10: Brad Jones, Founding Partner at RedPoint Ventures

Square One: Conversations with the Best in Business

Product. Market. Team. Though a significant amount has changed in venture over the past two decades, the focus on these three variables has still remained largely the same when it comes to investing. This week, I chatted with one of the most successful venture capitalists of the past two decades, Brad Jones, Founding Partner at Redpoint. Brad co-founded Redpoint in 1999 after serving as a General Partner at Brentwood Venture Capital. Over the past 20 years, Brad has served on the boards of over 10 public companies and his team has invested in household names like Stripe, Twilio, Zendesk, Fortinet, Heroku and early on, Netflix. Brad and I spoke for about an hour and covered a number of topics in this one; we talked about startups, the state of venture capital and where we’re headed. Some of my favorite moments included: why less companies going public is bad for retail investors and broader society (17:20), his observations on how starting and scaling a startup has changed over the past 15 years (21:44), what he thinks of the state of culture in the technology community today given the recent turmoil at Uber (25:46) and ideas for how local and national government can help startups (43:21).