Investor Stories 438. The Deals That Got Away: LinkedIn, Snowflake, and Zeitview (Jiang, Schuler, Rizik)

This episode of TFR is brought to you by Ramp, the spend management platform we use here at TFR. They're offering listeners a $150 just to take a demo. We've never had an offer quite like this. Claim your $150 before this offer is gone at our partner link, ramp.com/partner/tfr. And this episode of TFR is brought to you by the American Arbitration Association, where smart startups and investors turn to for fast, efficient, and cost effective dispute resolution. Visit adr.org/tfr to learn more. Welcome to the podcast about venture capital, where investors and founders alike can learn how VCs make decisions and reach conviction. Your host is Nick Moran, and this is the full ratchet. Welcome Welcome back to TFR. On today's special segment, we ask guests to discuss their anti portfolio, a start up investment that they passed on. Here's the segment called why I passed. On today's special segment, we have Kevin Jang of Mangusta Capital. Kevin, can you tell us a story about a startup that you passed on? Absolutely. Well, it's a company that I still remain very excited about today. And so, you know, it's it's a company that and a founder that I have a lot of respect for. It's a company called Zeatview, z e I t v I e w. And at the time, at SoftBank, it was unfortunately too early stage for us to invest in. But now we are continuing to stay in touch with the company. I still remain really excited. And essentially what they do is they are providing visual AI as well as drone image capture to be able to help asset and infrastructure owners be able to maintain and capture data on their major assets, whether it's wind turbines, solar panels, other commercial real estate. It's a really interesting business, especially in this era of using AI applications to be able to drive value for large industry incumbents. Because as you can imagine, manual collection of this data and analysis of this data is extremely dangerous as well as time intensive. And so it's one of the companies that I'm really sad we passed on at SoftBank, but I'm excited to continue to find ways to collaborate with and hopefully find a way to invest in in the near future. On today's special segment, we have Barry Schueller of DFJ Growth. Barry, can you tell us a story about a startup that you passed on? Oh, gosh. Yes. Early, I think, and it was our first or second fund, we had the opportunity to do LinkedIn pre revenue, and and I think the valuation was about a billion, which was to us, we're like, we wanna exit at a billion, not and and, and we really tortured ourself about about about doing doing that deal, And and in the end, we just couldn't get around not seeing any revenue signal, even though the ad model, you know, that was being developed by Facebook was applicable, …