Speaking store with Twitter’s latest head of corp dev — and now VC — Seksom Suriyapa – TechCrunch

Seksom Suriyapa was seemingly destined to land at a enterprise agency. A Stanford Regulation graduate, he labored at two blue-chip funding banks earlier than becoming a member of the cybersecurity firm McAfee as a senior corp dev worker, later logging six years on the human sources software program firm SuccessFactors and, in 2018, touchdown at Twitter, the place he headed up its 12-person company growth crew till June.

The larger shock is that Suriyapa — who simply joined the L.A.-based enterprise agency Upfront Ventures — didn’t make the leap sooner. “The catalyst was discovering a agency that felt like the precise proper match for me,” says Suriyapa.

We talked earlier in the present day with Suriyapa — who lives and can stay within the Bay Space — about his new function at Upfront, the place he might be main its increasing growth-stage follow with agency founder Yves Sisteron.

He additionally make clear how Twitter — which has been on a bit of shopping for spree — thinks about acquisitions today. Our chat has been edited flippantly for size.

TC: How did you wind up becoming a member of Upfront?

SS: [Longtime partner] Mark Suster and I had been launched via a mutual enterprise acquaintance within the enterprise world, and I received to know him over a time frame and actually got here to seek out him to be a exceptional particular person. He’s considerate concerning the enterprise itself, he’s an unimaginable model builder. I feel you can argue that [Upfront] put L.A. on the enterprise map.

TC: It was additionally, for a very long time, an early-stage agency, however now it has a ‘barbell’ technique. Is your new job to verify it could actually preserve its stake in its portfolio corporations as they develop? Are you able to store exterior of that portfolio?

SS: The mission for me might be supporting the very best of Upfront’s hundred-plus present portfolio corporations which can be poised to scale, and in addition to put money into corporations not foreign money on the platform, and I anticipate [the latter] will occur increasingly more over time.

TC: Twitter was much more lively on the corp dev entrance in the course of the years whenever you had been there. Why?

SS: When i joined in 2018, Jack Dorsey had been CEO for about three years, and actually his focus was on the core mission of driving the general public dialog, and in doing that, Twitter shrunk itself out of plenty of companies and [shrunk] individuals smart as nicely.

TC: I bear in mind it laid individuals off in 2016.

SS: And one of many offshoots of that was means much less in the way in which of newer merchandise, so there have been no new acquisitions within the three years previous to me becoming a member of, and that muscle atrophies for those who don’t train it. So [ahead of me] Jack had remodeled the administration crew, which had been, comparatively talking, a revolving door of executives till that time, and I used to be introduced in with a particular mandate of reviving a company growth follow that had been quiet for a couple of years. I’d identified [CFO] Ned Segal when he was a banker at Goldman Sachs and [while] I used to be at SuccessFactors, so once I heard concerning the function via the grapevine, I reached out.

TC: And Twitter begins purchasing, shopping for up the information reader service Scroll, the e-newsletter platform Revue. Have been these choices coming down from the highest or vice versa?

SS: One of the best ways to explain it could be that it was product-need pushed. The corporate had a couple of totally different targets. One was to diversify Twitter from its dependency on being an ad-driven enterprise. One thing like 80{69439eabc38bbe67fb47fc503d1b0f790fcef507f9cafca8a4ef4fbfe163a7c5} of income comes from advertisements.

Second, there’s an unimaginable have to ramp up its machine studying and synthetic intelligence as an organization. In the event you’re searching for toxicity in dialog, it’s not scalable to rent tens of hundreds of individuals to do this. You want machine studying to seek out it. Twitter carried out nicely can be capable of present you the conversations which can be most fascinating to you, and to do this, it has to take indicators from what you comply with and spend time studying and what you work together with, and that, at its core, is ML AI.  [Relatedly] Jack has a imaginative and prescient that anyone who tweets in no matter their native tongue is ought to be capable of speak with another person of their native tongue as a part of a world dialog, and to do this, you want [natural language processing] strategies galore.

TC: There’s additionally this concentrate on client functions.

SS: That’s the third goal. What are the instruments that followers and creators can use in dialog with one another? So [Twitter] added audio [via its Clubhouse rival Spaces]. We purchased Revue, which is a competitor to Substack. So there’s plenty of innovation occurring round the kind of content material that somebody ought to count on to see or create on Twitter.

TC: Would you describe these acquisitions as proactive or reactive?

SS: From the surface it could appear reactive, however the actuality is we’d been pondering loads about one thing like Areas even earlier than Clubhouse took off. I feel what’s noticeable to me is [Spaces] is among the first instances you’ve seen an organization like Twitter construct up a functionality and a brand new product space that’s going head-to-head going in opposition to an organization that’s centered solely on that realm, and it’s aggressive from day one. Twitter beat Clubhouse in [offering an] Android model as a result of it poured sources into it, and I’d argue that plenty of the mechanics of Twitter and the truth that creators are on Twitter places it in an superior spot to win this section.

Twitter additionally simply has an enormous quantity of experience to find toxicity and stuff you wish to be cautious of whenever you’re a social media play, and an organization of Clubhouse’s dimension, a minimum of in its preliminary days, may have a tough time getting there.

TC: Twitter has so many pursuits, together with round cryptocurrencies and decentralization. 

SS: By way of priorities at Twitter,  loads is underneath wraps when it comes to the applied sciences that we count on [will rise up over] the following 5  to 10 years, however [a lot of thought is being given to] the affect of cryptocurrency and the underlying protocols round it and the way Twitter participates in a trustless, permissionless [world] the place there’s a decentralized web that may defend individuals’s privateness and permit individuals to not fear the place their content material is saved. Individuals consider Twitter as a client app however there’s wonderful and appreciable range underneath the hood.

TC: Do you assume due to the present regulatory setting that it has a greater shot at working with corporations and tasks that may have gotten snapped up by Fb and Google?

By way of the regulatory setting, the fact is that even for those who take the Facebooks and Googles out of the equation, there are acquirers which can be aggressive that might step up and purchase issues, so it’s just a little short-sighted to think about simply these two. However even after they had been lively, we had been profitable [deals]. Plenty of the businesses we acquired self-selected to be at Twitter as a result of they like what it stands for, they like the way in which that Jack Dorsey leads the group, and so they imagine within the stands that he takes and the positions that he and his management espouse.

TC: You’re now representing a really totally different model. How will your work at Twitter aid you compete for offers on behalf of Upfront?

SS: I’ve this community of unimaginable entrepreneurs around the globe due to corporations throughout my profession that I’ve helped purchase or tried to amass or who’re working companies; I additionally [have relationships with] VCs at totally different levels who actively spot companies around the globe [and introduce them to corp dev teams]. You may also know that Twitter has a range and inclusion program the place they intend to have 25{69439eabc38bbe67fb47fc503d1b0f790fcef507f9cafca8a4ef4fbfe163a7c5} of management be various over the following a number of years, so my crew was typically concerned to find the very best methods to seek out various targets to purchase. I additionally led a sequence of LP investments into newly rising funds, some LatinX-founded, some women-founded, some Black-founded, some that had been various from a geographic standpoint which can be scouting corporations in faraway locations . . .

TC: Does Twitter additionally make direct investments?

SS: We did direct investments however [backing fund managers] is a extra leveraged method. Most of them are seed funds and so they’ll in flip put money into 30 to 60 corporations every. However sure, I scouted corporations in faraway locations, together with [India’s] ShareChat the place I served on the board for 2 years. [Editor’s note: TechCrunch reported earlier this year that Twitter explored buying ShareChat at an earlier point; the company has since raised numerous rounds of funding and was most recently valued by its investors at nearly $3 billion.]

TC: You could have plenty of relationships, however it could nonetheless appear actually onerous to compete for growth-stage offers when so many different outfits at the moment are investing there, too. How do you intend to compete?

SS: I’ll clearly be drawing on these networks to seek out offers. I’ll be investing in sectors the place Upfront has already invested in, however initially I’ll be double-clicking that ihave a powerful curiosity in, together with round creator economic system ecosystem, as a result of I did o a lot of that at Twitter. And w3b 3.0, ow this permissionless comes togerh, edge computing ML AI and shared date that goes throughout quite a lot of disciplines that i’ve workedin, i believe one in every of robust factors that can cinterdiscplianry areas, additionally in sustainability are however I gained’t child myself. You compete by studying what your worth proposition is. At Twitter, my technique was profitable on velocity, understanding individuals earlier, and [underscoring] Twitter’s worth proposition [to close deals]. I can’t speak about my [VC] technique with out having applied but; I’ll have to determine what’s most fascinating to entrepreneurs that the megafunds don’t supply.