Today's guest is Shaun Abrahamson. Shaun co-founded Urban Us to fund & serve startups that make cities better. Before Urban Us Shaun was an active angel investor, investing in more than 20 firms between 2007 and 2013.
In this episode, Shaun will tell us how he became an investor, what it means to invest with a 'Climate Thesis' and how his investments at Urban Us can contribute to more sustainable cities.
Today's guest is Shaun Abrahamson. Shaun co-founded Urban Us to fund & serve startups that make cities better. Before Urban Us Shaun was an active angel investor, investing in more than 20 firms between 2007 and 2013.
In this episode, Shaun will tell us how he became an investor, what it means to invest with a 'Climate Thesis' and how his investments at Urban Us can contribute to more sustainable cities.
Lieke 0:42
Welcome, Shaun
Shaun 1:41
Thank you. Thanks for having me.
Liz 1:43
Welcome. We're really pleased and looking forward to our discussion today. So let's kick right off. Shaun, we understand you know, you've built up a lot of different companies and you started angel investing. And we were really curious to hear what were some things that you learnt from your own business experience that you are applying to your role as an investor?
Shaun 2:06
Oh, boy, yeah. Lots of lots of lessons. But I think the one that I come back to most often is that fundraising has a really bad measure of progress. You know, I sort of understand the mechanics of evaluating funds, based on markups, and, you know, the last round price. But I think early on, I had two experiences on sort of the opposite end of the spectrum. So, you know, guidebooks became a documentary because it was such a fantastic failure. Like, we burned through $60 million, from some really smart investors, right, like, we had people like Henry Kravis on the board. And, you know, super talented people on the team. And, you know, that was, I think the first experience that there is really sort of a finite rate at which you can add people to a team and raise money, at least that was one of my takeaways is that you can definitely grow too fast. And then the exit that allowed me to start angel investing was totally bootstrapped. So, and then, you know, as time goes on, I think we meet founders all the time, that will panic, you know, one of their competitors will raise, their investors will, you know, sort of send them the news as if they didn't know. And then they panic. And, I think what we've seen over and over again, is that it's just, the ability to fundraise is useful, it's sort of necessary, but definitely not sufficient to determine the outcome. And so I think that's been a sort of useful perspective for a lot of the teams.
Liz 4:13
Absolutely. And I'm sure those are the kind of conversations that you're having with the teams You know, when they're telling you about the news they've received from their their investors, I'm sure that your ability to share your experience on both sides probably goes a long way to Yeah, to reassuring them or to guiding them through their current situation. Perhaps it makes sense, I guess, to then move on to Urban Us. So you know, the fund that you're raising or the you know, the thesis that you're operating out of currently, maybe you could tell us more about precisely what it means to make cities better. And to help them yeah, survive through or to flourish and kind of climate change.
Shaun 4:57
Yeah, so You know, we sort of think about our thesis in three parts. And maybe I'll leave the city for the end because it's a little bit more complicated. But I think at this point, a lot of your listeners, we'll be sort of very familiar with, you know, pathways to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. And what we found early on is we sort of looked at these things called Sankey diagrams. And a Sankey, it sort of shows where energy comes from, and sort of where it's consumed. And sadly, how much of it is wasted. And when you look at a Sankey diagram, you can look at something like transportation, and you can drill down into, okay, within transportation, you know, what is used for logistics, you know, domestic, you know, logistics that are local flights, for example. So you can get very granular. And so we sort of walk our way through each of those, you know, specific areas and think about which machines do you need to upgrade, because very often, the question is, how do you take something from an internal combustion engine, or natural gas powered heating system, and make it electric. And so a big part of how we think about greenhouse gas emissions is what old machines we need to upgrade, usually, they are part of the transportation system, they are somewhere in a building, often in the basement, on the roof where people don't see them and don't think about them. And so that, you know, that's one way we've more recently started to think about carbon capture, definitely not our first choice, because we think it actually disincentivizes things like electrification. But we also think the problem is urgent enough that even the sort of plan B options need to be on the table. And then we do a fair amount of work with what I think it's sort of classically thought of as a circular economy. Although, you know, we think encouraging reuse can actually be much more interesting, even then, let's say traditional retail experiences. So greenhouse gas emissions are sort of the way and I think a lot of people understand that now. You know, we've, we can get into this, but we've we focused more on the demand side versus generation and transmission. Another important thing we looked at, and again, this was just from trying to understand cities, we've looked at adaptation since we started. So sort of recognizing that there's a certain amount of change already built in. Unfortunately, the last few weeks of news, if you weren't sure about that, like that's probably confirmed. It's just wildfires and floods. And you sort of can guess the location, because at this point, it could be anywhere in the world. It's sort of, it's a little bit scary to actually see it as a news headline, versus the way that we saw it, which is, you know, climate models. And so there, we try to think about, how do you evaluate risk? How do you score risk, in a sort of classic insurance sense? We're also thinking about how you build hard infrastructure. So it's not helpful that construction productivity hasn't improved in decades, we have a lot of hard infrastructure to build if you're going to manage more water, either, you know, you know that as a flood management system. So yeah, I don't have to explain this to people in the Netherlands, but the rest of the world doesn't know about this, or hasn't really mentally prepared for it. And then the soft infrastructure, which I think people forget about, like, first responders, like firefighters, you know, now need superpowers, right, the current, you know, sort of capabilities are quite limited, given what we asked him to do. So whether it's flood or fire, you know, first responder infrastructure is necessary, and then even community infrastructure. So thinking about how easy is it for people to help their neighbors or help each other? And so we think quite a bit about what adaptation looks like in terms of soft infrastructure.
And then finally, so you know, if you look at our portfolio about a third is you could map to finance gas emissions, about a third to adaptation. The city's piece is really interesting, because we know historically, that when we deliver infrastructure and services, it's three to five times cheaper per capita, in a denser community. Right and so As we think about the cost of adaptation, or sort of building retrofits, or even logistics, you know, one of the critical things is, we'd much prefer to do that in a dense community, like a city, then to try and do that across, you know, huge swaths of land. And so then the question we ask ourselves is genuinely what are the total sort of top issues outside of climate directly which cities are struggling with? So that takes us into things like traffic congestion, you know, use of, you know, how do you allocate public space, which I think we've had an interesting firsthand experience during COVID, where parking spaces, and we suddenly realize we're not that useful. And outdoor dining and bike lanes are much more valuable. So things like that are the types of things we look at, you know, more directly in terms of city problems.
Lieke 10:58
Shaun, you mentioned kind of the denser communities that you typically look at so highly populated cities, I can imagine that, you know, since COVID, two plays in this pandemic took place, people kind of took away from the cities, which might have created less risk, maybe less riskier environments, in terms of the themes that you look at. Has it also affected your portfolio companies in that sense?
Shaun 11:34
Yeah, I mean, I think there was a moment where, you know, there was this remote work, you know, to get a cabin in the woods with a satellite connection. And that was supposed to be awesome. And I think that's a very particular profile. I mean, our internal joke was, Tinder is gonna really suck.
Lieke 12:00
Are they gonna find each other?
Shaun 12:01
Yesh, no, there's no, there's no hope. I haven't thought Tinder works for that situation. So I think that there's an interesting balance. I do think ultimately, there's a certain amount of sort of pragmatic work cost of living consideration. But I think we can't, we are social. I don't think there's any way around that. And I think, like, watching a place like New York go from, you know, everyone's leaving to you know, rents are going up, you know, quite rapidly again, I think that was our expectation, and it's kind of playing out. I think, if anything, spending some time away from a community or from a large city just emphasizes how much people actually value them. So it's a classic, maybe absence makes the heart grow fonder. But on a global scale, yeah.
Liz 13:00
Shaun, maybe, maybe I need to take a step back here. And perhaps this question is a little bit out of place. But I think sorry, we kind of jumped almost from the work that you did as an angel investor. And then we really launched into what you're doing with Urban us. And thank you so much for describing Kind of, yeah, I guess the three broad principles or what you invest in, but I'm, I'd love to find the missing jigsaw piece, which is how did you come across your particular investment thesis? And how did you decide to do this kind of really broad, you know, a third greenhouse gas, a third adaptation of third cities? How did Yeah, what's the missing jigsaw piece in this?
Shaun 13:41
Yeah, so, you know, I think, for me, it goes back to grad school. So I grew up in South Africa, but came to the US for grad school. And I landed up in a research lab with a professor who was already concerned with climate change. So he was like the first hypermiler that I met, he was ultra efficient, I think it was like a Honda Insight or something. And was building models with like, mpfl in Switzerland, for like cogeneration. We were building efficiency models, and it was a computer aided design lab. So it was sort of the place where you were supposed to build simulations of physical engineering systems. And so that was my introduction, that was sort of mid late 90s. When I left the sort of.com. Let's say the sort of first internet bubble was well on its way, there was the sense that, you know, there were all these things you could do with the Internet, and that was going to be more important than we'd come back to Climate change, at least that was, in my mind, the justification. And I think what was interesting is that there were a few people that I kept in touch with. So like, one of the people I cited was when to work on winter wind gearboxes. So it was very clear to me that there was progress happening. But it took me a while, sort of as I started angel investing, to find a way to bridge to climate because literally, just as I started angel investing, we had sort of clean tech blow up. And so, you know, the initial attempts to invest around climate as a theme. I wasn't getting any positive feedback to say that. And then I had a good friend who built something called tree hugger, to sort of the first consumer facing, I would say, climate and environmental, sort of focused content. And, you know, sort of 2008 onwards, we worked on a few projects. So we did some work with Starbucks, to try and reduce paper cup waste. We did some real estate projects to do sort of high efficiency, basically, sort of Passive House, but multifamily. And so by the time, you know, I got into, like, 2012 2013. I was really just trying to figure out how do you reconcile all these interesting climate related projects with the venture capital world? And, my sense, when Sonia and I started talking in 2013, was that they just had to be a way to use everything we're learning in the startup world, which I sort of view as startups are phenomenally efficient ways to quickly test things. Right. So particularly early on, if you think about a portfolio, the failure rate is actually quite high. It's like 60-70%, assuming that returning capital is considered a failure at seed stage. And so just from a like, if you think about not knowing the answer, you want to experiment and do thousands of things and actually test them on some sort of scale. Startups feel like the way that you want to approach that. And so that's sort of when the light went on. And we said, Look, we, you know, we have to try this, there's a lot of things that seem to scare co investors. But we'll give it a try and see if we can, you know, build a pipeline that's a little bit more narrowly focused. We thought it would be something like, one in 10 investments in the US would be relevant to us. And we figured, yeah, we could probably figure out sourcing to do that. And that is how we built a pilot fund on that idea.
Lieke 17:57
Yeah, great. And I can indeed, imagine, especially being you know, in the really early stages of, of startups, you see a lot of them and a lot of interesting ones. Could you maybe tell us a little bit more about some of the companies that you have invested in such as Bowery farming?
Shaun 18:16
Sure. Yes, Bowery was interesting. I had met the CEO, and co founder, as an angel investor and actually invested in a company that he helped to start, it was ultimately sold to Oracle, and really, as a first time founder, he had a really rough time. He ultimately was, you know, sort of left, I'll just say he left the company, you know, rather broadly. And, you know, we kept in touch. And, you know, after a few months, he kind of said, I have this idea that I think is super important. And when he introduced it, we talked through what at the time sounded really crazy, which was the potential that we were going to see crop yields fall, or we would see outright sort of crop failures because of climate change. And so his insight was okay, if I can, if I can figure out a way to produce more food indoors, I can remove, you know, some of the climate or sort of weather specific risks, like temperature or, or frost. And so, you know, it really wasn't a difficult decision, you know, really like Irving knew that he was going to execute well felt like he was super motivated to solve the problem, but also to prove that, you know, the first startup that he worked on, actually, he could have done much better. And but our way into that deal wasn't specifically agriculture, it was a sense that it was part of a resilience plan, if you want to think about populations, you know, securing access to food. It sounds like it looks like prepping. But in some ways, it's just a recognition that we've changed the planet enough. And we need to rethink how we do very basic things like growing food. And so we invested, I think, 2015, they did the seed round. And they just did a, I think it was like a 2 billion pre wit fidelity to ramp up the number of farms in the US.
Liz 20:57
Yeah, super interesting, and great to hear how, I guess your previous conversations, and your previous relationships, really, you know, pull into what you're executing on in this fund? And maybe if we kind of yet maybe close off that and move on to the next question, Shaun, which is, I think, finance, you know, here at c*funds, we work in finance, and we work in capital in numbers. So what role do you believe that finance can play in creating sustainable cities?
Shaun 21:33
Yeah, so I think we pursued three tracks. You know, there's more, but I'll just share the three that I think we spend most of our time on. So the basic one we sort of touched on, which is building a seed stage portfolio is, for us, sort of a very efficient way to quickly experiment, and then scale, the most promising results. I want to maybe explain that a bit more, because I think when people think about climate, there's a sort of Bill Gates version of climate, which is, hey, it's a super hard technical problem, and there's gonna be this magical solution. And we just, it's interesting, we make some hard tech investments. We don't think that's a reasonable approach. Because we think that in a lot of cases, the biggest problem is not testing the technology. It's testing how you distribute, and how you finance the technology. And so how can you package it and align incentives and get it in front of customers and so probably my favorite example of that is, we don't really know why people buy, right? Like, we have some ideas. But it turns out that having a car go from sort of zero to hundred kilometers now, zero to 60, was a really good way to appeal to all sorts of car obsessed people and get them excited about electric vehicles. And that's just not technical, I mean, you have to solve technical problems, but it really is a marketing and distribution problem. Anyway, I am mentioning that because I think that's what makes this sort of startup experiment super interesting is it, it's a lot to do with customers, and how you convince them to buy something. And so that for us, you know, venture finances is sort of the first thing. The second thing is, software is great, and yet still eating the world. But I like to joke that you can't eat software. Like ultimately, Bowery farming, you know, is a good example of, yes, their software and their robots. But ultimately, you've got to deal with the physical world, if you are going to solve climate change. And so about 50% of our portfolio has hardware. So the problem with hardware is, yes, you know, the VCs will say hardware is hard. But it's specifically hard because of things like working capital. And it's especially hard because at least in the US, after 25 years of using the Internet, and software, there's not a lot of domain knowledge about manufacturing. Like they just you'd be hard pressed to find a hardware founder or sitting in a VCs office, or even at home in a remote gct. They just weren't there. So there's this sort of lost understanding of the full capital structure. And so the secondary is sort of how do you use finance to unlock adoption. And so you know, working capital is one basic thing, but setting up leasing structures is a classic, well understood approach, it works in sort of areas like residential solar. And so a big unlock for us is to be able to go to the market with a startup and say, you know, Option A, you can pay for this new piece of hardware. Yes, there's some technology risk. Yes, it's expensive, the payback period is not ideal. Or we can say, how would you like to lease this and get all the benefits and none of the technology risk, and we'll go with other investors and figure out how to manage the technology risk, some of its going to be insurance, some of its going to be different risk return trenches, in a capital structure. So the second thing we see for finances, just that for hardware startups, there's sort of this resurgence, when we're not doing sort of dumbed down finance, like venture debt. You know, it's kind of, it's kind of like it's fake debt. It's a real sort of off balance sheet leasing structure that makes it easier to accelerate adoption, it makes it easier for customers to say yes. And it accelerates the rate at which they can install new hardware or, you know, upgrade an E-bike fleet or install residential storage, those types of things. That's the second. And then the third is more, I would say classic insurance, which is, we kind of need to put a price on climate risk.
You know, the market eventually is going to understand if the cost of financing a home is going to go up because of the understood risks around flooding, for example, or hurricanes. And so that's sort of the third piece that we see is finance is supposed to be able to, you know, through market forces through analytics, etc, come to an opinion about risk. And so that's the other key role. We see it is around, I would say, sort of adaptation. You know, ultimately, we think there will be things like stranded assets, it's not a conceptual thing. But we think that's where the financial world to decide and a lot of cases,
Lieke 27:18
Yeah, I think it's really interesting, indeed, how you say that's, you know, it's not the technical solution right now, that will solve the problems with climate change and creating sustainable cities. But that is really the role of finance, and also how to finance it. I think it's interesting that in your three points, I think the customer is quite central. Don't you also think that it's specifically the government's plays an important role here and is actually pushing those changes?
Shaun 27:52
Yeah, I mean, so to be clear, I think the government already does, and has done a lot. So I don't want to minimize that. I think that the financial world to some extent, it's benefiting from investments that governments made a long time ago, right. So whether it's sort of German subsidies for solar, it's Chinese subsidies for battery manufacturing. Like, there's already been a lot of work. And I think there continues to be a lot of support. So if you have carbon pricing in a meaningful way, and you can sort of patch some of the new polls, I think, as it is happening in the EU, those all useful things I think the finance world is, you know, sort of operating within that environment. And, you know, with more government action in a lot of cases, that just means we can take less risk, or we can take more risk, but I think it just adjusts the risk profile. So as a specific example, like we, so far, when we look at companies, we don't look at their policy support, right? We want them to be sort of standalone, valuable. And if a local government or federal national government showed up and said, Hey, we want to subsidize this thing, that's great. But we've genuinely tried to pick companies where we can get comfortable that the economic benefits or the customer benefits are sufficient. That for example, you know, an upgraded heating system or H-vac would stand on its own merits. You know, it's gonna be more quiet, it's going to be more convenient. It's going to be, you know, more efficient. Turns out a lot of the market doesn't really care if it's more efficient. But if the local government showed up and said, Hey, we will incentivize high efficiency, that's awesome, right? Like that's just for as a bonus, but I think we try to come at most of the investments from the perspective that either we are benefiting from government policies that are sometimes 20 years old, or we want to ship something into the world, where once you demonstrate that it actually has value, and so as another example, we saw this happen, we had a company that made like a smart irrigation controller. So the motivation for us was, 50% of water in the US is going into people's yards. And the irrigation systems turn on during winter rains, which is kind of silly. So you're treating all this water that's coming into your yard, it's raining. And so using energy to move the water on etc, not good. What was interesting is, when they first shipped the product, they were shipping through Amazon, eventually, the EPA got a hold of units that they could test. And a year later, they were encouraging local municipal water systems to say, hey, you should really consider this part of infrastructure and subsidize it. So sometimes there's that positive feedback loop where just by getting a product to customers, showing that it works, it becomes easy, especially for local governments to say, yeah, we can support that will offer a rebate or some other incentives.
Liz 31:34
Yeah, interesting to hear about the loop going the other way in that case. So thanks for finding that example.
Shaun 31:39
I think it really does work, you know, multiple ways. And the other thing that I'll say is, our sort of internal joke is that, what we would really like is for the science fiction people to talk to the policymakers.
And so sometimes that works. But sometimes the science fiction people have to talk to the engineers who work with private capital markets to get something into the world. So the policymakers can see at work, it's kind of the long way around, but it also works.
Liz 32:12
And Shaun, what about, say, more developing countries where the government wasn't able to invest? Earlier on? So I think before you mentioned Germany, or I guess you've spoken about China's subsidizing battery manufacturing. But what about the other countries in the world that are, you know, fastest growing and also more polluting? What's your view on the role? there?
Shaun 32:40
Yeah, I don't know. If I have a strong opinion about it, you know, let's say, India, Brazil, I mean, I think, let's say, the fox, formerly known as the BRICS. You know, I get that they are all concerned about growth, and they look at, you know, I think, especially in the US, and as I look how much energy and emissions you use to build a certain standard of living, I think it's tough to argue that the way that I'm sorry that you get to do that, but but I think that a lot of them are benefiting from just seeing more options in the world. So, you know, India may have wanted to continue to invest in coal, but the economics of solar make that a really tough argument. And so in some ways, you know, what started out as work in Germany to drive down the cost of solar cells. By incentivizing adoption and driving up manufacturing volumes. A country like India is going to get the payoff. You know, it also helps China. China would love to sell them, batteries and solar cells. So I don't know, necessarily, how much policy is going to be necessary. I think in a lot of categories, economics is winning out, which is, again, that's like, coming back to the point about distribution, really fast distribution seems like the hardest problem right now. The cost curves on things like solar on batteries, the performance on everything from like, you know, electric passenger vehicles to electric bikes, it's becoming harder and harder to argue against them. And I don't think we'll need to and then I think the other interesting thing in a lot of developing countries is they have some weird dynamics that I think are non obvious to folks like us who are living in the US and Europe. If you live in South Africa, where currently there is You know, I think it's level four. I forget what it's called, when they basically turn off the grid.
And so, for someone living, if you conduct business in South Africa right now, probably four times a day, you are going through load shedding. Right, so you have no power. And what that's done is it's shifted the market to think about local solar right, residential or community solar. And then as you take that step to think about solar, you know, now you can start to think about, okay, I don't have to get range anxiety from my EV, I could actually have an EV at home and use it for out and back, because now I feel really confident in the electricity supply, I probably feel less and less confident that actually about gas and diesel, because by the way, those institutions are going offline a lot of the time when there's no power, because the pumps need power. So anyway, there's some interesting things, like, intersections between resilience and reliability and emerging technologies that, I think, maybe don't need policy, because the market is sort of making the decision and, you know, you look at a market like South Africa, they probably will leapfrog you know, North American and Europe and go straight to very distributed solar and storage.
Lieke 36:39
Yeah, definitely. And I think something that is happening all over the world right now, and I think also touches, you know, everyone's life on a daily basis currently is, I think you already mentioned it floodings around the world, wildfires recently also in the Netherlands, in Belgium, in Germany, there were some heavy floodings, with people dying as well. It seems to have become quite real. Now, you know, all the effects of climate change. So we would also like to hear from you what is your view on it, what is your stance? Do you believe that we are heading towards a bit of a gloomy future? Or do you have a more optimistic outlook?
Shaun 37:23
Yes. I think unfortunately, like COVID is probably a good example where it really depends, I think, if you are wealthy, you can probably buy yourself out of most of the problems. And so, you know, that's a little bit troubling, right? So like, you will be able to build more resilient infrastructure for yourself, you'll be able to live off the grid, potentially make your own water is like an atmospheric water system, like, you could really, you know, have the infrastructure to not worry too much. Right, you could afford to pay someone to do the analysis to tell you where to purchase a home or land etc. So I think the thing that, honestly, like, we worry about a lot is that there are a bunch of people who didn't do anything, we don't have the resources, who will suffer. And I think a lot of them will die. And I think we'll, you know, we go forward 20, 30 years, we'll look back at this and say, you know, people were buying SUVs just because they want it to be comfortable, and as a result, we took too long to reduce emissions, and people in a lot of developing countries died. Yeah, I don't, I just don't have another way to see it. So like, I don't know if it's gloomy, it is just as much as a disappointment that we couldn't figure out a sort of economic and social system where we could move fast enough. And so we've essentially resigned ourselves to say, yeah, I'm sorry. I mean, what was fascinating to me. I read some interviews from people in Germany, like a couple of weeks ago during the flooding. And one woman said, I just don't expect to see this in Germany. I expect to see this in poor countries.
You know, and so, I just, I just think that, we've sort of accepted that there's a certain amount of suffering and whether it's not getting vaccines to the world fast enough. You know, the climate I think is going to follow. You know, I think our best case is trying to minimize loss of life. But the scale of suffering, you know, feels like it's going to be 100x what we saw with COVID over the next few decades.
Lieke 40:21
Yep.
Shaun 40:21
So gloomy. I don't know if I want to describe it, it's just like I you know,
Liz 40:26
It's honest.
Shaun 40:28
It's Yeah, my hope is that is a generation of people growing up now, who will look at that and just say, it's unacceptable, like we can't have economic and social systems that are so selfish, that we just inflict suffering and death on whole populations of people, because they fall away like that. That to me, it's like, that would be the best outcome is that we just, you know, it becomes part of history. And people are like, wow, what is a selfish generation of people? We don't ever want to do that.
Lieke 41:10
Yeah. I think it's not the most positive note to end this part, but it's good to have this thought right?
Shaun 41:10
Yeah, the good side is like there is, I think some of that is inevitable , there is a part of this that could be substantially worse, right? So business as usual, we won't see adoption of electric vehicles, we won't see people trying to reduce footprints, we won't see policy work. The scale of that would be unimaginable, like if would be a terrible sci-fi movie, and so I think relative to that I am very optimistic, It's just it's hard, I'm optimistic because I do see so many startups making great progress and scaling quicky etc, but it's like, coming back to the bowery, it's sad that we couldn't do enough. Something like Bowery could be highly successful, and it means that we fundamentally change the planet, that's the indication, which is kind of, it's insane, but I guess, you know, go humans still figured out a way.
Lieke 42:29
Yeah, and I think at least it's good to have this thought again. I think with Urban Us, you are definitely a part of the solution and not a problem, so that's really great to hear. Thank you so much for these insights, we are gonna move on to the next part of the interview now, these are the firerounds questions, we are gonna ask you a couple of really short questions. Please just answer the first thing that comes to your mind. So if you are ready, we are getting started.
What is your morning coffee order?
Shaun 43:07:
Oh, usually nitro cold brew.. it's California, so hot coffee is not really an option.
Liz 43:11
Alright, and if you could solve one problem in the world, what could it be?
Shaun 43:19
Oef, one problem.. Wow, I mean I have to say, instant solve, climate, for sure.
Lieke 43:36
Could you name three trades that make a successful GP?
Shuan 43:43
I think, you know, sort of fund emphasis is really useful, you know, understanding that. You know, fund is doing the world we generally going along for the right as investors, I think understanding what LPs are trying to solve for, you know, I think we have been not so good at that, we spend a lot of time with founders but really not think as much what LPs are trying to achieve. And then I think it's just discipline. I think it's very easy to get FOMO and worry about what the other people are doing. There are a lot of temptations to prevent what you learn because this time is different, so i think discipline is probably a third good attitude.
Liz 44:55
Okay finally, what book are you currently reading?
Shaun 45:00
I'm just finishing <Surely you're Joking, Mr. Feynman>. So Feynman did work on the Manhattan project in the US and became a very famous physics lecturer. And I highly recommend it, it's really interesting.
Liz 45:33
So <Surely You're Joking>?
Shaun 45:44
I think, let me just double check. It's <Surely you're Joking, Mr. Feynman>
Liz 45:40
<Surely you're Joking, Mr. Feynman>, alright.
Shaun 45:46
It says, I mean, it's a biography, but it's written in a name sort of a... He talks a little bit about physics, but he mostly talks about his life which is wild. He loves going to Las Vegas, he joined the summer school in Rio, in the 60th like...
Liz 46:00
Alright, don't tell anymore, you are ruining the surprise.
Shaun 46:04
Okay, no, that's like, you know, two out of a bunch of chapters
Liz 46:10
Alright, perfect. Thanks Shaun. Just for the last part, and please if we can just...just tell me if you think the following topics are overrated or underrated? So I'm gonna start off, asking, what do you think about Twitter?
Shaun 46:34
Probably underrated.
Liz 46:35
Perfect, and self-driving cars?
Shaun 46:36
Underrated
Liz 46:38
Avocados?
Shaun 46:39
That's not very... You can't have avocados on this list, underrated.
Liz 46:48
What about Bill Gates?
Shaun 46:50
Overrated.
Liz 46:52
And cryptocurrency?
Shaun 46:57
Overrated.
Liz 47:01
Okay, what about the Netflix documentary Seaspiracy?
Shaun 47:08
Oh, I didn't see that yet.
Liz 47:11
Alright, we will take a pause then, finally, Shaun. what about one wheeling?
Shaun 47:15
Underrated for sure.
Lieke 47:19
Excellent
Liz 47:20
Excellent. That wraps up today's conversation, thank you so much for your time Shaun.
Shaun 47:26
Sure
Liz 47:26
So many interesting insights, I feel like we are just scratching the surface of things but we really enjoyed speaking with you and thank you so much for your time.
Shaun 47:36
Thank you, thank you for doing this.
Lieke 47:38
Thank you Shaun.