Interview with Unfiltered TV: Continuing a family legacy - investing in high growth businesses

Click here to watch the interview at Unfiltered, posted 18 January 2019

The following interview was done in September of 2018 and posted publicly on January 2019. It may be of help to entrepreneurs seeking to understand the mindset of early stage high growth investors.

Key takeouts from the interview:

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• On selling too early: "Bad investing is not just about choosing companies which are bad performers, bad investing is also about selling perfectly good companies for no good reason at all. Just because they've gone up in price you think, I'll take some money off the table. It's not necessarily a smart thing to do."
• On approaching investors: "Cold calling is tough. Sending someone an email, it gets lost in the ether. People will do that anyway, but you'd be surprised how many people do that. So think about who you know in common and use tools like LinkedIn to try and use that as an icebreaker to find people in common, who could potentially foreshadow your approach."
• On raising capital: "Always try and grab a little bit more than you think you'll need. You want to make sure that you've always got enough cash to achieve the thing that you said that you were going to do, and a little bit more because there's always a pivot, there's always a barrier, there's always a headache or a drama."
• On simplifying complexity: "One of the things that I absolutely love about a founder or a entrepreneur, is the understanding of the clarity of their vision. That they are able to espouse what their company does in a very short and succinct fashion. And so, being able to take a very complicated idea and reducing it down to something as simple as a tweet -- 140 characters or a very short sentence."
• On failing fast: "You don't want to waste a lot of time and money on something that's not going to work, or worse, struggles along until you finally go back. So, someone who struggles along desperately trying to make a lemon succeed, and they keep raising capital... but in the end after five years, no, it's not going to work out - that's a bad failure."
• On monopoly profits: "I'll never want to invest in a company that just competes on price. I want to invest in companies that provide a meaningful improvement in the way in which people can do business, and that they have a moat around their price. People are happy to pay their price because they get such a great experience."
• On board roles for investors: "In some of our investments we have said, "We want to have the information flow, we want to get the best information, which is the board packs, but we don't have to be a director, we're just happy to have observation rights." And that's been quite a successful tool for us in the sense as an investor. 
• On founder dilution: "So, a good investor will want to see their founders retain as much of their shares as possible, because you want to have that skin in the game. Ways in which an investor can help protect against founder dilution, whether it's by mechanisms that prevent or lessen the rate for founders being diluted, or whether founders can earn more options to compensate for the dilution that's occurred previously, those are things which founders should be thinking closely about. 
• On New Zealand's investment landscape: "If I think about where we were in 2010, it was all angel, but now you've actually got some high net worth families and funds made up of families who've had exits from companies. Think about Charlie's Orange Juice, and Trademe, Diligent, Pushpay. There's some great stories out there, and that that capital is now being recycled into new ventures." 
• On success: "Of course everyone should be focused on how you can improve your own life, and have the best possible life that you can. But I would measure my success in the future based on how much I could help others, so being more philanthropic, being able to invest in things which do great things to help people."
• Million dollar advice: "Learn to solve someone else's problems, learn how to make other people happy, and you'll find that that's actually a great solution, not just for business, but also for a great personal life too."