AngelList CEO Avlok Kohli: The Funding Market Today; Last-Mile Delivery; Competing w/ Carta | E1005

Let's not have meetings about meetings, or process about process. None of that shit matters, right? The only purpose for a, a company ... It's just a group of individuals that are coming together to build product for your customers. Any process, anything that gets in the way of that, crush it. If we have too many meetings, cancel the meetings. Like, I'll regularly go cancel all of my meetings on the calendar because all that really matters is that you're shipping products that your customers love. And anything that gets in the way of that and you drag, kill it, crush it, and just focus on speed. (instrumental music plays)

Avlok, I'm so excited for this, my friend. It's been a while since we last had you on the show, but I wanna start today with a little bit of context. So, how did you come to be CEO of AngelList and what was that entry to the role for you?

Yeah. So the background is Naval, who's one of the founders of AngelList, had been an investor in all three of the companies I've started. Uh, so I started one company in 2011, then another in 2014, and then another in 2017. And Naval was an investor in all three. And when I wrapped up the acquisition of the last company, uh, I stepped back, and was effectively gonna just focus on investing. Uh, so a semi-retired life at that point for me, uh, since I wasn't building anything new. Um, and Naval approached me to consider stepping in at AngelList as CEO, uh, as he'd already stepped back, I believe, in late 2018, if I remember correctly. And it was, uh, you know, ori- originally it was a hard, hard decision. But I said, "Hey, may- ... It's probably not the right fit." I was just coming off of the last startup. And as you know, startups are a marathon and it gets quite intense. Uh, but the idea of AngelList and the concept of AngelList just stuck with me, and we kept talking every week, every other week. And six months into it, uh, I fell in love with the, uh, opportunity and officially accepted in mid-July. And, uh, Naval said, "Can you start tomorrow?" And that was it. (laughs) And it's been crazy ever since.

Now before we dive into some of the craziness, I just have to ask about one of the startups you founded. Um, believe it or not, um, you know, last-mile delivery is a, a passion area of mine.

(laughs) Professional.

Um, and so my question to you is, I know Gokul, um, obviously, and you kind of coincided around this, uh, with Fastbite, which was 15-minute delivery. And it was the first 15-minute delivery startup. "What were your single biggest lessons from the Fastbite experience?" was Gokul's question.

So it was act- ... Average delivery time was actually seven minutes, um, even though we billed it as 15. I, I would say, um ... I'll actually share two of the lessons. I think first one is building for yourself will lead to a much higher probability of building something that people love. Because when you're building for yourself, you then just need to believe you can find other people like yourself that are gonna use the product. Uh, and the second one, and the reason I, I wanna add this one, is you wanna think about the variables that you can optimize for the utility function of your product. So, every product, any product you use has some utility function. The utility function could be price, convenience, speed, right? Anything. The customer experience itself. And you wanna think about, what are you optimizing on? Because different products actually have different diminishing returns. And as you think about really fast delivery, uh, you can optimize on the delivery speed, but then sometimes people actually don't want it to be as fast, right? They actually want it to be a little bit slower. And so that was a pretty good lesson for me in terms of how to think about overall product experience. It isn't just about a single variable you wanna optimize on; you wanna optimize on multiple.