027: Ex-Lawyer GROWS The Vault to 7 Countries & Counting… The Adventure of Kevin Smith.

Background on Kevin Smith of The Vault:

Kevin Smith is the CEO & Founder of The Vault, a collaborative workspace/innovation hub founded on the principle that people work better together. He's spent the last decade spearheading projects in global business development, startup investment and innovation initiatives. Since founding The Vault in San Francisco in 2013, Kevin has helped in-house companies raise over $200 million. With an eye towards the international, Kevin’s mission is to utilize The Vault to nurture the next generation of world-class startups.

Kevin most recently was a Director at Barclays Global Investors/BlackRock, and previously worked as a lawyer at Davis Polk & Wardwell in Menlo Park. Before law school, Kevin co-founded a management consulting firm, CBSD, in Moscow and worked as a consultant for Levi Strauss & Co. and Xerox.

Time-Stamped Show Notes:

[0:56] 5 yrs ago he left a large company and started an online investment firm.
[1:42] 3 yrs ago he started another company, The Vault. It is a collaborative work-space and innovation hub based in San Francisco. He also has another company named Seedchange, a global platform that seeks early stage companies and standout founders.
[3:04] “It’s impossible to predict the difficulties and the obstacles you have to go through.”
[4:12] Part of the reason for starting The Vault is to support Seedchange.
[4:41] There are 6 people working in Seedchange and 10 people in The Vault.
[4:55] He spends most of his time talking to investors.
[6:26] “We focus a lot on data but the real deciding factor is the leadership quality.”
[7:57] He looks at people integrity and background before investing.
[9:39] When he was a grad student in Berkeley, his friend who was working on a start-up needed help in marketing and sales. He got interested and enjoyed doing it.
[9:59] After he passed his PhD, he got an offer to work in Eastern Europe doing sales and strategy consulting for a company. He ended up going to different Law School in 5 years and started a company in Russia.
[10:42] After Law School, he practiced for a large firm in Silicon Valley.
[13:14] Seedchange started after a lot of beer and late nights of developing ideas in his garage.
[15:18] His friends and former colleagues urged him to start the company and offered to invest.
[16:57] “Ask for advice and get money, ask for money and get an advice.”
[20:48] Their average investment for early stage company is $100,000 and the highest is around $1,000,000-$2,000,000.
[23:36] “The hard part is figuring out why this beautiful baby you brought up into this world is not making money.”
[25:40] There were times when the company will give him a very low salary or nothing at all.
[26:18] In early 2015, his cofounder left the company.
[32:32] The company will expand in Oslow and Korea in September, and other locations in 2018.
[35:55] “A mistake that I see almost every start-up around the world doing is starting with the product rather than starting with the distribution.”

Fabulous 4 Questions:

📖 📚 Favorite Book(s)? A Confederacy of Dunces by John Toole, The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky, I Served the King of England by Bohumil Hrabal, Collapse by Jared Diamond, Outliers: The Story of Success by Malcolm Gladwell, The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals by Michael Pollan, & Memoirs: 1925-1950 by George Kennan.
🙌😎 Favorite Amazon.com purchase? Books (ie – see above).
🌱💸 Favorite Tool that's GROWN your Business? Word of Mouth.
💭💡 BIGGEST Challenge keeping your Business from GROWING? Not having raised funding early enough.