The Conviction Punch with Eli Blee-Goldman(!)
Jake & JZ · Jake Knapp and John Zeratsky
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Show Notes
A special chance to meet Eli, the third founder of Character, and learn about the inner workings of venture capital. This week on episode 6 of Jake & JZ we talked about:
- How Jake got to ride in the very first Waymo (when it was just a prototype on the Google campus)
- Jake’s rollercoaster of emotion meeting Eli
- Eli’s winding path to VC (it led through Botswana!), his famously good intuition, and “Eli-isms”
- Phaidra: Why we invested, how we work with the team, and the real value of a startup board member
- Why we use blinded scorecards to make investment decisions
- Jake’s annotated copy of the viral MrBeast production memo (download it here!)
- The importance of starting at the end
- And much more
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💸 Learn more about our seed fund Character Capital
Chapters
0:00 Jake got to ride in the very first Waymo
3:35 Jake & JZ’s impressions of Waymo in San Francisco
7:55 Welcoming our cofounder Eli Blee-Goldman to the show!
8:15 Jake’s rollercoaster of emotion meeting Eli
10:35 Eli’s winding path to VC (it led through Botswana!)
13:35 How Eli developed his famously good intuition
15:40 How Eli got his first job in VC
20:20 Showing up and putting in the work
21:50 A fine Eli-ism: The Conviction Punch!
26:05 The mismatch between founders and VCs
30:40 Why Eli got excited about Phaidra
34:00 Wait, what does Phaidra do, anyway?
36:15 Why we use blinded scorecards to make investment decisions
39:30 How Design Sprints make startups more capital efficient
42:15 The role of board members at an early-stage startup
47:40 Why Eli decided to start Character Capital
50:25 The viral MrBeast production memo
52:05 “This is like Sun Tzu, it’s like the Art of War”
52:45 Jake walks through his annotated version of the MrBeast memo
57:05 Start at the end: Choosing the title and thumbnail BEFORE making the video
59:55 Seth Godin: “Marketing is how we create the conditions for people to find what they are looking for”
1:00:50 MrBeast and Lightning Demos
1:03:00 Clickbait headlines and the feeling of success