Comparison of Secondary and Tertiary Waste Water Management

Examination of Secondary and Tertiary Waste Water Management Auxiliary waste water treatment is significantly planned for expelling broken down yet biodegradable natural issue from water after genuinely suspended materials are evacuated by the essential process(Bengtson, 2010, p. 2).Advertising We will compose a custom article test on Comparison of Secondary and Tertiary Waste Water Management explicitly for you for just $16.05 $11/page Learn More Majorly, these kinds of treatment utilize organic treatment procedures to treat water however last utilization is done after tertiary treatment has been finished. Tertiary treatment is once in a while alluded to as the propelled treatment since it treats what the essential and auxiliary strategies have been not able to treat. A significant number of these sorts of treatment (tertiary) use synthetic mixes to treat water (Bengtson, 2010, p. 1). Both the optional and tertiary treatment strategies use various procedures to make each stage a triumph however tertiary treatment is never normally a need sinc e it relies upon the harmfulness of the wellspring of water. The absolute most noteworthy contrasts in these treatment strategies are that the optional treatment techniques significantly use physical procedures however tertiary treatment techniques use compound techniques for treatment. Additionally, the tertiary treatment technique is significantly attempted with the point of expelling nitrate and phosphorous mixes from the water yet the optional treatment strategy is planned for evacuating natural waste materials. Finally, the tertiary treatment strategy is certainly not a required technique and fluctuates here and there however the optional treatment technique is obligatory and includes two or three regular procedures, for example, the streaming channel, adjustment lake treatment frameworks and initiated slime (Bengtson, 2010, p. 4). Suitable Uses of Reclaimed Water Reclaimed water can be acquired from numerous sources however it bears the characteristics of being scentless, clea r and excellent water, which empowers it to be utilized for various purposes.Advertising Looking for paper on ecological investigations? We should check whether we can support you! Get your first paper with 15% OFF Learn More However, the most fitting hotspot for recycled water is water system yet it is very sad that up to half of top notch water, which could be utilized for drinking, is utilized for water system (National Academy of Sciences, 2010, p. 3). Recycled water can along these lines go about as a decent substitute. In any case, recycled water can be utilized in various modern water system forms and in enhancing common framework needs. In this specific situation, recycled water can be properly utilized in road cleaning activities; power age plants; improving wellsprings, suppressing fires, dust control, spring release; cooling in modern procedures; and reestablishing drained, normal frameworks (National Academy of Sciences, 2010, p. 3). In any case, a few people have the en tire idea of utilizing recycled water for body contact wrong since it is improper to utilize recycled water for recreational purposes (like pool); cooking or drinking; or inundating vegetable and different nourishments, for example, herb gardens since they can legitimately assimilate the defiled synthetic concoctions from the recycled water and store them in their tissues. Suggestion Tertiary treatment strategies are bad for ground water revive and rather optional treatment is suggested for this reason. This is genuine in light of the fact that the operational plant offices are probably going to be influenced by tertiary treatment techniques since they dispose of nitrates and phosphates which are basic for ground water energize, particularly when the revive is relied upon to help convenient use, including metallic toxicants, or when the revive procedure is required to utilize nitrogen mixes and pathogens. Nonetheless, tertiary treatment techniques are valuable for rewarding drinking water on the grounds that many drinking water cleansing plants utilize the procedure to clean crude water. In addition, the procedure can be utilized to evacuate contaminations which the essential and optional procedures can't. References Bengtson, H. (2010). An Introduction to Primary, Secondary, and Advanced Wastewater Treatment Methods. Recovered fromâ https://www.brighthub.com/condition/science-natural/articles/68537.aspxAdvertising We will compose a custom exposition test on Comparison of Secondary and Tertiary Waste Water Management explicitly for you for just $16.05 $11/page Learn More National Academy of Sciences. (2010). Source Waters and Their Treatment. Recovered from https://www.nap.edu/read/4780/part/4

The Essentials That Plants Need To Survive Environmental Sciences Essay

The Essentials That Plants Need To Survive Environmental Sciences Essay Divine beings creation is brimming with numerous superb manifestations. A large portion of these superb manifestations are living things. Three general gatherings of living things are creatures, people, and plants. There are a wide range of sorts of animals and living things in each gathering yet that is another subject. People and plants share many essential parts practically speaking. In this paper, one will find out about how plants develop, what they have to develop, and the procedures plants use to become bigger and endure. People need food and water to live. Plants need food and water too yet they likewise need daylight to make vitality in an alternate manner that we use daylight for our bodies. People, creatures, and plants need to inhale, yet creatures and people take in a gas got oxygen and inhale out a gas called carbon dioxide. Carbon dioxide is a blend of one carbon iota and two oxygen particles for each atom which shapes the compound CO2. Plants are the polar opposite; they take in carbon dioxide and inhale out oxygen. So together we complete one another; we need each other to inhale which we have to do to endure. Another basic for plants is a concoction called nitrogen, which is found in soil. Nitrogen is additionally found in our bodies yet we needn't bother with it so it is discarded. Its arranged through our excrement and pee. The explanation ranchers and even individuals like you and me use fertilizer is on the grounds that it contains nitrogen to enable the plants to develop. Compost is a type of manure. The beginnings of manure began in the ahead of schedule to mid sixteen hundreds, concocted by a man named Johann Glauber. The main fixings in manure were; saltpeter, lime, phosphoric corrosive, and potash. Later included was phosphate, which supported the manure business so they moved into bomb manufacturing plants after world war one finished. The plan to include phosphate was by a man named Sir John Lawes from the mid eighteen hundreds to the start of the nineteen hundreds. The three principle fixings are; nitrogen, phosphate, and potassium yet there are numerous different fixings that change between each extraordinary kind. Nitrogen is the key example in combinations in plants including proteins, nucleic acids, and hormones. There are different things that plants need yet less of in light of the fact that dirt as of now contains limited quantities of them. Different materials are; calcium, magnesium, and sulfur. A few fixings can be discovered normally like kelp, bones, guano, sodium nitrate, potash, and phosphate rock that structure things that plants need. (Storm, 3) The manner in which plants produce food is however photosynthesis. Photosynthesis is the place the plant utilizes water and carbon dioxide to create oxygen and glucose. At the point when we get hot we sweat yet when plants get hot they vanish water to their leaves to chill themselves off at their fundamental warmth receptors. The explanation plants will shrink once in a while in heat is on the grounds that they need more water around then to chill their leaves off and make food. An explanation plants need water is to move their supplements around through their foundations, stem, leaves, and bloom or organic product, contingent upon what sort of plant it is. First photosynthesis occurs. Photosynthesis is the way toward transforming light vitality into compound vitality. There are two pieces of photosynthesis: light and dull responses. The light response happens in the thylakoid layer. This makes the light vitality into synthetic vitality. The chlorophyll and different colors like a beta carotene bunch together to make the response. The vitality made by the response makes a synthetic called ATP, (adenosine triphosphate). The dull response occurs in a stroma inside a chloroplast which transforms carbon dioxide into glucose (sugar). Light isn't really required for a dull response. It needs a few things that make a light response however, similar to ATP and NADPH. This dull response experiences a cycle called the Calvin cycle, which joins Carbon dioxide and ATP t o make glucose. Quickly a portion of these compound join to frame glucose. At that point the water goes through the plant in a dew structure in a piece of the plant called the xylem into something like vessels. (Carter, 5-7) We likewise need water to do essentially something very similar, move supplements around our bodies. Our bodies are comprised of for the most part water, around fifty five to sixty five percent water, so we have to recharge it all the time by drinking water or we will start to get got dried out, similar to plants start shrivel from absence of water. How much water a plant needs relies upon the atmosphere, how old the plant is, and what sort of plant it is. Water is likewise expected to keep up how much water there is in the plant cells. The water in the plant cells is in control on how enormous and quick the plant develops. An excessive amount of water however will suffocate the plant. Too little won't fill its needs and it will make it shrivel. Three different ways to tell if your plant has the perfect measure of water for the plant to keep up its life: one, stick your finger in the dirt of the plant about an inch and if its dry and solidified it needs water, if its drenched and watery it needs to much water however on the off chance that it is soggy it is entirely fine and ought to be kept on being watered a similar measure of water. Two, grasp the plant and pot, in the event that it feels lighter in weight, at that point regular it needs water so you should expand the water sum, if heavier in weight there is an excess of wate r in the plant so you should diminish the water sum. Three, if the dirt is beginning to drive away from the sides of the pot the plant needs more water. Water additionally keeps up the plants temperature through the dissipation of the water in the plant. At the point when the water on a superficial level zone dissipates in takes in more water into its underlying foundations. Everything fills in as a flow framework simply like our breathing and plants breathing course. Toward the start of the water cycle the water experiences another course procedure. This procedure likewise includes vanishing. It begins with a waterway, at that point the water in that waterway vanishes. At that point the water transforms into mists. Mists are comprised of water and air. In the cloud a procedure called buildup occurs. After that the water returns in a procedure called precipitation. Much the same as all cycles, this cycle rehashes and rehashes and rehashes quite often everywhere throughout the world. The fundamental explanation it is bound to rain during chilly climate is on the grounds that the virus air in mists can't hold as much water as in mists with tourist. Earth is around seventy one percent water. Just around three percent of that water can be utilized for drinking and watering plants. Water is comprised of two hydrogen iotas and one oxygen particle for each atom to shape H2O (dihydrogen monoxide). Plants have nearly precisely the same basics to make due as other living things, for example, people and creatures. One thing each living thing shares for all intents and purpose is its requirement for water to keep up its life. Work Cited Page Armstrong, Shari. How Does Water Affect Plant Growth?. www.gardeningknowhow.com. 10/6/09. 10/7/09. Carter, J. Stein. Photosynthesis. http://biology.clc.uc.edu. 11/2/04. 1/11/10. . Storm, Thomson. Composts. http://www.bookrags.com. 2005-2006. 1/11/10. . Jeffery. What do Plants need to Grow?. http://kidscientist.com. 11/3/07. 10/7/09. . Whitehead, Cathryn. Plants Need Water to Grow. http://www.ehow.com. 9/4/05. 10/7/09. .

222#5 Assignment Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 250 words

222#5 - Assignment Example Sometimes temperatures apparently rose over 100 degrees in summer (the Texas tribune). An expanded number of prisoners additionally adds strain to the effectively came up short on and exhausted prison guards. Therefore they need to work longer hours with the negligible compensation and this prompts turnover or the leading unlawful organizations in jail. High turnover presents a few difficulties to the restorative offices. In an examination done on turnover, high turnover in recently utilized staff indicated that the assets utilized in selecting and preparing the staff don't create the necessary returns. Subsequently, this outcomes to less assets required to advance other staff maintenance and improvement of prisoner programs. Accessible officials accordingly wind up staying at work past 40 hours which further means weakness and wear out. In a report by Oklahoma watch, jail staff have been accounted for to be associated with auto collisions because of weariness (watch). The significant advance should have been taken is increment of the work force compensation. This will go about as a spark and less will be compelled to turnover. This progression ought to be trailed by progress of the working conditions, cooling, better lodging and decreased additional time. Diminishing the quantity of detainees is likewise key. This should be possible by moving little wrongdoing detainees to network recovery focuses as opposed to setting them in restorative offices. This will decrease the quantity of prisoners to be managed by one official. The Texas Tribune,. Jail Officials Seek Ways To Recruit, Retain Officers, By Brandi Grissom. N.p., 2015. Web. 20 Apr.

Marketing Research Assignment Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 3500 words

Showcasing Research - Assignment Example The ongoing pattern to expend low fat or without sugar items has been to a great extent saw among the buyers. The enthusiasm of the purchasers to eat well nourishments is a passing rage among most of the populace all around. Item evaluation is a viable proportion of distinguishing the particular tactile properties that are related with new items presented in the market sections so as to fulfill shoppers and meet their products’ desire (Walker, 2002). In view of the broad job of the sugars in human sustenance, the wellbeing experts have been suggesting a decrease of the all out admission of fat nourishments. Additionally, the current prevailing fashion of calorie control so as to diminish the odds of corpulence has been going about as an impetus to expand the offer of items with low fat substance (Lauritzen, n.d.). The task expounds on statistical surveying and market patterns following a definite examination of the auxiliary sources according to the ongoing pattern of buyers in settling on low-fat items in the UK showcase fragments. Contingent upon the examination of the UK market, figures and patterns identified with the subject theme are nitty gritty based on advancement of market and item blend. The report gathered would help the economic analyst in settling on proficient choices dependent on which proper proposals are made for powerful business exhibitions on a long haul and transient premise. The economic scientist of the advertising branch of a UK general store chain has directed an auxiliary research with the point of getting sufficient data about item blend that are requested in the UK showcase fragments. The ongoing pattern of the UK showcase proposes a gigantic move in the preferences and the inclinations of the customer according to wellbeing diets and low fat items. The move in the general pattern of utilization portrays an approaching need of

Behavioural Finance..

An examination on Behavioral Finance Problem Statement: To see how and to what degree markets and financial specialist choices have been impacted by advertise moving feelings. Targets: The principle destinations of this exploration are 1. To comprehend the roots and inceptions of social money. 2. To comprehend the essential financial specialist brain research, segments and parts of the equivalent. 3. To comprehend the segments, heuristics and inconsistencies engaged with conduct fund. . To decide as per sexual orientation and age gathering, what are the different selections of ventures, need given to qualities of speculation choices and choices made based on hazard and solid market movements.Null Hypothesis: The market moving feelings have no effect on the conduct of financial specialists. Elective Hypothesis: The market moving feelings have an impact on the conduct of speculators. Advantages of the Research: . It will assist with understanding the roots and starting points of conduc t account. 2. It will assist with understanding the essential financial specialist brain science, segments and parts of the equivalent. 3. It will assist with deciding as indicated by sexual orientation and age gathering, what are the different selections of speculations, need given to attributes of venture options and choices made based on chance and solid market developments. Research Methodology:A test of 50 individuals will be taken of various age, pay gatherings and information will be examined. Wellsprings of Data: The essential research will incorporate Questionnaires, individual meetings which will contain shut finished inquiries. For the optional Research information will be gathered from various sites, e-diaries, diaries, books and different articles which have been distributed. The auxiliary information will be contrasted with the essential with demonstrate the theory. Conduct Finance.. An examination on Behavioral Finance Problem Statement: To see how and to what degree markets and financial specialist choices have been affected by showcase moving feelings. Destinations: The principle targets of this examination are 1. To comprehend the roots and birthplaces of social fund. 2. To comprehend the fundamental financial specialist brain science, segments and parts of the equivalent. 3. To comprehend the parts, heuristics and peculiarities engaged with conduct money. . To decide as per sex and age gathering, what are the different selections of ventures, need given to attributes of speculation choices and choices made based on chance and solid market movements.Null Hypothesis: The market moving feelings have no effect on the conduct of speculators. Elective Hypothesis: The market moving feelings have an effect on the conduct of financial specialists. Advantages of the Research: . It will assist with understanding the roots and starting points of conduct account. 2. It w ill assist with understanding the fundamental financial specialist brain research, parts and parts of the equivalent. 3. It will assist with deciding as per sexual orientation and age gathering, what are the different selections of speculations, need given to qualities of venture choices and choices made based on hazard and solid market developments. Research Methodology:A test of 50 individuals will be taken of various age, pay gatherings and information will be dissected. Wellsprings of Data: The essential research will incorporate Questionnaires, individual meetings which will contain shut finished inquiries. For the auxiliary Research information will be gathered from various sites, e-diaries, diaries, books and different articles which have been distributed. The optional information will be contrasted with the essential with demonstrate the speculation.

TrueVentures

TrueVentures INTRODUCTIONMartin: Hi. Today we are in Palo Alto in the True Ventures office. Hi, Jon. Who are you and what do you do?Jon: So my name is Jon Callaghan and I’m one of the founders of True Ventures. We started our firm in 2005, so we are celebrating our 10th year anniversary right now. But before starting True, I was an entrepreneur and a venture capitalist. So I’ve started three different companies as a founder myself, the first of which I started in 1987 as I was 18. And then I’ve started two other companies since then and True as a venture firm. I started my venture capital career formally in 1991 at Summit Partners and I’ve had a lot of very traditional venture capital experience before starting this firm.Martin: What type of companies have you been investing before the Internet era, so to speak?Jon: Yes. So I started my venture capital career and, frankly, entrepreneurship, my first company was a bike company.Martin: A bike?Jon: Yes. Mountain bike store and all sorts of o ther things at a couple of locations in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. That’s where I grew up, and it was a mountain bike only company. And the story is interesting because there’s an entrepreneurial insight that kicked off my entire career. But I was working very hard. I was on my way to college, working very hard for the summer with various summer jobs to save up enough money to go to college and for spending money, I wanted to buy a mountain bike. And the problem was mountain bikes weren’t that well-known at that point in time. So again, 1987 they were just starting, and I went to the local store in Wyoming with my checkbook and I had $700 to spend. I knew exactly the bike I wanted, specialized Stump jumper Sport, orange. It was great. I walked into the shop and the owner of the bike shop threw me out, and he said, “Mountain bikes, they’re never going to be popular. It’s all about road bikes. Get out of my store. Mountain bikes have no future.”And so I thought he was wrong because I saw the big opportunity for mountain biking. Anyway, it’s a new market is the analogy. The insight I had was, “Hey, wait. There’s this new market happening in the cycling world. So if they don’t see it, if the existing market and the existing vendors don’t see it, then I will start my own.” So I literally started my own mountain bike only business. I owned it and ran it for eight years and learned how to be an entrepreneur literally through the hard work that it takes to start something from scratch, sweep the floors, manage cash, all sort of thing.Other than that retail sporting goods, I’ve been predominantly in software and the Internet. And so I started my software investing career in 1991 again at Summit and did a lot of the early enterprise software and, frankly, a lot of the early online services before it was the Internet. I was investing in and around it.Martin: Jon, what made you switch from being an entrepreneur to becoming an investor?Jon: I’ve s tayed an entrepreneur throughout. So I’ve been lucky enough to be around lots of great companies and been a part of starting lots of great companies. And, frankly, in my view as an early stage venture capitalist, that’s the part you’ve just got to love. You’ve got to love the entrepreneur, you’ve got to love the team challenge and the people part of the vision of the entrepreneur. You’ve got to love that it’s someone who sees a better world and you’re just finding a way to get on that path and build something truly remarkable.So what I do today as a venture capitalist is extraordinarily entrepreneurial. And in fact, we have 140 different investments at True. We have 250 founders that we work with pretty much on a regular basis to help their companies grow. And so one of the things I love about this business is that I’m immersed in entrepreneurship every day.So I wouldn’t say I really switched. And then quite frankly, my team and I, we started True as a startup, n ot as a venture capital firm. We thought the existing venture capital market was completely upside down, frankly. We thought that entrepreneurs were really the creative power in our economy and we should build a firm that supported them. The entrepreneurs are at the top of the pyramid, not the venture capitalists. We’re at the bottom providing capital, services, resources, anything we can possibly do to help that entrepreneur achieve his or her dreams. And so we really turn the whole market upside down. Even True is a startup. It’s been very entrepreneurial to build a better product, to test that product with customers, to build services around that product. We have our customer support organization. We have all of the things that a normal company has. We just do it in this weird, funny little market called venture capital.ABOUT TRUE VENTURESMartin: So this sounds to be more like closer to an accelerator or incubator. Is this true, or is it even something between an accelerator and a typically classical VC?Jon: I love all of those words. They do great things. Accelerators really work. Incubators, it depends on certain ones, and they do better than others. Incubators really work. For me, it’s just about again magnifying the power of the creative entrepreneur. We do it a little differently than most. We have tremendous capital resources, so we manage about a billion dollars in capital. Our funds are roughly $250 to $300 million in size. So we’re way bigger from a capital-based standpoint than any Accelerator or anything like that. But we enter at the same time.So our ideal investment is meeting one or two founders Day 1 when they’re just at the formative phase and providing the first check. Usually, our first investment is between $1 and $3 million, and it’s very small from a fund stand point. It’s literally less than a percent of the fund kind of thing, sometimes less than a half of 1%. So the fund is designed to take enormous risk on products and markets, so we get to do wild and crazy things like Fitbit before anyone saw a Fitbit, or 3D robotics, drones. We’re doing an awful lot right now in digital biology, in digital therapeutics. Neuroscience is a big thing for us. So really weird and wild places, and the reason we can do that is that our model is set up to provide enough capital Day 1 for that really creative founder. So again, between $1 to $3 million is not awful lot to get started and exploring market, but the best part about our model is we have tremendous muscle. So when it works, we can double, triple, quadruple. We can write a $10 million check behind something that an entrepreneur chooses to pursue.And so one of the things we say to our investors is our view on the world is that venture capital needs to be more about venture and less about capital. So we literally talk about maximizing risk. We don’t want to take a safe bet. So when people come to us and say, “Well, it’s the fourth SaaS company in the c ategory, and there’s a small advantage,” it’s just not interesting to us. If you can already see the category, it’s too late. So we really like to be in these markets that are potentially large and they’re five, six, seven years out because it takes a long time to build a great company and so we want as much time on the founder side and the market side to evolve.So again, what’s really exciting to us is that phenomenal team. We say we have five criteria, and they’re very strict. And they are.The first three are the same. It’s people. People, people, people. And that sounds like shorthand but it’s really true. All we really care about is working with obviously super great, creative and talented people, bold people. We want to see big ideas, people that have the ability to attract and retain amazing talent around them throughout their whole career. We want to be in business with givers, with people that are missionaries. Even if it’s in a technology-based market, w e want to be able to help people that want to make the world better. It doesn’t all need to be altruism. It can be capitalism, too. We’re capitalists. But we really want to see a founding team that wants to do more for the world. And so that leads us into some really exciting teams. Imagine, if you have that as a criteria. We want to be with the dreamers and the missionaries and the givers of the world and the really dynamic personalities that create things. We’re designed for those entrepreneurs.One of the things I always say when we make a first investment, I usually sit down with the founder and I say, “Please don’t be safe with our capital. I don’t want you to save it. Your job is to explore.” Think about yourself as an explorer. You’ve got a bunch of capital, you’ve got a bunch of connections, you’ve got a great team, but let’s go see what’s out there. And if we see something out there… By the way, it doesn’t necessarily need to be on a straight path either. It could be anywhere in your peripheral vision. Then we’d run like crazy at the target. But it’s not always clear early on.If you looked at Fitbit in 2008, the summer of ’08 when we met them, and you thought it was a pedometer, you’d be really, really wrong. The pedometer market that was tiny and there was no wearable market. People couldn’t even conceive that we could do this in a miniaturized fashion at scale with connectivity to smartphones, all that sort of thing. BLE wasn’t even a thing. There was no BLE. But now, of course, we understand that these markets are significantly larger. They’re much more horizontal than we ever thought and they’re also deeper.For the first time in history, the vast majority of our startups have customer numbers that are in the millions, sometimes billions. First time in history. We used to have a software company that would say, “Well, the target market is these 900 companies.” And maybe there’s another 2000. Or even with consumers, they’d say, “We’d have to do a national TV.” Who would do that? Only in the bubble. That’s not like that anymore. Now we have these incredibly powerful horizontal platforms that allow company startups, entrepreneurs to reach all corners of the world. So it’s super exciting.Martin: Awesome. Jon, when you started to do ventures roughly 10 years ago, what was it like in the beginning when you didn’t have a big number of LPs putting money into your funds and meaning you didn’t have a super awesome deal flow, pipeline, whatsoever? What was it like?Jon: Well, so it was very different. So we are entrepreneurs and we were entrepreneurs. And the thing people don’t understand or seem to forget, I should say, is that in 2005, the early stage was dead. Literally dead. Ron Conway was doing angel investments. Josh Kopelman had his tiny little $10 and $20 million annual funds. And both of those people are phenomenal and wonderful pioneers and successful practition ers. But the early stage market was dead. First of all, venture capital was biggering, meaning raising larger and larger funds. And when you have a larger fund traditionally (this is not the case with True), when you have a bigger checkbook, you write bigger checks. So typically, the larger the fund, the later stage in the cycle a venture capitalist moved.So there are several popular phrases back then. First of all, it was: “Early stage is dead.” The other one was: “You don’t get paid for early stage risk.” These are all on quotes. These are not my sayings, to be clear. And the other one was: “The world doesn’t need another venture capital firm.” So this is what we were up against. And fortunately, my co-founder, Phil Black, and I and other entrepreneurs and partners who were helping us put all this together and my other founders as well who were involved back then, we had very successful entrepreneurial track records. So my founders and I had successful entrepreneur ial track records, successful venture capital track records, but still there was this perception that the world didn’t need an early stage venture capital firm.The other important trend to talk about… So venture capital was going through two changes that moved it away from seed and series A. The first of which was it was biggering. Larger fund sizes meant larger checks. The second of which was what I call it was getting distracted. Through the early 2000’s, venture capital was getting distracted. You had China funds, India funds. You had clean techs. There was a group that did a pandemic fund. All these specialty funds that were in anything other than core early stage technology. I used to say that if you wanted to see the vast majority of Sand Hill Road venture capitalists, they were on their way back and forth to China and India. And those regions were really, really exciting and hot, but what it meant was the vast majority of practicing venture capital partners weren’t he re in the valley, spending time in early stage. It was very desolate.Martin: There’s the opportunity.Jon: That’s what we saw. So we saw, “Wait a second. Venture capital is moving away from its core. The Valley is still very innovative.” And oh, guess what. Because we were entrepreneurs and close to the ecosystem, my partner Tony Schneider started a company called Oddpost and he sold it to Yahoo. It was one of the first DHTML apps built. So we saw Ajax, DHTML started to come out, and we also saw that the API structures were being broken apart, so Yahoo in those years offered their APIs to people. Google offered APIs to people. Amazon was starting.All of a sudden you could dechunk big parts of technology and reassemble them, and in those years, a term don’t use anymore, they were called mashups. So all of a sudden it wasn’t just the venture capitalists who were moving away. It was also that all of this entrepreneurial activity was happening, and Phil Black and I were at ot her firms and funding it. We were doing these small deals, and so we were on the ground seeing it. So when we came together, we said, “Wait a minute. Not only has venture capital moved away, but there’s this tremendous dynamic activity and it’s very capital efficient.”And so our idea, our big aha was what if you could build an incredibly powerful firm to do these super early stage seed deals. Not an angel firm. Nothing wrong with angel firms. They’re great. But actually a professionally funded venture capital firm that put the entrepreneur first that could assemble a portfolio of 20 to 30 companies where all the entrepreneurs could help each other out, could build a network.You build a lot of different networking groups over time, so you understand the power of collaboration and the power of really this intense help that when a group of people can help each other, their group can do a lot more than the individual. And so we just believed that and we’ve been successful ac ross our careers because of this network.So one of the most interesting things about starting True was we had a phenomenal deal flow. All these entrepreneurs that we had worked with over time and had a great collaborative philosophy rooted for us to get into business. They started companies themselves. Matt Mullenweg at WordPress or Seth at Meebo. I worked with Seth at Plaxo, Tod Sacerdoti at BrightRoll. I had worked with Tod at Plaxo. Again in the networking field, which is what your company does, these networks of relationships put us into business. And LPs said, “Wait a minute. There’s something contrarian about what these two people are talking about. And gosh, they have all this entrepreneurial support, and maybe there is this what we call gap ventures are moving away, entrepreneurs doing things that required less capital.” So entrepreneurs becoming more capital efficient. So this gap really became super clear.And like any great founder who sees a market, once we saw it, we couldn’t let go of it. And it didn’t matter if anyone else saw it. A lot of people laughed at us. I remember this great meeting. Big fancy firm. We were telling our friend what it was all about. We got this all the time, and they said, “How in the world are you going to start a firm? You don’t have any business card. There’s no big name of your big firm behind you. It’s never going to work.” And this other friend of ours would say something really great. And this was just a conventional wisdom. This is what every entrepreneur faces when he or she starts something new and bold. It’s the doubt.Another friend said to me. It was hilarious. He said: “Oh, that’s so cute. You’re building your nice little micro fund.” That firm is almost out of business, the one that he was at. Just thinking about the disruption that happens, the change that’s happened in the venture capital market. But it’s the same with every industry. Entrepreneurs come in and build new th ings, and sometimes they work and sometimes the incumbents fall. I had another friend. He’s a big fun guy and he was at a barbecue in my house, and he turned to me and he said, “You left a job to start a new…” He just said, “That’s crazy. No one can start a fund. The world doesn’t need another fund.”And so all of these doubts. And of course it’s very scary to start a company. So I would say that we are truly entrepreneurial and we have enormous empathy for every new founder we meet with because it’s still very fresh. Ten years later, it’s not that long ago. A week ago, we had a nice dinner. That was the 10th year to the day of when we signed the incorporation documents, when Phil and I signed them at a local restaurant here on a five-minute meeting. “We got to get this thing signed.” Very scrappy. But the other night I pulled out our founding documents, our first executive summary that was written roughly 10 years ago, the fall of ’05.The words we used ar e interesting. We talked about freedom for the entrepreneur. We talked about empowering creativity with small bits of money and enormous degrees of freedom. So this whole idea of exploring a market together because we have a lot of capital behind us if you find something but not constraining the possibilities they want, literally liberating the possibilities they want. We talked about building a firm that prioritizes relationships and values, just exceptional integrity around values, and working with people with whom we share those values.And we talked about the word platform, which it took us five years later to name our founder community, our founder platform. But in our founding documents, we say we want to be a platform for entrepreneurs, where they can come and collaborate and not feel like they’re going to their investor, actually feel like they’re going somewhere safe, where they can collaborate and talk about their problems and share best practices. And so we do that. We have this amazing founder camp, True University. We have an internship program, a fellowship program. We do YPO style forums for entrepreneurs. We just have all these amazing entrepreneurial resources that are fully designed to build more muscle and make the entrepreneur more successful over the entire arc of their career.It’s the other thing, too. So we had this very long term view, and we still do. Our goal is to build a 50-year firm, not a 10-year firm. And the only way you can do that is if you look at every entrepreneur and say, “What’s the arc or trajectory of this entrepreneur’s career?” and fund the ones that we want to follow their entire trajectory. So once we meet an entrepreneur that we fund, our objective isn’t just that one company. We want to fund everything he or she does for their whole career.Martin: This is very different from my perception from other VCs.Jon: Very different.Martin: So what have been your emotions when you had so many people at your h ome having barbecue and everybody was doubting and said, “Jon, forget it. Really, you are a nice guy, but forget it. Early stage is dead. Venture capital is dead. Don’t do it?” What type of emotions did you feel then, and how did you manage them, to put them in the right direction?Jon: It’s really hard and it’s really scary. We were turned down by tons of LPs saying No to us. We were turned down by tens, twenties, hundreds of LPs in the early days that didn’t see this. We were told by friends that it wouldn’t happen. We were told by the market that… All that kind of stuff. The emotions of being a founder are really, really difficult. I say that starting a company (this is one of the things that I talk with our founders about) is it’s this intensely personal thing. It’s not work. It requires all of you. And so that was hard. It was really hard. On the other hand, the more doubts that I saw in others, the more strongly convinced I became that we were onto something .Martin: Because if everybody else is saying, “No, no, no,” if there’s an opportunity and you the say yes, then you get all of them after.Jon: The way I phrase it to my founders, which I’ve lived, by the way, in every startup I’ve been successful in most of the investments, is “When people are laughing at you, you’re probably onto something.” I mean really, there are a lot of reasons why people are critical or laugh. Sometimes it’s because you’re off the mark. Normally it’s because they have a lot invested in their success and they can’t see another path or their fear. There’s a lot of reasons why conventional wisdom takes hold and then becomes conventional wisdom. And so therefore I’ve always been a contrarian my whole career, and I just love seeing something that others don’t.And by the way, I’m not always right. That’s fine. One of the biggest aha’s in my career, and it’s important too, is that at True we do not think about being right. That puts your brain into all these really very difficult judgmental places where creativity dies. Creativity flourishes when you have freedom of expression, freedom of degrees, and you can think about the possibilities. So there are requirements to being massively creative. The first of which is the stakes are sort of low from a dollar standpoint. What I mean by that is when all my friends and all the people were saying it’s never going to work, I thought, “Well, if I fail, there’s always something else.”We’re very fortunate in this day and age to have all sorts of options, all kinds of options that don’t necessarily need to be in Silicon Valley. There’s lots of ways I could find something to do and be constructive. But what if I didn’t try? I couldn’t sleep at night thinking that I wouldn’t try. That was the part that if there was one thing that completely freaked me out as a founder, it was not trying this. Literally, people say, “What keeps you up at night?” W ell, first of all, everything keeps you up at night. Everything. But the one thing that was literally terrifying was if I ended up later in my career and I never gave it a shot. That I couldn’t live with.And most of the founders I work with, that’s what it’s all about. They have this burning sensation to start this thing or build this thing or make the impact they see so clearly. And yes, you’ve got to persevere and you’ve got to really commit. You’ve got to work your tail off harder and longer than anyone in terms of the hours you put and all that kind of stuff. But there’s also this realization that if this doesn’t work, there are other things out there. There’s this global picture which is to say the world is a very exciting place right now and a very needy place for solutions. It’s like, “There’s an awful lot we could do here together.”So I think liberating your mind, if you get locked into “I have to,” “I can’t,” all these, then you start los ing the bigger picture. So we tend to continue even today. We don’t focus on being right on an initial investment. That’s not even relevant. We focus on the proper ingredients. Is the entrepreneur committed? Is there this crazy potential for market? Is there some technology? That kind of thing. And it’s very rigorous analysis. I’m not suggesting that it’s easy. It’s not easy but it’s different. It’s not judging. It’s more exploring. There’s a subtlety there.Martin: You touched very briefly one some of the criteria that you are using for the investment. One of them was doing some really crazy stuff. When an entrepreneur comes to you, how do you identify or evaluate that something is really awesome crazy?Jon: So I get in trouble with this all the time because I say there’s nothing too crazy for us and then sure enough I’ll see something and I’ll say, “Okay, that’s a crazy one.” But I think directionally we’re doing an awful lot in neuroscience right n ow. It’s a great example, where big data and frankly sometimes mobile technology and other types of horizontal platforms is meeting that absolute frontier of how we understand the brain and the power of the brain, both for output and input sensory and other. It’s a remarkably exciting field, and so we’re very excited about it. It’s in one way this great next frontier of scientific understanding, but there are also enormous markets that fall out of that research and of success there, and likewise digital therapeutics. So on the one hand, where big data meets healing, you might say that’s a computer science problem. It absolutely is, but it’s also a real health care problem. And health care and pharmaceuticals in the country and the world are really broken in some fundamental ways. And could we fix that? Yes. It’s absolutely crazy to think so but it’s working and it’s happening. And so we’re very much at the forefront there.We love robotics, and so when I met the f ounders of Open ROV, they make underwater submarines and drones and very low cost, very high performance, we got super excited. It was very hard to see. That was another one. Some of my closest friends and fellow entrepreneurs laughed at me. They called it my passion project, and I was like, “No, you just don’t see it. There are enormous applications that come out of building underwater robotics. And of course, right now that’s all starting to happen for the company.So you have to be able to see it through the eyes of the founder, most typically, because we’re not necessarily at a whiteboard saying, “This market. That market.” We really need the protagonist of a great founding team to come to us and say, “These are the three things that if they connect, it could be huge.”And so same thing. We’re really open. We’re super open to the big ideas. And we’re also… I was going to say patient but it’s more than that. We accept timing risk. So one of the things abou t when you say you want to maximize product risk, there’s no product we invest almost always. We want to maximize market risk. If we’re doing it right, there’s no market for what we’re building with the team. And we want to maximize timing risk, and this is one of the most highly controversial aspect of this discussion because a lot of investors will say timing risk will kill you. And it absolutely can kill you. It can also make you. If you’re early in a big market and you’re one of the first participants in a big market, you have the opportunity to get outstanding share. You have the opportunity to lead. It doesn’t mean you’ll always get it. Someone else will come from behind and beat you, but that risk is worth it to us. And of course, you can be too early, you can be too late. There are all sorts of things that happen. But we really embrace this notion that good things take time.I was with a team very recently, and they showed me a plan, and it was “Hit the mark et within six months and 18.” It was a very exciting man and woman founding team. And I said, “It’s a marathon. Don’t sprint. Building a company and tapping into a market, and they brought these incredible résumés and incredible experiences, very seasoned. We all know this is a marathon. So I’m not interested in 18 months. What’s five years? Tell me seven years. How? So again, timing risk is super important to success. And giving yourself all sorts of degrees of freedom is the other thing timing does.ADVICE TO ENTREPRENEURS FROM JON CALLAGHAN In Palo Alto (CA), we meet Partner at True Ventures, Jon Callaghan. Jon talks about how he became a venture capitalist and what his major learnings for entrepreneurs are.INTRODUCTIONMartin: Hi. Today we are in Palo Alto in the True Ventures office. Hi, Jon. Who are you and what do you do?Jon: So my name is Jon Callaghan and I’m one of the founders of True Ventures. We started our firm in 2005, so we are celebrating our 10th year anniversary right now. But before starting True, I was an entrepreneur and a venture capitalist. So I’ve started three different companies as a founder myself, the first of which I started in 1987 as I was 18. And then I’ve started two other companies since then and True as a venture firm. I started my venture capital career formally in 1991 at Summit Partners and I’ve had a lot of very traditional venture capital experience before starting this firm.Martin: What type of companies have you been investing before the Internet era, so to speak?Jon: Yes. So I started my venture capital career and, frankly, entrepreneurship, my first company was a bike company.Martin: A bike?Jon: Yes. Mountain bike store and all sorts of other things at a couple of locations in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. That’s where I grew up, and it was a mountain bike only company. And the story is interesting because there’s an entrepreneurial insight that kicked off my entire career. But I was working very hard. I was on my way to college, working very hard for the summer with various summer jobs to save up enough money to go to college and for spending money, I wanted to buy a mountain bike. And the problem was mountain bikes weren’t that well-known at that point in time. So again, 1987 they were just starting, and I went to the local store in Wyoming with my checkbook and I had $700 to spend. I knew exactly the bike I wanted, specialized Stump jumper Sport, orange. It was great. I walked into the shop and the owner of the bike shop threw me out, and he said, “Mountain bikes, they’re never going to be popular. It’s all about road bikes. Get out of my store. Mountain bikes have no future.”And so I thought he was wrong because I saw the big opportunity for mountain biking. Anyway, it’s a new market is the analogy. The insight I had was, “Hey, wait. There’s this new market happening in the cycling world. So if they don’t see it, if the existing market and the existing vendors don’t see it, then I will start my own.” So I literally started my own mountain bike only business. I owned it and ran it for eight years and learned how to be an entrepreneur literally through the hard work that it takes to start something from scratch, sweep the floors, manage cash, all sort of thing.Other than that retail sporting goods, I’ve been predominantly in software and the Internet. And so I started my software investing career in 1991 again at Summit and did a lot of the early enterprise software and, frankly, a lot of the early onlin e services before it was the Internet. I was investing in and around it.Martin: Jon, what made you switch from being an entrepreneur to becoming an investor?Jon: I’ve stayed an entrepreneur throughout. So I’ve been lucky enough to be around lots of great companies and been a part of starting lots of great companies. And, frankly, in my view as an early stage venture capitalist, that’s the part you’ve just got to love. You’ve got to love the entrepreneur, you’ve got to love the team challenge and the people part of the vision of the entrepreneur. You’ve got to love that it’s someone who sees a better world and you’re just finding a way to get on that path and build something truly remarkable.So what I do today as a venture capitalist is extraordinarily entrepreneurial. And in fact, we have 140 different investments at True. We have 250 founders that we work with pretty much on a regular basis to help their companies grow. And so one of the things I love about this b usiness is that I’m immersed in entrepreneurship every day.So I wouldn’t say I really switched. And then quite frankly, my team and I, we started True as a startup, not as a venture capital firm. We thought the existing venture capital market was completely upside down, frankly. We thought that entrepreneurs were really the creative power in our economy and we should build a firm that supported them. The entrepreneurs are at the top of the pyramid, not the venture capitalists. We’re at the bottom providing capital, services, resources, anything we can possibly do to help that entrepreneur achieve his or her dreams. And so we really turn the whole market upside down. Even True is a startup. It’s been very entrepreneurial to build a better product, to test that product with customers, to build services around that product. We have our customer support organization. We have all of the things that a normal company has. We just do it in this weird, funny little market called vent ure capital.ABOUT TRUE VENTURESMartin: So this sounds to be more like closer to an accelerator or incubator. Is this true, or is it even something between an accelerator and a typically classical VC?Jon: I love all of those words. They do great things. Accelerators really work. Incubators, it depends on certain ones, and they do better than others. Incubators really work. For me, it’s just about again magnifying the power of the creative entrepreneur. We do it a little differently than most. We have tremendous capital resources, so we manage about a billion dollars in capital. Our funds are roughly $250 to $300 million in size. So we’re way bigger from a capital-based standpoint than any Accelerator or anything like that. But we enter at the same time.So our ideal investment is meeting one or two founders Day 1 when they’re just at the formative phase and providing the first check. Usually, our first investment is between $1 and $3 million, and it’s very small from a fund st and point. It’s literally less than a percent of the fund kind of thing, sometimes less than a half of 1%. So the fund is designed to take enormous risk on products and markets, so we get to do wild and crazy things like Fitbit before anyone saw a Fitbit, or 3D robotics, drones. We’re doing an awful lot right now in digital biology, in digital therapeutics. Neuroscience is a big thing for us. So really weird and wild places, and the reason we can do that is that our model is set up to provide enough capital Day 1 for that really creative founder. So again, between $1 to $3 million is not awful lot to get started and exploring market, but the best part about our model is we have tremendous muscle. So when it works, we can double, triple, quadruple. We can write a $10 million check behind something that an entrepreneur chooses to pursue.And so one of the things we say to our investors is our view on the world is that venture capital needs to be more about venture and less about ca pital. So we literally talk about maximizing risk. We don’t want to take a safe bet. So when people come to us and say, “Well, it’s the fourth SaaS company in the category, and there’s a small advantage,” it’s just not interesting to us. If you can already see the category, it’s too late. So we really like to be in these markets that are potentially large and they’re five, six, seven years out because it takes a long time to build a great company and so we want as much time on the founder side and the market side to evolve.So again, what’s really exciting to us is that phenomenal team. We say we have five criteria, and they’re very strict. And they are.The first three are the same. It’s people. People, people, people. And that sounds like shorthand but it’s really true. All we really care about is working with obviously super great, creative and talented people, bold people. We want to see big ideas, people that have the ability to attract and retain amazing talent around them throughout their whole career. We want to be in business with givers, with people that are missionaries. Even if it’s in a technology-based market, we want to be able to help people that want to make the world better. It doesn’t all need to be altruism. It can be capitalism, too. We’re capitalists. But we really want to see a founding team that wants to do more for the world. And so that leads us into some really exciting teams. Imagine, if you have that as a criteria. We want to be with the dreamers and the missionaries and the givers of the world and the really dynamic personalities that create things. We’re designed for those entrepreneurs.One of the things I always say when we make a first investment, I usually sit down with the founder and I say, “Please don’t be safe with our capital. I don’t want you to save it. Your job is to explore.” Think about yourself as an explorer. You’ve got a bunch of capital, you’ve got a bunch of connections, you’ve got a great team, but let’s go see what’s out there. And if we see something out there… By the way, it doesn’t necessarily need to be on a straight path either. It could be anywhere in your peripheral vision. Then we’d run like crazy at the target. But it’s not always clear early on.If you looked at Fitbit in 2008, the summer of ’08 when we met them, and you thought it was a pedometer, you’d be really, really wrong. The pedometer market that was tiny and there was no wearable market. People couldn’t even conceive that we could do this in a miniaturized fashion at scale with connectivity to smartphones, all that sort of thing. BLE wasn’t even a thing. There was no BLE. But now, of course, we understand that these markets are significantly larger. They’re much more horizontal than we ever thought and they’re also deeper.For the first time in history, the vast majority of our startups have customer numbers that are in the millions, sometimes billions. First time in history. We used to have a software company that would say, “Well, the target market is these 900 companies.” And maybe there’s another 2000. Or even with consumers, they’d say, “We’d have to do a national TV.” Who would do that? Only in the bubble. That’s not like that anymore. Now we have these incredibly powerful horizontal platforms that allow company startups, entrepreneurs to reach all corners of the world. So it’s super exciting.Martin: Awesome. Jon, when you started to do ventures roughly 10 years ago, what was it like in the beginning when you didn’t have a big number of LPs putting money into your funds and meaning you didn’t have a super awesome deal flow, pipeline, whatsoever? What was it like?Jon: Well, so it was very different. So we are entrepreneurs and we were entrepreneurs. And the thing people don’t understand or seem to forget, I should say, is that in 2005, the early stage was dead. Literally dead. Ron Conway was doing angel investments. Josh Kopelman had his tiny little $10 and $20 million annual funds. And both of those people are phenomenal and wonderful pioneers and successful practitioners. But the early stage market was dead. First of all, venture capital was biggering, meaning raising larger and larger funds. And when you have a larger fund traditionally (this is not the case with True), when you have a bigger checkbook, you write bigger checks. So typically, the larger the fund, the later stage in the cycle a venture capitalist moved.So there are several popular phrases back then. First of all, it was: “Early stage is dead.” The other one was: “You don’t get paid for early stage risk.” These are all on quotes. These are not my sayings, to be clear. And the other one was: “The world doesn’t need another venture capital firm.” So this is what we were up against. And fortunately, my co-founder, Phil Black, and I and other entrepreneurs and partners who were helping us put all this together and my other founders as well who were involved back then, we had very successful entrepreneurial track records. So my founders and I had successful entrepreneurial track records, successful venture capital track records, but still there was this perception that the world didn’t need an early stage venture capital firm.The other important trend to talk about… So venture capital was going through two changes that moved it away from seed and series A. The first of which was it was biggering. Larger fund sizes meant larger checks. The second of which was what I call it was getting distracted. Through the early 2000’s, venture capital was getting distracted. You had China funds, India funds. You had clean techs. There was a group that did a pandemic fund. All these specialty funds that were in anything other than core early stage technology. I used to say that if you wanted to see the vast majority of Sand Hill Road venture capitalists, they were on their way back and for th to China and India. And those regions were really, really exciting and hot, but what it meant was the vast majority of practicing venture capital partners weren’t here in the valley, spending time in early stage. It was very desolate.Martin: There’s the opportunity.Jon: That’s what we saw. So we saw, “Wait a second. Venture capital is moving away from its core. The Valley is still very innovative.” And oh, guess what. Because we were entrepreneurs and close to the ecosystem, my partner Tony Schneider started a company called Oddpost and he sold it to Yahoo. It was one of the first DHTML apps built. So we saw Ajax, DHTML started to come out, and we also saw that the API structures were being broken apart, so Yahoo in those years offered their APIs to people. Google offered APIs to people. Amazon was starting.All of a sudden you could dechunk big parts of technology and reassemble them, and in those years, a term don’t use anymore, they were called mashups. So all of a sudden it wasn’t just the venture capitalists who were moving away. It was also that all of this entrepreneurial activity was happening, and Phil Black and I were at other firms and funding it. We were doing these small deals, and so we were on the ground seeing it. So when we came together, we said, “Wait a minute. Not only has venture capital moved away, but there’s this tremendous dynamic activity and it’s very capital efficient.”And so our idea, our big aha was what if you could build an incredibly powerful firm to do these super early stage seed deals. Not an angel firm. Nothing wrong with angel firms. They’re great. But actually a professionally funded venture capital firm that put the entrepreneur first that could assemble a portfolio of 20 to 30 companies where all the entrepreneurs could help each other out, could build a network.You build a lot of different networking groups over time, so you understand the power of collaboration and the power of really this in tense help that when a group of people can help each other, their group can do a lot more than the individual. And so we just believed that and we’ve been successful across our careers because of this network.So one of the most interesting things about starting True was we had a phenomenal deal flow. All these entrepreneurs that we had worked with over time and had a great collaborative philosophy rooted for us to get into business. They started companies themselves. Matt Mullenweg at WordPress or Seth at Meebo. I worked with Seth at Plaxo, Tod Sacerdoti at BrightRoll. I had worked with Tod at Plaxo. Again in the networking field, which is what your company does, these networks of relationships put us into business. And LPs said, “Wait a minute. There’s something contrarian about what these two people are talking about. And gosh, they have all this entrepreneurial support, and maybe there is this what we call gap ventures are moving away, entrepreneurs doing things that requi red less capital.” So entrepreneurs becoming more capital efficient. So this gap really became super clear.And like any great founder who sees a market, once we saw it, we couldn’t let go of it. And it didn’t matter if anyone else saw it. A lot of people laughed at us. I remember this great meeting. Big fancy firm. We were telling our friend what it was all about. We got this all the time, and they said, “How in the world are you going to start a firm? You don’t have any business card. There’s no big name of your big firm behind you. It’s never going to work.” And this other friend of ours would say something really great. And this was just a conventional wisdom. This is what every entrepreneur faces when he or she starts something new and bold. It’s the doubt.Another friend said to me. It was hilarious. He said: “Oh, that’s so cute. You’re building your nice little micro fund.” That firm is almost out of business, the one that he was at. Just thinking abou t the disruption that happens, the change that’s happened in the venture capital market. But it’s the same with every industry. Entrepreneurs come in and build new things, and sometimes they work and sometimes the incumbents fall. I had another friend. He’s a big fun guy and he was at a barbecue in my house, and he turned to me and he said, “You left a job to start a new…” He just said, “That’s crazy. No one can start a fund. The world doesn’t need another fund.”And so all of these doubts. And of course it’s very scary to start a company. So I would say that we are truly entrepreneurial and we have enormous empathy for every new founder we meet with because it’s still very fresh. Ten years later, it’s not that long ago. A week ago, we had a nice dinner. That was the 10th year to the day of when we signed the incorporation documents, when Phil and I signed them at a local restaurant here on a five-minute meeting. “We got to get this thing signed.” Very s crappy. But the other night I pulled out our founding documents, our first executive summary that was written roughly 10 years ago, the fall of ’05.The words we used are interesting. We talked about freedom for the entrepreneur. We talked about empowering creativity with small bits of money and enormous degrees of freedom. So this whole idea of exploring a market together because we have a lot of capital behind us if you find something but not constraining the possibilities they want, literally liberating the possibilities they want. We talked about building a firm that prioritizes relationships and values, just exceptional integrity around values, and working with people with whom we share those values.And we talked about the word platform, which it took us five years later to name our founder community, our founder platform. But in our founding documents, we say we want to be a platform for entrepreneurs, where they can come and collaborate and not feel like they’re going to t heir investor, actually feel like they’re going somewhere safe, where they can collaborate and talk about their problems and share best practices. And so we do that. We have this amazing founder camp, True University. We have an internship program, a fellowship program. We do YPO style forums for entrepreneurs. We just have all these amazing entrepreneurial resources that are fully designed to build more muscle and make the entrepreneur more successful over the entire arc of their career.It’s the other thing, too. So we had this very long term view, and we still do. Our goal is to build a 50-year firm, not a 10-year firm. And the only way you can do that is if you look at every entrepreneur and say, “What’s the arc or trajectory of this entrepreneur’s career?” and fund the ones that we want to follow their entire trajectory. So once we meet an entrepreneur that we fund, our objective isn’t just that one company. We want to fund everything he or she does for their whole career.Martin: This is very different from my perception from other VCs.Jon: Very different.Martin: So what have been your emotions when you had so many people at your home having barbecue and everybody was doubting and said, “Jon, forget it. Really, you are a nice guy, but forget it. Early stage is dead. Venture capital is dead. Don’t do it?” What type of emotions did you feel then, and how did you manage them, to put them in the right direction?Jon: It’s really hard and it’s really scary. We were turned down by tons of LPs saying No to us. We were turned down by tens, twenties, hundreds of LPs in the early days that didn’t see this. We were told by friends that it wouldn’t happen. We were told by the market that… All that kind of stuff. The emotions of being a founder are really, really difficult. I say that starting a company (this is one of the things that I talk with our founders about) is it’s this intensely personal thing. It’s not work. It requires all o f you. And so that was hard. It was really hard. On the other hand, the more doubts that I saw in others, the more strongly convinced I became that we were onto something.Martin: Because if everybody else is saying, “No, no, no,” if there’s an opportunity and you the say yes, then you get all of them after.Jon: The way I phrase it to my founders, which I’ve lived, by the way, in every startup I’ve been successful in most of the investments, is “When people are laughing at you, you’re probably onto something.” I mean really, there are a lot of reasons why people are critical or laugh. Sometimes it’s because you’re off the mark. Normally it’s because they have a lot invested in their success and they can’t see another path or their fear. There’s a lot of reasons why conventional wisdom takes hold and then becomes conventional wisdom. And so therefore I’ve always been a contrarian my whole career, and I just love seeing something that others don’t.And by t he way, I’m not always right. That’s fine. One of the biggest aha’s in my career, and it’s important too, is that at True we do not think about being right. That puts your brain into all these really very difficult judgmental places where creativity dies. Creativity flourishes when you have freedom of expression, freedom of degrees, and you can think about the possibilities. So there are requirements to being massively creative. The first of which is the stakes are sort of low from a dollar standpoint. What I mean by that is when all my friends and all the people were saying it’s never going to work, I thought, “Well, if I fail, there’s always something else.”We’re very fortunate in this day and age to have all sorts of options, all kinds of options that don’t necessarily need to be in Silicon Valley. There’s lots of ways I could find something to do and be constructive. But what if I didn’t try? I couldn’t sleep at night thinking that I wouldn’t try. Tha t was the part that if there was one thing that completely freaked me out as a founder, it was not trying this. Literally, people say, “What keeps you up at night?” Well, first of all, everything keeps you up at night. Everything. But the one thing that was literally terrifying was if I ended up later in my career and I never gave it a shot. That I couldn’t live with.And most of the founders I work with, that’s what it’s all about. They have this burning sensation to start this thing or build this thing or make the impact they see so clearly. And yes, you’ve got to persevere and you’ve got to really commit. You’ve got to work your tail off harder and longer than anyone in terms of the hours you put and all that kind of stuff. But there’s also this realization that if this doesn’t work, there are other things out there. There’s this global picture which is to say the world is a very exciting place right now and a very needy place for solutions. It’s like, “T here’s an awful lot we could do here together.”So I think liberating your mind, if you get locked into “I have to,” “I can’t,” all these, then you start losing the bigger picture. So we tend to continue even today. We don’t focus on being right on an initial investment. That’s not even relevant. We focus on the proper ingredients. Is the entrepreneur committed? Is there this crazy potential for market? Is there some technology? That kind of thing. And it’s very rigorous analysis. I’m not suggesting that it’s easy. It’s not easy but it’s different. It’s not judging. It’s more exploring. There’s a subtlety there.Martin: You touched very briefly one some of the criteria that you are using for the investment. One of them was doing some really crazy stuff. When an entrepreneur comes to you, how do you identify or evaluate that something is really awesome crazy?Jon: So I get in trouble with this all the time because I say there’s nothing too crazy for u s and then sure enough I’ll see something and I’ll say, “Okay, that’s a crazy one.” But I think directionally we’re doing an awful lot in neuroscience right now. It’s a great example, where big data and frankly sometimes mobile technology and other types of horizontal platforms is meeting that absolute frontier of how we understand the brain and the power of the brain, both for output and input sensory and other. It’s a remarkably exciting field, and so we’re very excited about it. It’s in one way this great next frontier of scientific understanding, but there are also enormous markets that fall out of that research and of success there, and likewise digital therapeutics. So on the one hand, where big data meets healing, you might say that’s a computer science problem. It absolutely is, but it’s also a real health care problem. And health care and pharmaceuticals in the country and the world are really broken in some fundamental ways. And could we fix that? Y es. It’s absolutely crazy to think so but it’s working and it’s happening. And so we’re very much at the forefront there.We love robotics, and so when I met the founders of Open ROV, they make underwater submarines and drones and very low cost, very high performance, we got super excited. It was very hard to see. That was another one. Some of my closest friends and fellow entrepreneurs laughed at me. They called it my passion project, and I was like, “No, you just don’t see it. There are enormous applications that come out of building underwater robotics. And of course, right now that’s all starting to happen for the company.So you have to be able to see it through the eyes of the founder, most typically, because we’re not necessarily at a whiteboard saying, “This market. That market.” We really need the protagonist of a great founding team to come to us and say, “These are the three things that if they connect, it could be huge.”And so same thing. We’re re ally open. We’re super open to the big ideas. And we’re also… I was going to say patient but it’s more than that. We accept timing risk. So one of the things about when you say you want to maximize product risk, there’s no product we invest almost always. We want to maximize market risk. If we’re doing it right, there’s no market for what we’re building with the team. And we want to maximize timing risk, and this is one of the most highly controversial aspect of this discussion because a lot of investors will say timing risk will kill you. And it absolutely can kill you. It can also make you. If you’re early in a big market and you’re one of the first participants in a big market, you have the opportunity to get outstanding share. You have the opportunity to lead. It doesn’t mean you’ll always get it. Someone else will come from behind and beat you, but that risk is worth it to us. And of course, you can be too early, you can be too late. There are all sorts of things that happen. But we really embrace this notion that good things take time.I was with a team very recently, and they showed me a plan, and it was “Hit the market within six months and 18.” It was a very exciting man and woman founding team. And I said, “It’s a marathon. Don’t sprint. Building a company and tapping into a market, and they brought these incredible résumés and incredible experiences, very seasoned. We all know this is a marathon. So I’m not interested in 18 months. What’s five years? Tell me seven years. How? So again, timing risk is super important to success. And giving yourself all sorts of degrees of freedom is the other thing timing does.ADVICE TO ENTREPRENEURS FROM JON CALLAGHANMartin: Jon, you have so much entrepreneurial experience and experience as an investor. What have been the major learnings that you’ve seen over the years which you can share with first time entrepreneurs?Jon: Yes. It is all about the people. There’s nothing mo re. And I would say another angle, another perspective on that, it’s all about values. First of all, it’s completely overwhelming to be a first time entrepreneur, and the truth of the matter is that no one has the answers. None of us know what to do. So a lot of times, an entrepreneur, when they start they’d be like, “I don’t know what to do, but somebody else must,” and that kind of thing. And so there are a few absolutes that I would think about. The first is people and values. Don’t waste time with people that don’t share your values, and prioritize the relationships around you.And what do I mean by that? So a lot of interesting things come out of that. So for example, if you value collaboration, which we do, and you value transparency and you value the human element and being very honest and present about how hard it is, you get lots of support. And the support comes in interesting ways. Of course, it’s like someone there to talk to about what’s upsetting you or what’s your challenge or what’s the biggest thing you’re worried about or whatever, but it’s also ideas. When you talk to people about the challenge you have and you have this group around you that understands your quest and what you’re on, people will help. And if you’ll help others, people will help.And so it’s more than just “It’s all about the people.” It’s more than just “I’ll get the résumé out of this company or that company or the Google engineer and this.” That’s important. You have to have the right skills around you, but there are a lot of great skills. There are people with all kinds of incredible skills. Much more important is to prioritize people that share your same values. And that can be a performance edge. That can be a communication style. That can be design. There’s lots of manifestations of values, but put that first. Absolutely put that first.The other is again this notion we talked about too, about time. I think people who think about their quest as a missionary quest tend to understand that it’s a really long road and there are millions of decisions you need to make properly in order to get through this path, or there are a million decisions you need to make to succeed. So the missionaries have this longer view. People who are more mercenary like, “I just want to manipulate this little edge,” tend to think in very short term decision making windows and tend to get in trouble. So we would encourage, I always encourage boldness. I encourage really long term thinking. If you don’t see a five-year, ten-year market here, don’t bother. It’s way too hard to hit a teeny little window of a couple of years. You need to be planning on very, very large trends and very, very long timeframes. And set yourself up properly for that kind of success. Give yourself a chance. And it’s not just the dollars. It’s about expectation. It’s about the team you build. So for example, where the rubber meets th e road on this one is it’s all about a great engineering team. Well, don’t put the great engineering team where you think one or two of them are going to turn out a year because they tell you that. “I’m only in it for a quick…” Things like that have really long term ramifications.I think the other thing that we talk to our founders about is you just have to operate with incredible speed and clarity. Optimization is not really important in these early things. And it’s true. I keep coming back to value. If your value is driven in relationships during the decision, you’re pretty easy. What’s the right thing for the customer? Okay, let’s do that. Are there risks to it? Probably there are risks to it. How can we minimize this risk? There are probably a few ways we could minimize this risk. Do we violate something with the customer? Yes. Okay, don’t do that. You can follow these decision trees. Hiring. Everything.I always say, “Put your team first, customer second. ” First, the values have to come from your team and your people around the table, and then they will properly radiate to the customers. And I think that’s really important. Even in remarkably successful companies where the sky is the limit, the sky is the limit because every single day your 500 employees know what you stand for and every single day they’re out with customers standing for that same thing. It magnifies your potential impact and customers feel authenticity. You feel it when you buy coffee or when you fly in Virgin. The choices we make typically associate with authentic brands, the brands that mean something, that resonates with you. Apple for design. That’s interesting. But I think every startup has that opportunity. It’s this really important common core of values, of vision, of long term time horizon.Martin: Cool. Jon, thank you so much for sharing with us.Jon: Yes. Absolutely. Great to see you. Thank you.Martin: And next time, if you are building a company , focus really on the values. So if you are just hiring your starting team, don’t only look at their résumé but really whether they are resonating with your values and the values of the company because in the end there are millions of decisions you need to do, and if you are value-driven, then it’s easier. Thanks so much. Great.Jon: Thank you, Martin.

Comparing the Marketing Strategies of Two Rival Firms - 825 Words

Comparing the Marketing Strategies of Two Rival Firms (Essay Sample) Content: NameInstructorCourseDateComparing Loki USA against Adidas its PeersLoki USA is perhaps one of the fastest developing companies in the United States today. Started in 1997, the company has grown to be a popular clothing line not just in the US but also in countries like Canada, Japan, and China. The clothing line remains high-performing despite fierce competition in its market niche. Loki USA operates in a market that is defined by popular multinational entities like Adidas, Nike and Puma, which have existed for many years now. However, despite it being relatively new and young in the market, Loki remains profitable and its levels of success have indeed exceeded what many startup clothing line companies have failed to achieve in many years, especially given the levels of competition in that market. The current editorial compares Loki USA and Adidas, a Germany multinational that operates in many other countries including the United States.Although it is undisputable tha t Adidas is a larger company than Loki USA, it is true to say that the latter is far much innovative than the former. The claim is informed by the fact that Adidas employs far much expensive marketing strategies whose cost exceed that of the marketing tactics employed by Loki USA. For instance, Adidas marketing campaigns employ renowned sports stars with the aim of attracting customers to the clothing line. On the other hand, Loki USA relies on innovative strategies that tend to focus more on the appeal of customers rather than the popularity of the personalities used in advertisement campaigns. In this light, Loki can be described as a company that uses some of the most effective marketing campaigns in a niche where starts-ups that fail to innovate literally die off within just a few months or years of operation.Apparently, Loki USA deals with clothing that is meant for outdoor sporting events performed in varied weathers. Consequently, the company offers products that are responsi ve to the temperature demands of the areas in which their customers intend to use the attires that they purchase. Loki USA has, therefore, endeavored to produce the sports gear that enhances and improves temperature levels on their own, and as per the customers tastes. Innovatively, the products of Loki USA lower temperatures on they own by use of the vent technology which the companys products are installed with. It is clear that the level of innovation that Loki USA has employs in its products is far much effective than that employed by Adidas or any other company that develops and produces attires for events that require physical and aggressive participation by users. From this perspective, it is evident that Loki USA beats Adidas or any of the other popular sports attire businesses operating anywhere in the world today.Additionally, Loki USA operates in a number of countries, which leads to the conclusion that it is also a multinational company, just like Adidas. The firm operat es in Japan, Canada and China while also aiming to expand to other markets across the globe. Just like in the USA, Loki is performing positively in the aforementioned countries and it is expected that it will meet, and perhaps exceed, both financial and market development expectations in future years. Taking from the challenges that the company has gone through ever since it was established in 1997, Loki USA is poised to effectively mitigate its challenges in future regardless of the country in which it intends to operate. Apparently, Loki is currently at a better financial position than it was in its early ye...