JE004: four myths for investment outside of silicon valley

Jay Clouse: 00:00

The startup investment landscape is changing in world class companies are being built outside of Silicon Valley. We find them, talk with them and discuss the upside of investing in them. Welcome to upside.

Eric Hornung: 00:28

Hello. Hello. Hello and welcome to upside. The first podcast, finding upside outside of Silicon Valley. I’m Eric Hornung and I’m accompanied by my cohost, Mr. really splurging for the Wifi himself, Jay Clouse. Jay, how’s it going man?

Jay Clouse: 00:45

I get it. I need to upgrade my internet connection. This comes on the back of me giving Eric a tough time because I presumed that his Internet connection was the reason we had some audio issues as of late and so we did a little speed test.

Eric Hornung: 00:58

We did a little speed test off and my internet is at 300 megabytes per second. Jay, what’s yours at?

Jay Clouse: 01:05

Mines at about 30.

Eric Hornung: 01:06

Oh, that’s being generous.

Jay Clouse: 01:08

It’s about 30 depending on which resource you use to test it, and it’s expensive man. And I live in a studio with a neighbor who I thought bought pretty fast Internet and so why not save a couple bones by a plan to split the Wifi bill?

Eric Hornung: 01:24

I’ll give you one reason. You’re a co host of a podcast which requires Internet and a second reason you’re the CEO of a company which is literally built on the Internet.

Jay Clouse: 01:33

I agree. You’re right on both counts except that I wouldn’t call myself the CEO of my company. I don’t have board.

Eric Hornung: 01:40

Yeah. I don’t really know what title you use for that felt kind of weird coming out. What do you call yourself? Just founder?

Jay Clouse: 01:45

Founder. Just a founder. You’re right. You’re right. This whole experience has taught me one thing and it’s that I should invest in the product. I should invest in better Wifi to give everyone a better experience.

Eric Hornung: 01:55

Right, because you got to invest in great things and that’s one thing that we do here on upside. We look at great companies that are being invested in and today we’re doing that in a little bit of different way. Jay, do you want to talk about the structure that we’re going to use today?

Jay Clouse: 02:07

What a great segue that was.

Eric Hornung: 02:10

That was incredible, right? That felt good.

Jay Clouse: 02:12

That came through great. Okay, so absolutely. Today, Eric and I are going to take a little bit of a different approach to this episode. We’re going to do a one on one episode and actually we’ve talked about this. We’ve made the decision that we’re going to have these one to one episode’s a little bit more frequently than we have up to this point just because as this podcast is such a tool for us to learn and for you to learn, it’s a good idea for us to kind of coalesce those learnings from time to time and breakups on the interviews. So today we’re going to talk about four myths that we have heard about investing outside of Silicon Valley are about starting a company outside of Silicon Valley. Eric, do you want to read through those formats that we’ve come up with here?

Eric Hornung: 02:54

I do. So before Jay and I started this podcast, we’d heard these over and over again. You see them in articles, you as you read books about the industry, you kind of hear these things trickle through. So myth one is that you can’t start a great venture backable company outside of Silicon Valley. Myth two is that the city in which you start your company matters a lot. Myth three is that investors must be located very close to their investments in our myth four, which we’re calling our bonus myth, is that great investors must be in silicon valley. Great Angel Investors, great venture capital investors. Jay, do you want to jump into myth one?

Jay Clouse: 03:41

Yeah, and as we go through this guys, if we say something that you agree with or disagree with, or if we don’t say something that you think is a good point to be brought up and made, please tweet at us @upsidefm or comment on breaker. If you use breaker to listen your podcasts and if you don’t, maybe give it a shot, but we’d love to talk with you on twitter and on breaker as we go through this episode. So myth number one, you can’t start a VC backed company outside of Silicon Valley. This is probably a little overstated on our part, but the general feeling is silicon valley is the place to be, is the premise of why we have a podcast because this myth exists. Obviously we’ve interviewed 16, I think, companies to this point who are doing the opposite of this. So the question is are those companies venture backable companies and are their venture backable companies outside of Silicon Valley? Obviously I think our stance is yes. So what Eric in your mind, what are some points of evidence to back up our claim as a podcast that it’s a good time to start outside of Silicon Valley.

Eric Hornung: 04:47

So I think we can look at some of the later stage companies that have not been on the upside podcasts, but that may be indicative of where companies that are on upside are going to be in three, five, seven years. So that’s duo in Detroit. I think they just exited for 2.3 billion if I’m not mistaken?

Jay Clouse: 05:08
Yeah It was definitely Michigan. I think it might be Ann Arbor, but multibillion dollar exit just a few weeks ago.

Eric Hornung: 05:14

Yeah. Cover my Meds in Columbus and because we’re familiar with Columbus, I’ll rattle through a couple of others. Brute just raised a massive round of 50 million.

Jay Clouse: 05:24

Yeah, $51,000,000 series c mostly based in the valley investors though,

Eric Hornung: 05:31

Right, And Kleiner Perkins showing that the valley is really interested in the middle of the country. Just let her around into Beam Dental here in Columbus as well.

Jay Clouse: 05:41

Yeah, 23 million dollars for Beam Dental and its series c, Crosschecks which rebranded to all have an artificial intelligence company that I used to work at. Just raised a $38 million series D, so there’s a lot of investment happening here in Columbus and in the Midwest. Generally some of those being value investors, some of them being local investors, but as someone who has resided in the city over the last close to 10 years, I can see the velocity of these things happening. Really, really picking up steam and some of that I think has to do with investors who were formerly of Silicon Valley. Identifying the opportunity and moving into this part of the country to say we’re going to set down roots and and it in drives case, literally setting down Root insurance and make our claim on this part of the country and try to make a big return with the same fund economics here.

Eric Hornung: 06:36

And it’s interesting because I think a couple of cities in the midwest in the south are getting a lot of the dollars as it is right now. Midwest startups, which is Midweststartups.com just release their city rank and I think the top 10 of 54 in the midwest probably are seeing the most what you called velocity, but I think that it’s definitely true that each of those cities is producing venture backable startups that are not only going to work for their own communities and for their own crop of investors, but are gaining attention from Silicon Valley in Boston and New York.

Jay Clouse: 07:12

Something we’re also seeing, and I think it has to do with the fact that we’re in such a bull market, maybe a frothy market, as you’ve said before, frothy, frothy market. We’re seeing corporations getting into their own venture funds. There’s a there’s a quote from Josh Wolf, someone Eric and I both respect as an investor. He was on a podcast, the Invest Like The Best podcast with Patrick O’shaughnessy and he said in his estimation and in his research and experience the sign of a market that’s about to turn is when it gets so frothy that corporations get into venture and I think we’re starting to see that too.

Eric Hornung: 07:47

What are some examples that you’ve seen of corporations getting into venture?

Jay Clouse: 07:51

Nationwide Insurance is one. There’s a lot in the way of innovation hubs and departments that are getting started in large corporate places like cardinal health. They’ve been doing it for a few years now, but yeah, they’re starting to diversify and say, workout. Where else can we deploy capital to get some returns and also continue to innovate and lead. We keep talking about Columbus and I’m going to keep doing it because I’m very naturally apprise of that space. Root Insurance is a mobile APP that provides car insurance for drivers based on their driving habits. You download the APP, you carry it with you in your pocket. It uses the accelerometer over a period of couple of weeks and estimates your ability to drive safely and if you meet some threshold of driver behavior, they will offer you insurance coverage. Nationwide insurance has an internal innovation team working on something I don’t know what, but presumably to compete with things like Root because it’s just not as easy for a company that size to innovate that quickly and bring a product to market and build that product to be a b to c sustainable product that consumers will think is beautiful and functional and meets their expectations, of a perfectly functioning consumer app as quickly as an independent company like Root can. Now when they get into things like venture, they may look at investing in companies like Root or acquiring companies like Root .

Eric Hornung: 09:13

So that I think transitions us perfectly to myth two, which is that the city you start your company in matters a lot and why I think that transition is relevant here is that Columbus is a hub well Ohio in general, but Columbus is a hub for insurance. Nationwide you just mentioned and out of that has sprung a few insurance startups, namely Root, as we just talked about being is another one, so does the city that you start your company and matter and what are we seeing from the podcast guests that either confirms or invalidates that?

Jay Clouse: 09:52

I think in a lot of ways this may not be a myth. I think this may be true if you look at Local Crate. Local Crate was a company we interviewed in Minneapolis, the founder of Local Crate, Frank Jackman. He spent some time and his entire family spent time working for Schwan’s, the food service company. Because of that, he learned the food industry and his meal kit service is based in understading the food industry as opposed to understanding the tech industry as he put it. Another obvious one, Fresh Fry. Fresh Fry in Louisville, Kentucky. They are in what Jeremiah Chapman, the founder calls the franchise capital of the world. They work delivering their fry oil cleaning ponds, two restaurants, both independent and chain restaurants, but if you’re going to work with chain restaurants, it’s not a bad place to be the franchise capital of the world. What do you think Eric?

Eric Hornung: 10:41

Yeah, I agree. You stole my Fresh Fry idea, but Jay and I actually do a lot of discussions that aren’t on the pod and one of those was with a founder who is out of Nashville. She kind of gave us some insight into if you are a music or healthcare startup in Nashville, it’s like the perfect place to launch a company, but if you’re anything else, it’s a little difficult and I think we kind of hear that time and time again. We heard it with Ashley and Mixtroz. They weren’t feeling the love Nashville. They’re not a music startup. They’re not a healthcare startup, but they felt the love in Birmingham and in her words. So sometimes I think the city is really important in getting that right. It’s not to say you can’t start a company anywhere. It’s to say sometimes you need the right people around you in the right community around you to accelerate your growth.

Jay Clouse: 11:34

I do still think that some of our guests have been at a geographical disadvantage a little bit in that their choice in where they’re located is more happenstance than direct benefit. The one that comes to mind most for me is Rap Chat. A couple of guys who live here in Columbus, I’m friends with those guys, I don’t think that their business is at an advantage here in Columbus, Ohio being a b to c mobile APP, working with predominantly aspiring hip hop artists. I don’t think that’s something that Columbus is known for, right? The reason that they’re here is the economic benefit of just cost of living. The talent is here, but it does not have a direct benefit into the company and in fact Midwest investors just don’t quite understand that technology and they struggled to fundraise here based on the investors that are here, which I think segues very nicely into our third myth Eric.

Eric Hornung: 12:31

Look at us. The segways are on point today.

Jay Clouse: 12:34

On point segues. Investors should be co located in the same city or near geography as the investments that they make and the example I was just giving with rap chat, they came to the Midwest. They struggled a little bit to find investors here who understood the technology or would just be willing to take the risk and to me, I don’t know if, and I don’t know if the blame for this goes on the companies or the investors or both. I don’t quite see why this myth is exists since perpetuated why the investors feel they need to be an exact location as the companies they invest in.

Eric Hornung: 13:10

Well, I think it depends a lot on the investor and their thesis and how they’re going about things. Our friends at M25 group in Chicago, they’re investing across the entire Midwest. I think that that’s a different model than, hey, I’m an angel investor in Columbus, Ohio and I want to invest in five to 10 companies a year in the ecommerce space because maybe like web, I have a ton of ecommerce knowledge that I can impart and I want to be involved in this business, so I think it’s different based on the different levels that you’re at. When we think is as a pure venture capitalists though like series a, series b, series c, I completely agree with you. I don’t think that you need to be co located or near located.

Jay Clouse: 13:57

And we’re seeing that at an institutional stage, right? You know we were just talking about Root, we’re talking about Beam. Both of them have gotten investment outside of the Midwest. Same with crosschecks actually seems like a lot of the companies that are raising a lot of institutional funding are going outside of their geographic bounds. I don’t think that’s necessarily as true with earlier stage companies and part of that, I think, you know, you and I and our deal memo, we talk about the four questions we’re looking for with a founder. How successful do we think this founder will be with this business and in life? How committed as this founder? Why did this founder choose this business? If those are three of the four criteria that early stage investors are looking at, I do think there’s a benefit to being in person with somebody to feel that out and talk with them initially when you were deciding whether or not to make the investment, but I don’t think that being able to ride your bike over to their office makes that big of a difference.

Eric Hornung: 14:48

Are you riding your bike over to a lot of people’s offices? Is that the way you get around in Columbus?

Jay Clouse: 14:52

This is something I’ve heard. This is something I’ve heard in silicon valley specifically, like companies that don’t want to invest outside of sand hill because you can literally just go from company to company.

Eric Hornung: 15:01

That’s the way they’d done it and that’s where they do things and when you have board seats on companies and you have to fly out once a quarter potentially for board meetings. I think that depending on how the company’s structured that could we get a little expensive. So I understand for a smaller fund why that might not be viable. But one question that has come up to me as we’ve been talking through this, is this idea that you mentioned earlier about there’s a lot of capital right now and corporations are getting involved and there’s a lot of capital coming from the coast into the middle of the country, does the middle of the country, and it’s just a random question It’s not related to our myths at all, but does the success of the middle of the country depend so much on cheap capital and this glut of capital that exists in the system right now? Or is this something that’s sustainable through a market crash or something like that?

Jay Clouse: 15:54

I do think it’s sustainable. I think there are a lot of people getting into whether it’s corporate vc or whether it’s just people who feel rich on paper and they want to diversify their own alternative investments. I think that you’re seeing more activity in the middle of the country right now that some of that will get wiped out when the market crashes. You know, that’s just natural, but more than anything, I think the reason why it’s possible to start companies at a high level outside of the valley now is the tool sets and what is available to you as a founder. Silicon Valley started because it was a place built around silicone and the ability to actually get access to the chips so you could build a computing power was more available there than anybody else anywhere else. It just so happened that became an epicenter for innovation and intelligence in general and that spawned off just more people starting companies and then all those people are surrounded by that type of person and now they’re all having conversations that start more companies, but now all over the country you have access to things like Amazon web services where you can scale your, your servers and handle, handle all of this traffic and you can get started online with next to no effort whatsoever. You know you can. You can file an LLC for $99 online. You can do just about anything online from just about anywhere. That used to be a significant barrier. It is not now and it’s only getting easier and people who understand those tools and can build on them are becoming more prevalent all over the country. There was a period of time a couple years ago where one of my engineers, my first company was explaining here in the middle of the country. The engineers are about five years behind on understanding the most cutting edge tools, development tools that are happening on the coasts. His example at the time was python. Python has been popular on the coast for a little bit, its slower to get here. We have fewer python developers in the midwest because of it, but I think that feedback loop is getting tighter and tighter as the playing field gets leveled out from a talent and technology perspective.

Eric Hornung: 17:56

It’s interesting to me because people call like Silicon Valley and everything that has spawned from that, the tech industry, but from an economics perspective and industry is like a creation of something and technology is an accelerant which makes the creation of something pretty much costs less or be more effective in terms of your returns from capital. So it’s weird to me that we still think about tech as an industry when tech is really just an accelerant for the rest of the country. So your industries, your things that actually create things. In Columbus, it’s. I guess there’s an insurance industry, although that’s a little off, in Kansas City we just recently learned that it’s a animal healthcare industry. There’s 100 companies and an animal health vertical or something like that. Corridor is what he called it in

Jay Clouse: 18:44

In Cincinnati we got CPG.

Eric Hornung: 18:47

In Cincinnati theres CPG, in Minneapolis there’s healthcare, in Nebraska there’s wheat, I think they do wheat or something, maybe grain. I don’t know what

Jay Clouse: 18:56

agriculture maybe? The booming we industry.

Eric Hornung: 19:02

Yeah. I just think that this idea that tech has to be centralized is a little unfounded and as time progresses, tech will expand over everywhere and it will be a layer on top of whatever industry exists in that city or state.

Jay Clouse: 19:18

Look at our guests, Lawn Guru and the story that sky told us, they went through 500 startups. They were raising investment on the coast and they couldn’t because those investors didn’t understand the way people felt about their lawns. They didn’t have lawns in silicon valley that the way they did Sky’s hometown in Michigan, so there is a perfect example of that industry. The outdoor services industry wasn’t an industry that the investors understood in silicon valley.

Eric Hornung: 19:48

and that gets us to our fourth myth, which is that great investors have to be in silicon valley. I think we know where we’re heading with this one in terms of whether this is a myth or whether this is a reality. Jay and I don’t believe that great investors have to be in silicon valley and I think that as we move forward in this space and in the innovation space, there’s a lot of the most innovative companies are going to come out of the middle of the country because there has been a suppression of innovation there comparative to the coasts.

Jay Clouse: 20:24

and there’s a ton of research. If you look at the research universities, they’re heavily concentrated in the middle of the country, which is where new innovations, new ip can come from based on some of the smartest people doing very specific particular things. This, this myth, Eric and I kind of brought from a chapter and Jason Calacanis’s book angel.

Eric Hornung: 20:45

We didnt kind of. We, I cut that page out, like that is. We did not kind of bring it from a book. We saw that page and we stuck it to a wall.

Jay Clouse: 20:56

I think it’s chapter Chapter 15, 16. Yeah. Whatever it is, it just says, can you be a successful angel investor outside of Silicon Valley? And the entire chapter just says, no, that goes on the next chapter, but you know, we’re seeing. We’re seeing successful investors at an institutional level outside of Silicon Valley now. NCT ventures here in Columbus, Ohio. They invest, they’ve been investing in the midwest for a decade. They work with Dan Gilbert in Detroit with rock ventures. They’ve had one of the most successful portfolio returns records of any institutional investor around the country, drive capital, making a lot of noise. We keep bringing them up and they’re at an advantage because at it, as an institutional investor, you get to pick the best of the best of the best. You get to really be particular about where you deploy your capital and look for all this traction and numbers and social proof. Their biggest battle as an institutional investor outside of the valley, is competing with the deal flow of value investors and they can do that by showing their own track records by showing that they support founders in whatever way that is. Whether it’s talent, whether it’s helping them get deals on where they’re setting up their office, whether it’s just generally more founder friendly terms. They’re really fighting for the cream of the crop, which can be fairly obvious at some point in the company’s history. Where it’s more difficult is at this earlier stage that Eric and I are looking at on our podcast where it’s kind of a crap shoot, so know if these companies are going to take off or not. It’s. It’s much long before you have these numbers attraction or the social proof for all the customers that some of the institutional invested companies get and so I think that’s where it’s harder to be an investor outside of Silicon Valley. I don’t think it’s impossible, but from an even a pure numbers game, I think we found some data to show that there are approximately as many companies outside of Silicon Valley as there are inside of. Right. So that density is tough. What are your thoughts, Eric?

Eric Hornung: 22:57

Yeah, I agree. I don’t know if it was the exact same numbers because one thing we’ve found even on this podcast is that outside of Silicon Valley, the information on the leading platforms like crunchbase for example, I think we’ve had two or three founders who just don’t have updated information on crunchbase who have been on the podcast and it’s. It’s a little bit more difficult to know what’s really out there in the middle of the country because there are founders who reach out to us all the time. Who, if you look them up on crunchbase or you looked them up just kind of anywhere, they don’t exist in these industry periodicals in databases in Pitchbook, and that makes it a little bit harder to know what’s really out there when the information is so good in silicon valley and people are good about making sure it’s updated, but outside of it it’s just hard to know what what actually exists.

Jay Clouse: 23:50

The other hard thing is as an institutional investor, because you’re using social proof and raw traction as a proxy to show how successful a company is, your bet can be a little bit less on the founders earlier stage. We’re really looking at founders pretty heavily in predominantly and even from the guests on our show. We’ve talked to nearly two dozen guess at this point. It’s hard to tell a gradient between a good founder in a great founder in my mind to me were either doing a good job of bringing on good companies or we haven’t seen a phenomenal founder, you know, just because I have a hard time saying this person completely blew me away to a level that this person didn’t. Most of our founders I would get behind and say like, this person is very committed. It seems like they’re going to be very successful and so I don’t know. That’s a tough thing. As an early stage investor, have you had the same feeling?

Eric Hornung: 24:46

I have and it’s one thing that is really interesting to me because as an early stage investor, as an angel investor, you have to look at something and know that seven, eight, nine years from now, it still might not pan out and it’s still might just kind of be fledgling along and finding what it’s trying to find and then it might take off and then you’re like, oh, well there is what I was looking for. It’s just such a patience game and you don’t know if you’re right for years, so our deal memos, which will you will little inside scoop here. We’re going to go back and look at the founders that we reviewed and 15 months from now, look at how we thought about that company and how they have progressed in their journey, but even that is probably too soon in a angel investing type space where you really have to be patient and you have to have a long view and that’s why investing in the founder is so important and is so hard to know the difference between good and great.

Jay Clouse: 25:44

Something else that I feel like I hear a lot when I listened to interviews with institutional investors is they talk about their biggest returns and their biggest successes when making investment in companies are almost always the companies where there was a split opinion on that company and there’s somebody in the room that’s just fist pounding and saying, I believe in this founder. We got to go with this founder. When other people are saying, no, and I feel like you and I have been in relative consensus most of the time with our guests, so that again is a sign to me. We either still have a lot of work to do to hone our eye. We’ve brought in a set of good founders or we haven’t brought in a founder yet that truly is one that we should put money behind.

Eric Hornung: 26:25

Well, that is something that I think we’re going to learn over time and to be one of the great investors outside of Silicon Valley. You have to put in the time and you have to learn like we’re doing here. Right, Jay?

Jay Clouse: 26:36

That’s true. That’s true. I’m enjoying it. So guys, we’d love to hear your thoughts on this. We’d love to hear your feedback on these four myths. The myths of You can’t start a VC backed company outside of Silicon Valley, the city you start your company and matters a lot, Investors should be co located, and great investors must be inside of Silicon Valley. Eric, do you think we debunked any of these myths? Do we think we supported some of these myths?

Eric Hornung: 27:00

Well, I hope we’re in the process of debunking the first myth as a movement or as an initiative in general. I don’t know about just upside, but what upside stands for. I think that there is a lot of great momentum in the outside of Silicon Valley space. I think we agreed with myth two, which is that the city that you start your company in matters a lot

Jay Clouse: 27:22

and part of that is saying if you are starting a healthcare startup or you’re starting a startup that services the food industry or the insurance industry, maybe San Francisco isn’t the best place for you.

Eric Hornung: 27:35

Right, and if you’re like Vibe and you need to go up to Minnesota to do an accelerator because working with target and techstars is going to make your journey in Columbus much more fruitful, than sometimes you have to be a little bit geographically flexible to go to a city for a little bit to figure out, okay, this is what I need to do and this is going to accelerate me to the next level. I think myth three, we still have some work to do on our end on debunking, but we see some trends for people not being as closely located. It’s going to depend a lot on where in the spectrum investors who are and finally we are on a constant quest to prove that you can be a great investor outside of the Silicon Valley, so I don’t think we’ll ever debunk that because you have to overcome so much stigma, but we will work our way towards it.

Jay Clouse: 28:31

So shameless plug, two of those myths that we want to continue having a conversation around and potentially bust, investors should be co located, and great investors must be inside Silicon Valley, Eric and I are trying to have that conversation this year at South by Southwest. We’ve submitted a couple of panels for consideration for south by southwest programming this year, so if you don’t mind giving us a vote so that we can have that conversation at south by southwest this year in March of 2019. Please go to upside.fm/vote, and you can vote for both of our panels so that we have a chance of going there, public voting accounts for about a third of the consideration for which panels go into the programming, so once again, if you go to upside.fm/vote, it would really help eric and I continue to bring this conversation to light outside of Silicon Valley in Austin, Texas this year. Eric, any parting thoughts?

Eric Hornung: 29:23

We really appreciate you guys tuning in to upside to going to upside.fm/vote and voting for our south by southwest panel, and to all of the information and thoughts that we get on breaker on twitter at hello@upside.FM. If you have a company or founder or investor who you are or who you’d like us to talk to, we would love an introduction and we’ll talk to you later.

Jay Clouse: 29:52

That’s all for this week. Thanks for listening. We’d love to hear your thoughts on today’s guest, so shoot us an email at hello@upside.FM, or find us on twitter @upsideFM. We will be back here next week at the same time talking to another founder on our quest to find upside outside of Silicon Valley. If you or someone you know would make a good guest for our show, please email us or find us on twitter and let us know. And if you love our show, please leave us a review on itunes. That goes a long way in helping us spread the word and continue to help bring high quality guests to the show. Eric and I decided there were a couple things we wanted to share with you at the end of the podcast, and so here we go, Eric Hornung and Jay Clouse are the founding parties of the upside podcast. At the time of this recording, we do not own equity or other financial interest in the companies which appear on this show. All opinions expressed by podcasts participants are solely their own opinions and do not reflect the opinions of Duff and Phelps Llc and its affiliates Unreal Collective llc and its affiliates, or any entity which employ us. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon as a basis for investment decisions. We have not considered your specific financial situation nor provided any investment advice on this show. Thanks for listening and we’ll talk to you next week.