Fireside Chat, Interview
Jason Lemkin: Cold Email Tips; Why Only 15% of Founders Listen to their VCs | 20VC #954
- Harry Stebbings anticipates that "overnight success stories" require extended preparation periods, while Jason Lemkin projects Sastro Inc. will generate $40 million in revenue this year and predicts Algolia will eventually achieve a billion-dollar valuation, though it "would take an IPO" and "would take forever."
- Lemkin forecasts that Algolia's primary e-commerce and SaaS verticals will grow organically with market tailwinds, yet predicts that by 2032 the search market will change so significantly that future trajectories will be impossible to predict.
- Lemkin expects the appetite for new emerging managers among LPs to potentially evaporate within the next 12 months, while predicting that many VCs have abandoned "zombie" companies due to a lack of urgency and that investing has become so transactional that dealmakers care less about cap table composition.
- Lemkin anticipates that "first meetings will never happen in person again" in the current "Zoom invested world," noting that founders no longer value in-person meetings even though he predicts "bullshit artists" will be harder to identify without face-to-face trust-building exercises.
- Lemkin expects that top brands can secure "one or two good deals a year by hook or by crook" and predicts that a strong brand can endure for a decade if nurtured, whereas the most fertile investing periods occur when there is "maximum hunger."
- Lemkin predicts that "search is one of the five most biggest problems on the internet" and that SaaS companies are difficult to disrupt once momentum is established, while Stebbings plans to feature the "Algolia story" and observes that best founders are "great communicators."
- Stebbings predicts that top investors like David Sacks, Keith Raboi, Aileen Lee, and Satya Patel provided "radically different answers" on handling inbound emails, with Lemkin adding that an incredible email can signal a high-quality investment and that Stebbings "may be under-maximizing your platform."
- Lemkin suggests Stebbings might feel "disgraced" regarding his early career trajectory, while Stebbings predicts Algolia "probably would be IPO-ing if it wasn't for the markets," highlighting current market constraints on liquidity.