there and I always tell people the night is darkest before dawn and it just changes around the corner but sometimes investors and board members don't have the patience to wait until the movie plays out. Yeah one very similar quote I heard is like since our number as better they seem since our number is good as this. So but that's important. It's important about chemistry because you are going to be always this board members you know like yes right you are going to meet you are going to ask for advice you know.
It's a ten year marriage with no divorce. You are going to ask for forgiveness. What other advice do you have for founders you know who are first-time CEOs who may be brilliant technologists but in many cases have never really run or done sales or all the aspects that come with being CEO. Try to learn as much as possible on the job. You can read from books from your investors from your friends who have done it. You can reach to other people in your situations ask for their advice so try to learn as much as you can. You are going to make mistakes but you know you want to minimize those mistakes. The number of mistakes so that's number one.
The number two you surround yourself when you the time to hire executive people have done it right. In many cases if you are the first time CEO and so forth especially if you are technologist you don't know many things you don't know so it's you don't want to bring someone else like you to learn on a job it's enough for one to learn on a job so better you have people who can teach you. So hire a sales rep who's been a sales rep. That's someone who's learning how to be one. It's exact. It's exactly. So I think this are the tools of the most important. The third one it's again in need to learn try to put the process in places early as possible.
You know you ask me what I would have like to do more maybe put some of this press process in place earlier. Every single engineering on reviews. People reviews. People reviews. These are incredible important and if you don't do them earlier it's going to compromise. It can compromise your growth. You also use a lot of scaling issues and sometimes it's a stumble and sometimes it's a huge fall if you know. The entertainment of the best people. The other thing is that you have no time. Everything happens fast so you need to move extremely fast and one way to think about that you know is like you need in four years right better you have show significant success.
Why? Because if you don't show you are going to best employees you are going to be best. You're going to move on to the next startup because they're best. Especially when you see the compiler right. So I think that's that's exactly important. So that's also the process is very important because career growth and so forth are not extremely important. So if I would go back you said the things I would want to do better.
So you've started two companies and each time you've had to step away from your professorship at Berkeley. In the case of GitHubRick you had a very successful lab, the AMP lab. So talk about what motivated you to both to start the company and what were some of the doubts you had. It's okay.
Yeah. In Academy you developed technologies. It developed solutions but ultimately you want to make an impact. There are many ways to make an impact. And Academy needs, again, its impact means how many papers cite your work or the techniques being used by others to develop their own systems or solve their own problems. But another dimension of the Sarsis is about how many people lives you are going to touch. How much difference you are going to make in this world. And I think this is what motivates motivates me.
It's like people they say you want to change the world. Yeah, I mean it's a cliche but it's a little bit of that. And just to give you a sense about right now, Databricks, Executive Chairman. So I'm not sparing my full time Databricks. But the one thing I am focusing is developing verticals in particular healthcare and life sciences. Why is of course going into verticals. It's also it's strategically important. It's a strategical important. But at the same time it's meaningful. Right? It's like if your technology helps a little bit to cure diseases, self-save lives is very rewarding. So that's impact.
Moving from academia to a sharp is a very different career and being very successful and one doesn't mean you'll be successful in the other. What went through your mind in terms of questions and doubts? I think the question is always it's about you know are you going to be successful? Is that a decision? Is a bet? Are you going to make? How are they going to be to pen out? Right? It's like you know it's you know you bet on the cloud. You didn't work out. You look like an idiot. Right? Everyone told you to do the other things. Especially because everyone else told you to do that. Yes.
Also the fact when you hire someone right it's very hard you know never I never hired SVP or self so far. And sometimes people who you respect tell you hire this guy and you kind of you are uncomfortable to do it. Are you going to say oh I this guy knows what I'm doing he's talking about I don't you know I don't have experience I'm going to make that decision or not. These are kind of very hard decisions. And you know some and it takes a bunch of good a good decision to go your way to get some confidence.
But I think that what I found is that the more nervous you are is the more kind of a little bit more paranoid you are but you know easy is going to the more little doubts you have it's actually you sometimes it helps you to perform even better right? Yeah you perform with a pressure. Right it's it's nothing for granted you know it's you need to be very syncs from all the you know all the angles you need to push yourself it's so that's that's what also what I found. So if you are maybe too comfortable sometimes you you can get cocky and make yeah yeah make ratchet things yeah. So the self a little bit of self-doubt I think it's very healthy.
Thanks Jan for doing this it's been really fun talking to you my pleasure. Thanks for having me. That's it for this episode you can find past episodes and subscribe to future ones on iTunes, Stitcher and SoundCloud.
How do B2B SEO is brought to you by Foundation Capital. An early stage venture capital firm with 27 IPOs including Netflix, Lending Club, TubeMobile and Sunro. I'm Ashugard, a General Partner at Foundation Capital. I'm passionate about helping B2B entrepreneurs. We're trying to solve hard problems. So this podcast speaks to you. If you're interested in growing from a technical founder into a business leader drop me in line. Thanks and see you next time.