Chris Paik - Venture Investing Frameworks - [Invest Like the Best, EP.338]

My guest today is Chris Paik, who is a General Partner at early-stage venture firm, Pace Capital. Before Pace, Chris spent eight years building and investing alongside last week’s guest, Josh Kushner, at his firm Thrive Capital. During that time, he sat on the board of Twitch. Our conversation explores Chris’ frameworks for investing, from atomic value swaps to business model product fit and the seven deadly sins. We also discuss different consumer trends like the rise of virtual YouTubers, Apple’s Vision Pro, and why everyone graduates off YouTube. Please enjoy my conversation with Chris Paik. Founders Podcast Founders Episode 136 - Estee Lauder Founders Episode 288 - Ralph Lauren For the full show notes, transcript, and links to mentioned content, check out the episode page here ----- This episode is brought to you by Tegus, the modern research platform for leading investors. Stretch your research budget with flexible expert calls you can trust. At a fraction of the cost of traditional expert networks, Tegus customers pay only what an expert charges – with zero markups and no confusing call credits – netting an average 70% savings. Don’t want to conduct a full hour call? Tegus offers the ability to schedule 30-minutes, an offer you won’t find anywhere else. And they don’t stop there. With white-glove custom sourcing for every project and robust compliance measures, including a dedicated 50+ analyst team that vets every call transcript, Tegus ensures your privacy and protection. As the industry innovator for qualitative insights, Tegus helps you find the right experts you need at a quality and speed that can’t be matched. For a limited time, as a listener, you can trial Tegus for free by visiting tegus.co/patrick. ----- Invest Like the Best is a property of Colossus, LLC. For more episodes of Invest Like the Best, visit joincolossus.com/episodes. Past guests include Tobi Lutke, Kevin Systrom, Mike Krieger, John Collison, Kat Cole, Marc Andreessen, Matthew Ball, Bill Gurley, Anu Hariharan, Ben Thompson, and many more. Stay up to date on all our podcasts by signing up to Colossus Weekly, our quick dive every Sunday highlighting the top business and investing concepts from our podcasts and the best of what we read that week. Sign up here. Follow us on Twitter: @patrick_oshag | @JoinColossus Show Notes (00:03:00) - (First question) - The history of humanity as a data storage and transfer problem and how that relates to new kinds of computer interfaces (00:14:47) - Investing strategies; knowing when to invest in new technology (00:16:39) - Assessing the gray areas of a potential investment (00:22:13) - CodeMiko and VTubing (00:32:51) - An explanation of atomic value swap (00:39:55) - The 7 deadly sins and the degrees to which each sin is monetizable (00:45:05) - Evaluating the people behind new technologies (00:50:03) - The Reddit Revolt - the current changes happening at Reddit (00:53:09) - Business model alignment; the steps to take when determining a business’ value capture mechanism (01:03:52) - The investment decision that Chris is most proud of (01:08:14) - The consumer investing landscape today (01:11:19) - Chris’ methods for finding new content, technology and potential investments on the internet (01:14:06) - The fundamentals of value creation (01:15:06) - The dark side of tech, how can it be more than just friction reduction (01:17:22) - Chris’ opinion on why so many innovations come from the US (01:20:37) - Defining market places and how to start and grow a successful one (01:23:23) - Chris’ thoughts on opportunities with bad business models (01:26:19) - A breakdown of Chris’ analogy “Sculptors versus painters” (01:29:34) - The kindest thing that anyone has ever done for Chris