Airbnb seeds round

롱런하는 인재들의 특징

어제 오래 함께 일했던 지인과 이야기 하며, 롱런하는 사람들의 특징에 대한 이야기를 나눌 수 있었다.

1. 길게 보면, 빨리 가는 것보다 멈추지 않는 것 (포기하지 않는 것)이 중요하다.

2. 생각보다 많이 힘들고, 달성 시점이 다소 늦어지는 한이 있더라도 초기에 세웠던 비전/목표를 유지하는 것이 중요하다. (중간에 목표 낮추면, compromise 하면 안된다)

3. 매 순간 (미팅하는 순간, 일을 하는 순간 등) 최선을 다하는 것이 중요하다. 잠시 힘듦이 찾아올 수는 있지만 빠르게 웃으며 털어내야 한다.

4. 주변에 같은 마음으로 노력하며 사는 사람들이 있어야 한다.

5. 최소한의 여유와 웃음은 잃지 말아야 한다.

6. 매너는 최대한 지켜야 한다. (언어 습관, 행동 습관, 청결함 등)

7. 부지런히 움직여야 하며, 안좋은 음식을 자주 먹지 말아야 한다. (건강은 유지해야 한다)

한 마디로, 포기와 끝은 없다. 될 때까지 열심히 부지런히 최선을 다해 부딪혀 보는 것이다.

다시 보니, 롱런하는 기업들의 특징도 유사한 듯하다.

승훈님

Since its founding in 2012, the New York-based firm has taken a contrarian path to cinematic success. While Hollywood’s major studios have spent the last decade pumping out superhero vehicles, A24 has embraced creative risk. Rather than looking to underwrite safe bets, founders David Fenkel and Daniel Katz look for true auteurs – then back them to the hilt. From one vantage, it’s an almost venture-like search for outliers; from another, it resembles LVMH’s designer-centric approach. As at Bernard Arnault’s luxury conglomerate, for A24, the artist is sovereign.

A24 has backed the visionaries behind hits like Uncut Gems, Hereditary, Lady Bird, Midsommar, and Ex Machina. As well as delivering strong returns – and propelling the shop to a $2.5 billion valuation – A24’s filmography has earned critical respect and accumulated rare cultural power.

A24 has pushed the borders of its empire, moving into TV, music, publishing, physical experiences, and even cosmetics. It takes little imagination to see the contours A24 is following, to find a redux of Walt’s strategy designed for the 21st century.

Social media smarts underpinned the firm’s rise, allowing it to acquire attention much more cost-effectively than its more backward-minded peers. So did its understanding of internet culture, memes, and viral mechanics. Over the past decade, no studio has more efficiently inserted itself into the online zeitgeist, seasoning our feeds with satanic goats and Oscar Isaac dance sequences.

A24’s founders had noticed this decay. Rather than bemoaning it, however, they spotted an opening. Just because big studios didn’t want to make opinionated indie films anymore didn’t mean that audiences didn’t want to watch them. On the contrary, amidst an increasingly homogeneous cultural landscape, projects with a genuine point of view could have an outsized impact. “Films didn’t seem as exciting to us as when we started our careers,” Katz noted. “And that signaled an opportunity.”

Beginning:
A24 began its life as a distributor. Its team frequented film festivals, acquired the rights to promising pictures, and set about marketing them. It was a pragmatic starting point, grounded in the reality of the firm’s size. Rather than risk vast sums taking a project from noscript to screen, A24 concentrated its capital on finished projects that at least had a shot of delivering a return. “When we started, it was last money in, first money out,” one executive noted.

In addition to sitting in a de-risked part of the stack, A24 made four critical decisions that became a core part of the firm’s strategy:

1. Operate like a startup.
2. Make small bets.
3. Find outlier auteurs.
4. Embrace the internet.

A24’s differentiated strategy starts with its distinctive culture. In many respects, it’s a firm inspired by Silicon Valley rather than Hollywood.

Employees receive equity in the business, and the company operates with a flat organizational structure. Indeed, the firm’s headquarters in New York has been specifically designed to accommodate this approach. “No one has an office; everyone sits out on an open-plan floor,” one source remarked. This atmosphere is designed to encourage team members to share ideas, regardless of their position in the organization. Above all, A24’s management seems to want to provide the freedom to ideate and experiment. “I felt like there was a huge opportunity to create something where the talented people could be talented,” Katz said. That is more than just talk – A24 has purchased projects recommended by employees outside its core acquisition team.

https://thegeneralist.substack.com/p/a24

Investing also involves considering a litany of variables. The tricky thing is how highly granular the pattern matching can get. Without a firm grasp of a situation’s full context, it’s almost too easy to apply the wrong lesson. Likewise, while learning from the “mistakes of others” is certainly ideal, it is much harder than it seems to use successfully.

1. Why didn’t invest in Stripe?

In 2012, despite the prodigious impressiveness of the brothers Collison, I passed on investing in Stripe. Why? First, I basically had PTSD from my PayPal experience. I was wary of any financial services investments because on top of the regulatory complexity/friction, payments are incredibly difficult to get to scale. With insufficient volume, you are left tending to a money-hemorrhaging business due to all the chargebacks and fraud that are intrinsic to payments. So unless you have a really good theory about how to get to scale, it’s a fatal problem.

The Stripe theory of scale was to start with the initial volume from Y-Combinator and grow and broaden from that base. In retrospect, the thing that I missed was grokking the fundamental inflection point that the tech ecosystem was just reaching, and that these businesses would start on and scale with Stripe. While that alone wouldn’t get Stripe to scale, in combination with their other strategies and compounded gains, it would.

One of the ways I update my theory of the investing game is to go back and revisit the important ones: “Why did I make an error in this particular investing opportunity?” Sometimes knowing too much can lead to bad investment decisions, and certainly in the case of Stripe, mine proved to be the wrong lesson!

2. Airbnb investment
I did miss Stripe, but another interesting example where thankfully I got it right was Airbnb. It was actually my first venture investment as a partner at Greylock. When I brought it to the partnership, David Sze, looked across the table and said, “Every venture capitalist has to have a deal that they can fail on. Airbnb can be yours.” Mind you, David was the central reason I had joined Greylock, and my most helpful board member at LinkedIn. Again: this was my first investment as a partner! I was taken aback, but I still had my conviction that I was right. I had conviction in my theory of the game; conviction in the Airbnb founders’ comprehensive handle on the theory of the game they were managing.

It would take years before Airbnb’s metrics truly broke away to become the runaway transformative success that it’s become. To David’s immense credit, it was well before that (just six months after the initial investment) that he came to me and said “You were totally right. I was wrong. Let’s talk about this.”

I told David that all of the risk factors he had pointed out: political opposition in cities, the chance that guests would cause problems, unions would fight it, etc– those were all accurate. But I believed that if it did actually work, Airbnb would have a global impact and generate virtually uncapped returns. Those opportunities are special. And despite all the very serious and reasonable concerns, the Airbnb founders had a credible theory of the game for each one. It wasn’t a kind of one-shot faith in a silver bullet, but it was like “Oh, we could try X, we could try Y, or we could try Z. Our X is a good plan, but if it doesn’t work then we’ll…” None of that meant you wouldn’t die on that hill, but it was a good theory of the game, and considering the impact and profit opportunity, worth making the bet.

https://thegeneralist.substack.com/p/letters-reid-hoffman-1

기존 오너를 이기려 하지 않고, 누르려 하지 않고, 누가 더 똑똑하다는 것을 과시할 필요도 없다는 생각이다. 때로는 주변 사람들이 '너는 자존심도 없냐'는 말도 한다. 하지만 그는 반대로 생각한다 '딜소싱'을 잘하려면 오히려 자존감이 높아야 한다고. 김 대표는 "연기금에서 돈을 받아서 투자를 잘하고 돈을 잘 벌어드리는 게 제 직업이지, 똑똑하다는 얘기 듣는 게 제 직업은 아니다"라며 "5시간이고 6시간이고 일단 남의 이야기를 잘 들어준다"고 말했다.

https://cm.asiae.co.kr/article/2023061722154642774?aceRef=https%3A%2F%2Fm.blog.naver.com%2F

체크 리스트’로 '극한직업', '파묘'에 투자해 세 자릿수 수익률을 냈습니다. '60세 이상 감독이면 10% 감점', '직전 작품이 망했으면 10% 가산점 배우나 감독, 제작사가 혈연, 지연, 학연 등 특수 관계면 10% 감점


콘텐츠 취향이 평범한 20대 남녀 '이평녀', '이평남'이 극장에 보러 올 영화인지가 중요해요.

특정 취향에 치우치지 않고 평범한 사람들이 좋아할 만한 콘텐츠에 투자해야 하거든요.

https://www.folin.co/article/8429/gift/8IS5d4jHdjUeseRArKqZwB9XHI9JmWk6