Bloomberg Beta

My guest today is my friend, Roy Bahat.

Roy is the head of, I shouldn't have the title here in front of me, the GP of Bloomberg Beta, the CEO of Bloomberg Beta.

Head is what we use informally, but usually

these days I just say I'm a venture capitalist.

He said, okay, fine.

You don't want to do it.

How could you design something that would work for someone like you? And we designed what became Bloomberg Beta.

And the core idea is just be a normal VC.

My guest today is Roy Bahat, one of venture capital's most original thinkers about startups and the future of work.

Roy leads Bloomberg Beta, their early-stage venture fund he launched 13 years ago to back companies making work better for all of us.

Its portfolio includes Replit, Flexport, LaunchDarkly, Masterclass, and Weights & Biases, and so many more.

Before becoming an investor, Roy himself was a founder and CEO.

He's taught at Berkeley for 15 years.

More importantly, he's also built Bloomberg Beta around a radical idea, to treat founders like customers, to see the venture capitalist as the vendor in the relationship, and to put nearly everything the firm believes out in public.

In our conversation, Roy explains why founders should stop asking for permission.

We talk about how to identify just those few unconventional decisions essential to how a company can win.

... uh, and then had to sort of go and, and, and get more investors together and, and rallied with, with, with a brand new lead in the round.

Um, ended up getting Bloomberg Beta as the largest and single investor in the, in the round, and that was sort of like pretty schizophrenic moment where we went from like having to scrape together the rest of the round, and we were out like pitching everybody and getting small allotments in and slowly building up.

And suddenly Bloomberg Beta that had talked about coming in with like 250K calls us and says, "We want in, but we want in for a million." And now we're suddenly like completely oversubscribed, and we have to go back to some others and ask them can they lower the allotment a bit because otherwise-

Mm-hmm

...

Yeah, I mean, we definitely, um, you know, there were a lot of people at the conference who are not ...

Uh, y- o- one of our, one of our advisors, Roy Bahat, uh, he's the head of Bloomberg Beta, he had a nice quote.

He wrote this before the latest conference, but kind of writing about the, the previous conferences and looking ahead to this one, that The Curve is where the people who are really in the tech come together with the people who really aren't.

So, you know, we definitely, if you were to poll, uh, and we had a little ...

Ryan Tsang later had called her the first inventor to believe that Shield AI could succeed in its mission.

In twenty sixteen, she was an investor at the Bloomberg Beta, and she wrote that Shield AI in its very first term sheet, and she had laid out this document of this offer to invest and how to invest all of this stuff.

Shield AI said that she'd been passionate about this mission since they had first talked about it in twenty sixteen, and that it's all coming full circle for Siobhan.

And I'll show you here.

Um, and but I do think it is important to understand the role that she would play, theoretically, with China and Elon in that kind of position, and so I think it's important that we go back and look at who Siobhan actually is because this is not the first time that she's sat inside a company for Elon.

So before Elon, Siobhan was a part of Silicon Valley for a very long time, before they started dating.

She was a venture capitalist at Bloomberg Beta, the venture fund for that Bloomberg had set up, and it was her specialty that machine intelligence and coordinating between venture capitalists and putting together companies was, like, the thing that she was best at.

She was mapping the AI industry before most people even knew that there was one, which is why we're gonna watch this video of Sh- Siobhan.