Roy Bahat

This episode finds Maggie Kenefake, Venture Partner with Royal Street Ventures, continuing her series of talks with Roy Bahat, a Partner at Bloomberg Beta. The company, Roy said, is a small firm that invests only for financial return, not as a strategic investor. They’re exclusively focused on the future of work and everything relating to modern business.

Work ain’t what it used to be—just ask the millions of Americans who are part of the “Great Resignation.” Venture capitalist and head of Bloomberg Beta, Roy Bahat, is looking to shape work for the better, from new forms of labor organizing to remote-friendly tech.What Could Go Right? is produced by The Progress Network and The Podglomerate.

No founder should be all-consumed with work, and that is why Head of Bloomberg Beta Roy Bahat is no longer a founder. This week Roy joins Gina Trapani and Michael Shane to discuss how workplace boundaries are becoming normalized and why providing VC support in a company’s irrational phase excites him more than a later, safer bet. He also stresses the importance of language in a large and diverse workforce and questions whether metaphors and analogies are useful or alienating.Links:Roy Bahat on TwitterBloomberg Beta#thisisnotadviceJam.ai‘It’s All Just Wild’: Tech Start-Ups Reach a New Peak of Froth - Erin Griffith'My company is not my family': Fed up with long hours, many employees have quietly decided to take it easy at work rather than quit their jobs - Aki Ito

Roy Bahat is the head of Bloomberg Beta - an early-stage venture firm backed by Bloomberg LP that invests in startups creating the future of work. It was the first venture fund to focus on investing in the future of work and in artificial intelligence.

The Agenda 👇* Laetitia spoke with Bloomberg Beta’s Roy Bahat about everything future of work 🎧* My latest column in Sifted is about publicly traded VC firms in Europe* Thumbs up/down for last week* Recently unlocked essays from the European Straits archiveFor the latest episode of the Building Bridges podcast, Laetitia interviewed our friend Roy Bahat, an SF-based venture capitalist with Bloomberg Beta and an inspiring leader on the future of work. Here’s what she wrote about their conversation:For this new episode of the Building Bridges podcast, I’m excited to share my interview with Roy Bahat, who as the Head of Bloomberg Beta has been “obsessed with how we make work—the thing we do with more waking hours than any other—better”. He’s been an inspiration for me at least since I watched this video in which he speaks about two key drivers for workers: “Stability and dignity”.Roy is used to making short, insightful and actionable pieces of content about work, careers, entrepreneurship and personal development. I recommend his series of to-the-point #thisisnotadvice interviews which you can watch on Twitter. They cover a wide range of topics like “Should I mentor someone and, if so, how do I do it?”or “How can I be the type of founders that VCs want to fund?”. But I confess I wanted more time with him. I wanted to hear him in a longer format so he could tell his career story, what it means to be a VC specialised in the future of work and so we’d still have time left to speak about the future of work and how we can prepare for it. I’m so grateful he accepted!As he explains in this podcast, he hadn’t planned to become a VC, let alone one who focuses on the future of work! But after doing tons of reading, talked to thousands of people and given the subject a lot of thought, you could say he’s become quite the expert. (More exactly, he’s reached that level of expertise where you become humble again. It’s a bit like Japanese martial arts: when you reach the highest level, you can wear a white belt again like a beginner!) I simply love how he adresses the most simple yet profound questions. Here’s how he sums it all up neatly on his LinkedIn profile:I've had a messy, hand-wringy career (in non-profit, professional services, city government, big media, video games, academia, day-zero startup, investing), where I was never hired for any job for which I was qualified (including starting a company, where I guess I sort of co-hired myself and was still unqualified). Only later did I realize the one thread that tied it all together -- making work better.In 2013, Bloomberg L.P. gave me the opportunity to turn my obsession with the future of work into my job when we created Bloomberg Beta. I believe the fastest way to make change is to build extraordinary technology companies (and, these days, machine intelligence companies in particular).We talked about a lot of things, including feminism and why it’s important to embrace it. Among the many themes covered were also the skills of the future. How do you make yourself “futureproof” in a fast-changing world? I asked him because in his book Futureproof, NYT journalistKevin Roose thanks Roy profusely for the inspiring conversations he had with him. (Check out this article I wrote about the book.) Here’s Roy’s conclusion:How do we prepare? Most of the past thinking about preparation for the future that I learned growing up what “point preparation”—”here’s what the world’s going to be like: prepare yourself for it” (…) But if you believe that the pace of change is going to be more rapid, then learning is the most essential skill, rapid reinvention… In the tech world, I call this being the CIO of your own life… constantly looking for new tools and trying to integrate them and experiment with them. Another one is setting your own priorities. We don’t learn in school that this is a skill. The third one is the scientific method applied to everything around us. If the world is going to keep changing, scientific method is our best way of understanding how.👉 Listen to Laetitia’s conversation with Roy Bahat in the latest episode of the Building Bridges podcast using the player above 👆 or on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.Normally when we talk about startups and IPOs, it’s in the context of which VC firms have won a big payday after making a bet on a company that grew large enough to go public. In my Sifted column this week, I look at a situation that reverses the roles a bit: VC firms that themselves go public, raising money from public markets and thus giving access to VC performance to a wider swath of investors. While it’s still a relatively rare occurrence, I believe we’ll see it happening more and more, all part of venture capital taking a more central role in the financial services industry.👉 Read more in Startups IPO. Why shouldn’t VCs?😀 Lots of interesting discussions recently over turning traditional companies into tech companies. It’s a topic I’ve covered a lot (see All About Shifting Patterns Across Industries). More recently I was interested in Dealroom’s report about Corporate Innovation in the Entrepreneurial Age and the latest episode of Another Podcast w/ Toni Cowan-Brown & Benedict Evans, about digital transformation 🎧🙂 A while ago I wrote about the opportunities that European founders should pursue in Asia: read Should European Founders Look to the East?, as well as Martin Pasquier’s reaction in Another Round on Expanding in Asia (both unlocked). It turns out one of our portfolio companies, WeMaintain, just applied the playbook: Are Asian markets the secret to European proptech success?😏 Lego is one of the most fascinating companies around—especially from a European perspective! Last year I contributed to covering it with my 11 Notes on Lego. More recently, there were lots of echoes in the media about their move to recycle plastic and turn the legendary bricks into more environmentally-friendly stuff. See Lego's lesson in innovation (Financial Times).😐 I didn’t comment much on the Chinese Communist Party celebrating its 100th anniversary, but you can definitely find many pieces of background history. Here are some that are worth your attention: China’s Leaders – from Mao to now (The Guardian); The Chinese Communist party: 100 years that shook the world (The Guardian); and my own Primer on the Chinese Communist Party (unlocked) 🇨🇳 😒 Andy Jassy has now succeeded Jeff Bezos as Amazon’s CEO. You can read related articles in the Financial Times, the Wall Street Journal, and Bloomberg, as well as my own 11 Notes on Jeff Bezos (unlocked). Also read this illuminating blog by Steve Blank about what happens when the visionary founder passes the baton: Why Tim Cook is Steve Ballmer and Why He Still Has His Job at Apple. 😖 Maybe it’s simply me succumbing to the gloom that accompanies the never-ending COVID-19 pandemic, but I find that the awareness of climate change and its catastrophic consequences has gone up to eleven, and it’s definitely affecting everyone’s morale. Have a look at this in the FT: How to cope with the climate apocalypse. And this, by the ever-gloomier Umair Haque. And this about Europe. 📚 Since the paid version of European Straits has been discontinued, I’m gradually unlocking the entire archive so that everyone can read and share. It’s not systematic in any way, but rather I unlock essays when they’re relevant and I want to quote them either here or on social media.Here are the ones that you can now discover if you weren’t previously a paying subscriber:🇬🇧 Notes on Britain in the Entrepreneurial Age (June 2020) 💰 Notes on Revenue-Based Financing (July 2020) 🇨🇳 A Primer on the Chinese Communist Party (September 2020)🌏 Should European Founders Look to the East? (October 2020) 🇨🇳 Industrial Policy: China Gets It, We Don't (October 2020) 🏗 Why Software Has a Hard Time Eating Construction (October 2020) 🇪🇺 European Tech's Forgotten Stories (November 2020)🌏 Another Round on Expanding in Asia (November 2020) 🗺 Business Strategy at a Small Scale (January 2021)🇮🇳 A Great Writeup About India's Startup Scene (January 2021)  👨🏻‍🦲 11 Notes on Jeff Bezos (February 2021) 🕰 "Be Patient" | A Conversation About Angel Investing w/ Pascal Levy-Garboua (Part 1 & Part 2) (February 2021) Sign up to European Straits if you don’t want to miss the next issues 🤗(Credit: Franz Liszt, Angelus ! Prière Aux Anges Gardiens—extrait du disque Miroirs de Jonas Vitaud, NoMadMusic.)From Munich, Germany 🇩🇪 Nicolas This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit europeanstraits.substack.com

In this episode, we're talking with Roy Bahat, head of Bloomberg Beta, an early stage venture firm backed by Bloomberg LP, focused broadly on the future of work. We're going to dive into how COVID has accelerated that future of work and how some of the trends that we're experimenting with today will continue.

What is podcast about? Podcast missing genres. Signal vs Whatsapp. Giving up on privacy. The Star Wars Radio Broadcast.  What does it mean to believe in something? All jobs are automated. We are all just finger-pushing talkers. Noah's 2 types of belief theory. Thinking by talking.  All this and more from Bloomberg Beta creators Minn Kim and Roy Bahat. Check out #thisisnotadvice for their fine work! --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/bandcast/message

This episode was particularly a fun one to record in that we moved a bit away from our traditional interview format to more of a water-cooler format with Mac Conwell of RareBreed Ventures and Roy Bahat of Bloomberg Beta for a wide-ranging chat about the state of emerging venture capital. As many may now, Mac is using the seldom used 506C provision of Reg D to publicly solicit capital for his new fund (RareBreed VC). While many rolling fund managers use the 506C provision, Mac is not conducting his raise on the AngelList platform. Previously to starting RareBreed, Mac was an investor at the Maryland Technology Development Corporation’s Minority Business Pre-seed Fund, a partnership between TEDCO and Harbor Bank Community Development Corporation to address the needs of minority entrepreneurs in Maryland, who often lack access to Friends and Family rounds. He also has operating experience from his time as co-founder and CEO at Redberry Mobile and of Given. Roy Bahat is the head of Bloomberg Beta, which invests in the main category of the future of work and has a portfolio that includes Slack, Kaggle (acq. By Google), and MasterClass. They occasionally also invest directly into emerging managers to help drive financial performance. Prior to his life as a VC, Bahat founded start-ups, served as a corporate executive at News Corp., and worked in government in the office of New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg. In this episode we discuss the following topics:01:18    The unique structure of RareBreed Ventures03:09    How a Twitter following and new venture software made it possible for Rarebreed to launch a 506(c) structured fund07:00    Roy’s view on investing 16:18    Raising a fund versus raising capital for a company. Is it different?18:45    How the fundraising process helped Mac find his own unique brand. 22:01    Using LP feedback to your advantage23:32    Searching not selling when looking for LPs25:25    Is LP capital really scarce? 26:48    Questions LPs often ask to first time managers29:22    What makes an exceptional GP33:45    Giving up economics to early investors36:40    Is the notion of a GP commit outdated when assessing GP-LP alignment? 42:08    What post-COVID VC will look likeMentioned in this episode:* RareBreed.vc* Bloomberg Beta* Charles Hudson Interview* Elizabeth Yin interview* How LPs should really think about GP commits in Emerging ManagersI’d love to know what you took away from this conversation with Mac and Roy. Follow me @SamirKaji and give me your insights and questions with the hashtag #ventureunlocked. If you’d like to be considered as a guest or have someone you’d like to hear from (GP or LP), drop me a direct message on Twitter.Podcast Production support provided by Agent Bee Agency This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit ventureunlocked.substack.com

Venture capitalists, founders, and others in the tech industry are feeling pretty raw these days. Once admired as upstarts fighting the status quo, they now feel under siege, under attack for the negative things their products do without being appreciated for how they improve our lives. Bloomberg Beta head Roy Bahat, a veteran venture capitalist, joins the Big Technology Podcast for a nuanced conversation about what's going with the tech world, how it's innovation may be connected to its problems, and how it should handle the criticism.

This year, I sat down with Roy Bahat at CogX, a large global technology conference, that this year was completely virtual. Roy and I used this time to reflect on everything that has happened since the start of the pandemic. What many don't know is that a catalyst for the technology industry's response to the crisis in the early days was a WhatsApp group that Roy and I were a part of. We shared what it was like in those early days, how we got involved and what we need to do now to make sure we build a better world on the other side. This is the first ever live tapping of Out of the Crisis. It was recorded on June 9th, 2020.