Scott Sandell | How to last for 100 years in venture capital
Channel: Slush
Date: 2021-11-25

In this episode, we had the pleasure of talking to one of the absolute veterans of venture capital, the Managing General Partner of NEA, Scott Sandell. NEA has been around since the 1970’s, making it one of the oldest VC firms in history. That coupled with Scott’s personal track record and experience makes for a heap of knowledge and insights about investing, venture capital, entrepreneurship, technology and more. We hope you’ll enjoy listening to this as much as we enjoyed making it.

Expect to learn:
How NEA set out to build a company lasting 100 years
How Scott transitioned from being a product manager at Microsoft to venture capital 
How Scott thinks about investment decisions
How could the VC model be innovated?

00:50 Introduction to Scott 
01:30 Introduction to NEA 
02:45 How do you build for longevity in VC? 
05:20 Transition from Microsoft to NEA
09:05 Scott’s favourite investments 
14:45 How Scott makes investment decisions
16:50 Have the basic ingredients for success changed?
21:52 Recent investments that have made Scott excited
26:20 How much has the tech world changed since Scott’s time at Microsoft?
27:50 Innovating the VC model 
30:40 Is the VC model wasteful?
33:20 Allocation of capital to purpose-driven companies

Find out more about Capchase on capchase.com/slush