 Perfect. Dear panel, welcome. And dear audience, welcome into what you've always wanted to ask the VCs. We have the distinct honor to hopefully have and earn your attention during the next 30 minutes. And we will do so by talking about a subject which is very close to my heart. Super brief intro for myself, because then this is what we'll want to hear more about. My name is Oscar. I am a serial entrepreneur. And I run a company called Epidemic Sound. But that's basically it on me. It's now my distinct pleasure to introduce our guests. And I'm actually going to let our guests introduce themselves. So I think maybe Huey will start here. Thank you so much all for having me. I'm Huey Lin. Previously, before sitting in the seat as a venture partner at GGB Capital, I was an operator. First, I started my career as one of the first product manager at PayPal. This is way in the early days. I end up staying there for about 12 years, helping it expand across Europe and then Asia. Subsequently, I actually joined another effort called Affirm. I was the founding chief operating officer and helped build it from the ground up from basically no customers to millions of customers. And my latest operating role was with a company called Flexport, where I led Asia. And so I joined GGB recently for about a year now. So this is still fairly new to me. And I just wanted to share a little bit about GGB itself. It's a fund that is over 20 years old. And what I love most about it is that it's ambidextrous. It knows East. It knows West. A little bit like me. And so the other thing I would say about GGB is that with 20 years of history, it actually has learned many, many lessons. I've seen many ups and downs. And it's able to actually help a lot of entrepreneurs apply those lessons across the world. The other thing that we pride ourselves is that we are sector focused. We are nerves to the core. We're unafraid to go into the detail and really, really understand a particular sector, including just how much capital is really needed to help shepherd it all the way through. And the last one that leads to the other thing that we're very proud of is that there's a platform team there that is willing to support and able to support companies through all the ups and downs with us. So that's me in a nutshell. Very glad to have you. Ted. Hello. Pleased to introduce yourself. Hey. I will. Swedish just like you. X product person, X designer, X entrepreneur that stumbled into venture capital. And I did so eight years ago after having built both companies and digital platforms for companies that I did not found. I work at EQT and EQT is a big product equity firm, one of the top 10 investors in the world in terms of size. And we're kind of like the kids table of this big firm doing venture capital investing. And we got going back in 2015, 2016. Now we're on our third fund that we announced last week. And I think EQT is now 2,000 people. And on the venture side, we're 40 people. So we do everything from early stage investing, venture, where I work, growth, mid-market. They actually invest into Epidemic Sound, which is your company. Infrastructure, private equity, basically like a buffet of options. And just since you didn't plug your own company, I will do it for you. So Oscar founded Epidemic Sound, which is the place to find music for whatever you want to do on the internet. Royalty-free, super smooth, YouTube, gaming, TV, whatever. That's not the official pitch. I'm sure you would have done it better. It's a great pitch. But we're here to talk about all of you. And Judith, I'm very excited to hand it over to yourself. Please introduce yourself. Thank you so much. Judith, I'm with a venture firm called La Familia. We are not the mafia, but an early stage venture platform based in Berlin, investing across Europe and the US. We have a portfolio of 70 companies, including companies like Deal, Personio, Forto, really specialized in B2B. So we like to think we can help our entrepreneurs go to market in various industries. We have really, really deep industry networks. And so in B2B, it's most often going from 0 to 1, that kind of first customer, that big enterprise sale. We can really kind of supercharge our founders with the platform that we've built. I have a background in sales and data. Used to work at Facebook. That's probably also something we could discuss today. But just looking forward to all the questions. Cool. Thank you for joining and for introducing yourselves. And as I'm sure the audience can acknowledge, this is an incredible panel because they both have an operator side and a VC side. So last night, I was living my best life in downtown Helsinki. I was in my hotel room. I was watching East European male gymnastics as they were doing somersaults across the television. And the thought hit me, which was that I find that there's this interesting dynamic within entrepreneurship. Because as we all can attest to, being an entrepreneur is about treading your own path, building something unique, and doing something very different. However, I found over the last couple of years that the VC investing is less unique and it's becoming more of a process. This is a C, this is an A, this is a B round, this is a C round. It's becoming very structured and well-organized, which you could argue is the opposite of why we started to build companies to be unique and different and a flower. So do you agree with this way of that perception and that's happening? And are there ways to try and mitigate this and work arounds? And have you come across this as a trend? And maybe Judith, I'll start with you. I love that you just said a company being a flower because in March of this year, I backed a company called Flowers and they literally think they are kind of a flower, workflow, automation platform to SMBs, check them out, they're amazing. But so, I mean, overall I would agree with you. I mean, there is kind of a professionalization curve that VC has undergone and I think there's more maturity in the ecosystem. I actually still think that the most important thing when it comes to connecting with founders is not being too schematic, right? For me it's about having a conversation. I hate the kind of pitches where founders come with 20 minutes of input and then I'm supposed to ask three questions about your town and defensibility, maybe kind of a couple of questions on team. And so for me it really is finding that one common connection. And I really try and take the time to get to know the person and to really kind of have that conversation because honestly that's the best use of my time and that just makes days really special, right? But if I get to talk to four or five amazing personalities that most founders that we encounter are, I think that's really kind of the magic that I try to preserve in VC, even though of course with deal flow increasing, more and more amazing companies being founded in Europe and the US, there is a certain schema that we kind of also have to adhere to because otherwise it's just quite impossible to get a hand of all the deal flow. And so I think what you're saying is right in some way, but I do think there's like ways of keeping the magic and just connecting with the person that's most of the time a face in a box on Zoom and trying to find kind of emotional connection as well that is then what forms relationships. We actually have an interesting little feedback form that we have. So every single founder that we interact with, we trigger an anonymous survey where they can give us anonymous feedback and some of the feedbacks are really hard. I mean, they're like basically the conversation sucked for this and this reason. And many feedbacks are, the conversation was amazing for this and this reason. For us it's really important to have that anonymous feedback kind of ingrained into the culture so that we get a real kind of mirror in front of our faces to make sure that we can just be the best 30 minutes that a founder can spend and we really make that a meaningful interaction not just for hospitals but for them. Ted, what about you? Do you feel that this is turning into more of a process business? Or can you highlight examples like, no, no, no, the really exciting deals, they always go off on a tangent and there's something different and weird and crazy about them. I think it's interesting. So pattern recognition, that's our most important tool as investors and investing in many ways is about finding those patterns. But I also think that pattern recognition can be your biggest enemy that you try to sort of shoehorn stuff into this process. And I think to me, usually happens when you have too much and you're trying to process a lot of companies or a lot of intros or something. It's easy to say, ah, this company's like that or it's the wrong face or, and then I think one has to remind oneself that if you look at the companies we all look up to, the journeys of those companies are very seldomly up and to the right all the time. There's always a twist or a turn like M Night Shyamalaya and movie like you didn't see it from the beginning. And now I've been an investor for eight or so years and looking at the most successful companies we have in our portfolio, it's the same thing. It's like the portfolio constantly surprises us. And so you just have to be humble and realize that, yeah, you have to use it and also be aware of that it's not everything. Yeah. So you both touched upon professionalization and Hue thought I'd go in that direction. So if we look at the industry going back a bit, there was a period in time where it seemed to be enough to have a pitch deck to come and present that. But as the market has matured and we've become more sophisticated both operators but also investors, that's shifting more. And the norm I would argue is it's much more about evaluating the team, the founders, how they sit together and how the entire package basically works. And so if you subscribe to that, could you maybe elaborate a little bit more, what for example of the three most important aspects that you evaluate around teams and individuals? Yeah. Well, to sum it all up, I'd say that the thing we're ultimately looking for is one of trust, right? Can I really trust this team to really do what they say they're going to do? And will they trust me to ring me up when they need help the most? Now, when it comes to trust and the characteristics that actually creates trust is one of care. Do they really, will they really obsess over that problem that they've actually signed up to actually take on? The other one is of character. Now that takes a little bit longer, especially during the dating phase, you don't quite know. But ultimately consistency. And so going back to your earlier question, right? I'm a bit more old fashioned and I actually do like those routines in terms of those processes. But quite often what I will tell the founders, don't do it for me, do it for your team. Instill in the good habits of knowing how to convey clearly what you're dreaming about. How do you go and share that with your team and make sure the data that you're presenting to me, it's not just for the dog and pony for me, but use that as a way to go back to your team to make sure that you can all row in the same direction. So that for me is that type of consistency. Whatever you share outside, you're able to do it internally. And that itself is what lets me trust the team more and hopefully that them trust me more and that's what I will look for. Got it. Judith, would you like to chime in in terms of what are some traits that you look for in teams and in founders? Like building on Huey's point. Are there other things which you think are super crucial? No, I think he said it beautifully. And I would subscribe to all those characteristics. One that I would add is really energy. I think founders are kind of conveyors of energy, building structures, building teams. And no matter if the times are good or the times are hard, keeping the faith. And thinking about, for example, Alex from Deal, who was also at Slush this year. I mean, we met him very, very early on and he's just incredible in terms of injecting a room, injecting everyone around him with incredible energy and kind of leaving a room and everyone has it to do and everyone's aligned. And I think that is really a scaling and leadership quality that a lot of founders bring. And I think sometimes we confuse it with being extroverted and we think extroverted people, they're kind of out there and they're bam, bam, bam and that's what injecting energy is about. But it's not really that. It's really the communication that's the nuances and it's the ability to paint a picture, align people on that. And then basically lift a battery that was at 60% up to 80, 100, 120%. And so that's a really qualitative trait. It's very different in every founder that we meet, but really kind of this ability to inject energy and you feel that immediately after the first call. I think for all of the founders that we've met that we get really excited about, it's almost that you remember where you sat, you remember kind of that first conversation and what it was that made you excited. And I would say that for many founders you feel it very, very early on in the call. You kind of know it in the first 10 minutes. We always say you have a hunch and then you want to find data to back up the hunch, but it's that kind of injection of energy and there's something very physical about that that I think can be felt. This is such a good layup for the next question. So I'm gonna build on Huey the trust. I'm gonna build on Judith energy and I'm gonna put Ted on the spot here because the question I wanted to ask was, typically in a relationship like the one we're talking about, when do you know as in how fast is it? Cause I find myself the big decisions I make in life, the smaller decisions that can be Excel and you can do pros and cons and it's like an extended period. But sort of in terms of when I met my wife or you walk into an apartment and you just go, this is it, like I wanna die in this place. I wanna get old here or she's the one or he's the one or now is the time for kids. Like the bigger the decisions, the more it's a gut feeling. So building on these two traits, like when do you know, so this is, wow, this is amazing. I think, I mean, it differs. I mean, in our team, we have all sorts of processes and non-processes, I guess. But I mean, to speak about processes, we have all the different frameworks and derailers and all those things. But to me it's in many cases an emotional response or reaction or something like that. It's like you feel it and in a way there's no real formula for it because it's looking for outliers and then it might be that you don't really know it, exactly what it is, but you're getting excited about something. And to be honest, I'm struggling a bit with it. I'm Swedish, we're very sort of collectivist in our mind and in a way, my dream VC would be VC that are not centered around specific partners and people, but we are centered around people and I'm one of the partners and in many cases it's like my interest or deep dives that we have done or patterns that I've seen, that makes me excited about something. I think it was different when I was like eight years ago when I had zero portfolio companies to work with than I could have way more time in going deep into different things. Now when I have a dozen give or take companies that I work with, something has to kind of catch me in it. It's hard to say energy or the problem, I'm on a journey in my head and then a founder comes in and just adds the missing 45%. I'm like, oh shit, that's the way it is or something like that. So there's trust, there's energy, there's pattern recognition, there's the impossible mission of both going with tested principles but at the same time trying to find these outliers. So these are all examples of the things that you are looking for and that in a magical way come together. Let's flip it around and look at the glass half empty. What are some of the red flags? What are some of the things which you go, ooh, that's not necessarily a great sign. Hugh, would you like to start? Oh yeah, there's a couple I can share. Hubris, vanity, you can sense that. So sometimes too much positive energy tends to show up the wrong way. And it often shows up when you actually probe into some of genuine curious questions and it shows up a bit more defensive. So that's definitely one sign that I'm aware of. And then also maybe it's a bit of a nitpick but where the slides, the numbers don't quite add up, believe it or not, it happens. Or for instance, the page numbers are all numbered. I know it's silly but I actually noticed those things. But ultimately what matters most to me is that when you actually speak to senior management at the top level and they share their dreams and their thoughtful wishes. And yet you talk to the folks that all roll up to them and they're saying something else differently. That is a big, big red flag. Inconsistency then. Inconsistency, the two are not singing the same song. They're off tune a little bit. And that's the things that really will worry me. Okay. Judith, how about yourself and your experience? What has been the pattern recognition that you've seen in terms of flags which are caused for alarm or where you pause and reflect a bit? Yeah, I mean, since we invest very early on, I would say a recurring red flag is a bias for analysis versus a bias for building, right? And we have some amazing former consultants as part of our team but I always call them the kind of ex-consulting teams. They come with a pitch deck of like 40 slides and all these theoretical analysis and then you ask, well, tell me about three conversations with customers like the one insight that you walked away with. And they're like, well, that's something that we're gonna do once we will have raised this funding and once we will have hired this team and I will have the latest thing as this founders associate that will then do the heavy lifting for me and I'll basically just be the orchestrator sitting on top and making sure that all my sheep are in order. And so I just have a bias for action, a bias for building. I don't mind a scrappy deck where maybe the time analysis isn't perfectly figured out if I can see that the founders have, you know, sit in front of customers have been really scrappy in terms of just testing stuff, just being really creative. And like there is a certain kind of hustle that comes with that in the early stages and that is something that I prefer when it comes to, you know, it's a little rough around the edges but I can see this again, energy and I can see this bias for action, bias for building versus this theoretical, you know, perfect analysis but you know, it's all built on some argument that potentially does not even hold true in reality. Yeah. I hope you're all taking notes. I know that I am mentally, this is good stuff. Let's zoom out a little bit. I think it's fair to say that there has been a valuation reset in general in the world and in particular among growth stocks and growth companies. Typically, that's a prefix for then going on and talking about doom and gloom and why we all should be pessimistic but hopefully this is one of the few panels where that's not the case because from a VC perspective if you're looking for builders and new companies couldn't you make the argument of it's the worst of time but it's also the best of times? Like, what's your reflection on where we are right now as VCs and I'll maybe throw this to you Ted. No, I think along those lines it feels in some ways as the end of a cycle and the beginning of a new cycle. I don't know if we're in the pause in between the two cycles but if you take one such cycle I think is we're clearly the start of a climate tech cycle and a lot of people who go on and found climate companies come from the internet era could be operators or founders or something like that and it feels like the formation of something that resembles the internet back in the mid to late 90s. So that to me is a new start. At the same time I feel like when I became an investor in 2015, 2016 I could kind of know every startup in Europe or at least in the Nordics, I knew of them I didn't need any tools for that that is not the case at all anymore there's just so much and for every problem there is not just one approach into solving that there are several approaches and I think it's why is that? It's digitalization I guess, it's role models it's way simpler to get going it's a financing ecosystem that works but that also means that the bar gets way higher something that I would have gotten super excited about back in 2015, 2016 now just get lost in the noise so to me I'm less interested in those like same-same software as a service someone's patched together a couple of APIs to solve something, could become big and I'm more excited about this bigger, bolder solving something big. Judith, do you agree with the statement that as there are, for example, a lay of some such happening in big tech there's a flip side, there's a silver lining to these difficult things going on in the sense that there's tons of exceptional talent which is now freeing up and being made available for entrepreneurs to create the teams we're talking about who are able to build this energy and the trust and so that there's oxygen arguably being poured into the system hence from a VC perspective there is something very productive that could be done right now is there truth to that claim? Can you find energy in what's going on despite everything which is challenging? Yeah, absolutely. I think we're seeing two things already believing in two things the one is talent consolidation so we already see that a couple of amazing individuals that we've been in conversation with for nine months, six months that were operators at companies and wanted to start companies themselves and we were in early conversations ideating with them they're starting to join our businesses instead of becoming entrepreneurs and now you could argue well, we're just gonna have less startups but I actually think that's a good thing because you have this talent consolidation and you suddenly have this nucleus of insanely strong talent where before it would have been three startups that now come together as one startup with one startup that's really strong and so I think that can be a really, really good thing for the industry in terms of high quality teams I think a second thing that we really strongly or I really strongly believe in is culture at some point I think can no longer be fixed but it can be built and so taking big tech as an example I think and we're seeing that also with a lot of growth stocks right now I think is once you hit a certain scale as a business and you have inefficiency baked into your business model even if you do layoffs it's very, very difficult to fix the culture of inefficiency that you've built over years and years thinking about salaries when you pay someone salary X it's very difficult to tell that person the next year you're only gonna earn half of that right so because once you set culture it's very difficult to completely re-engineer it however what's currently happening for a lot of the companies that are still earlier stage and I would say kind of for me the cultural cutoff point would probably be a couple hundred employees right if that's when you pull the brakes and that's when you get back to a model of efficiency that you can then grow from I think that's actually making for better and stronger companies and kind of in the last couple of years because money was basically free we completely lost sight of what is the actual cultural core of efficiency and of a strong business model that we can then scale with and what we're now trying to do is we're trying to patch up a lot of the inefficiencies that we really baked into the system and I think for unfortunately many companies that won't be possible but for the new beat of companies that are currently scaling I think really going back to basics and then growing from that kind of core strength I think it's gonna make for a beautiful vintage which is what we're telling our LPs but I really do think we'll make for some fantastic companies I'd love to share another silver lining in all of this and that is while there's a lot of layoffs the talent that are released now are taking on jobs at the incumbent and so in fintech specifically no matter what we still have to work with the banks and for a long time in order to move forward quite often what we're seeing that the folks on the other side are just so different from us where we just couldn't move forward and so while yes you know there's a lot of lives being impacted many of the traditional companies are still hiring and so the silver lining is that there are now more folks on the other side that can actually work with us to move forward and so that's something that I'm actually quite excited about and the incumbents are actually thrilled to actually hire these folks that they normally wouldn't be able to in a normal you know happy happy days so to speak. So I think that's super interesting and this is the last question I'd like to ask within this area which is and maybe this is for you Ted how do you help founders and teams transition from like good times to let's call them bad even though we're in agreement that they're not all bad and so how do you balance the drive for results and growth but also the need to survive to get to live to fight another day like what are some of the things that you're seeing and that you're telling and please chime in but I'll launch that towards you Ted. As an investor I have maybe I know 10 or 15 relationships that I can manage or something like that so each every relationship is super important and you go through a process where you vet and you really make sure that everything is great and should work out so if one of these relationships or the company that one of these people is running does not work out it's also on me of course and we shook hands to do this together and if it doesn't work we gotta fix it together and then in many cases it becomes like internal discussions on the VC side where I have biases towards the companies that I backed and then other partners have biases towards companies they backed and then there's a negotiation and sometimes you win sometimes you lose in those discussions and you have to prioritize but no matter what it's about trying to do things in an as good way as possible and to me the core of that is the relationship between me and the founder so even if we disagree or something like that I always try to sort of keep that almost sacred and then sure there could be situations where our views differ so much so it becomes almost like a personal conflict but hopefully you don't go there. I hear you and so I'm gonna transition to a question where I would love all three of you to chime in so we're gonna take this in turns and it ties back to the fact that we have this huge opportunity since you're all VCs and you have been operators and so I'd love to focus in on the term ferocious learner and the act of learning so I'm convinced that there have been multiple examples of where you've been able to provide huge amounts of value to the companies that you're looking to help but also vice versa that there's been huge amounts of learning from the companies to yourselves. I'd love to hear you reflect a little bit around that and maybe Huey if you start first now that the rest have a think. Well we know that part of this journey is actually to be exposed like new ways to actually connect with customers and so I've spent most of my career in fintech and so quite often the go to market, how do you embed, how do you make one plus one equals three is like my name of the game and recently I've had a founder actually come back to me and actually just share other ways in which you can even further bridge. For instance, rather than just helping an SMB I have a bias for SMBs because I just think that I think the world of them and what he's actually been able to show me is it's not just helping them how to actually manage cash flows but quite often they genuinely need a help, need a way to actually know how to run their business better and how do you actually have those conversations that are not intimidating because quite often we've actually learned some of our words and how to actually convey like we have our own credos and the swords and the way that he actually showed me how he trains his staff to have a conversation with businesses that are less than three people to get them to actually know how to better run their business, adapting to software, a willingness to pay for SASS was eye-opening to me because it wasn't something that I'd ever worked on before. Cool. Judith. I would say it's one thing and it's actually Hannah from Personia who said this. Not lying to yourself, never lie to yourself. It's very, very, very hard. I find it very hard not to lie to myself. There's lots of psychological studies that show that humans are really good at lying to themselves. We always think we're slightly better off even in the current market. We think it's going to hit all those companies. It's not going to hit us. It's going to hit those portfolios. It's not going to hit us. And not lying to yourself while keeping the faith. Doing those things in parallel is the hardest thing possible. And in VC, as a FOMO-driven industry that we are, even though we lie to ourselves and we say we're not, we are, actually not making the highs higher and not making the lows lower. Really kind of being supportive to entrepreneurs, not lying to ourselves while keeping the faith in terms of like the long arc of history, the long, if we look at the current decade, all the amazing things that are happening. Doing those two things in parallel is incredibly hard. I'm still struggling. I'm still learning. I'm not enlightened. I've seen the light and now I'm perfect at this. But I think there's some entrepreneurs that do this really well. And I do think it's like almost the, that's perfection of the human craft. Being able to hold those two truths within yourself and excelling on them within your company. Ted, last comment. Do you have something similar that you want to share? We're out of time. I will tweet my answer instead. We're 31 seconds out of time. So you should initiate your outro now. Thank you for moderating for me. Thank you everyone for showing up and for listening and for participating with your ears. Thank you Judith, Ted and Huey for sharing so generously with all of us. Thank you very much.