20VC: How To Design Investment Decision Making That Allows For Outliers, Why Personal Voice Computing Is The Next Big Platform & The Challenges That Could Prevent It with David Beisel, Founding Partner @ NextView Ventures

David Beisel is a co-founder and Partner at NextView Ventures, one of the East Coast's leading early stage funds with their recent $50m seed fund being announced just this month. David was most recently a Vice President at Venrock and previously a Principal at Masthead Venture Partners. Prior to becoming a venture capitalist, David co-founded Sombasa Media, an e-mail marketing company best known for its flagship product BargainDog. Sombasa was successfully acquired by About.com where David served as Vice President of Marketing.   In Today’s Episode You Will Learn: 1.) How David made his way into the world of early stage venture and came to co-found NextView? 2.) How did Nextview design an investment decision-making process that allows for outliers to get through? How does this change with the decision for follow on investment? 3.) Why should firms write investment memos for every investment, regardless of stage and sector? How can firms implement a voting process that is both rigourous yet innovative? 4.) Why is David so excited by the voice computing space? With incumbents like Google and Amazon dominating, where is the opportunity for startups to play? Why does David believe that voice is the most natural user interface possible? 5.) Why does David believe distribution is one of the biggest challenges facing startups today? What does David look for in founders that suggest inherent knowledge of marketing and distribution prowess? Items Mentioned In Today’s Show: David’s Fave Book: Look Homeward, Angel David’s Fave Blog: Gotham Voices, Hearing Voices David’s Most Recent Investment: Skyways As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and David on Twitter here! Likewise, you can follow Harry on Snapchat here for mojito madness and all things 20VC. Pendo delivers the only complete platform that helps companies create great products. The Pendo Product Experience Platform enables product teams to understand product usage, collect user feedback, measure NPS, assist users, and promote new features in-app - all without requiring any engineering resources. This unique combination of capabilities helps companies improve customer satisfaction, reduce churn, and increase revenue. Pendo is the proven choice of Salesforce, Cisco, Optimizely Citrix, BMC and many more leading companies. Start a free trial at http://go.pendo.io/harry Treehouse is an online school where you can learn how to build websites and apps. Their course library has thousands of hours of content, where you can learn all sorts of topics, including Javascript, iOS, Android and more.  With high-quality video instruction from real industry experts teaching you all you need to know, and quizzes and code challenges keep you engaged and on track. Learn on your own schedule and go from beginner to pro. Go to teamtreehouse.com to start your free trial.