ROBERT PECK, CFA ‒ NYA MEMBER SPOTLIGHT
After joining New York Angels 18 months ago, Bob Peck has made a significant impact as both an active investor and leader of NYA Marketing. Bob offers his deep expertise in M&A, IPOs, and equity valuation, drawing on 35 years of experience in technology investment banking and research on Wall Street. In this interview, Bob shares meeting with Jack Ma in 2003 during Alibaba’s early days. Bob’s experiences with the founders of Alibaba, Google, Amazon, Snapchat and others make him an invaluable investor and mentor. Read more about his first meeting with Jack Ma, why choosing investors is like choosing a marriage partner, and how his interests in astrophysics helped him see that TAMs can expand like the constant expansion of the universe.
How did you first meet New York Angels, and why did you decide to join?
I joined New York Angels about 18 months ago. I was really looking to start investing with private tech companies. Particularly, I wanted to get to the seed stage, and I had heard tremendous things about New York Angels, particularly its members, procedures, and being a very professional organization.
Looking through the current members and seeing their expertise and backgrounds, I realized I could learn a tremendous amount from them, and I could also see how valuable they would be to founders that we invest in.
What has been your most memorable experience as a New York Angel so far?
New York Angels sees a lot of pitches, and for companies I am interested in, I want to be prepared. One week we had a founder pitching, and I did not have enough time to prep and do the homework before the presentations the way I wanted to.
As this person came up to the podium, I recognized the voice, and I immediately looked up. It turned out to be a founder of a company that I worked with over 15 years ago. He was a tremendous entrepreneur. I immediately perked up to hear what he was saying about his new company. As you can imagine, I immediately jumped at the chance to back his new company. It was great to reunite with an old friend and successful entrepreneur.
What do you look for when you are investing in a company?
I look for a couple things, but the most important is the founder. Do they have a vision? Do they have a unique product? Do they have something that has competitive moats? Are they going after a sizeable TAM?
The reason why the founder, to me, is so important is that it is not a straight line from founding a company to ultimate success in the end. There are a lot of ups and downs along the way. Can this founder adapt as the market changes, as the information changes, and keep the product and company on the right track and adapting with the markets?
What do founders appreciate most about working with you?
I have had a long history of working with founders, starting way back in the dot-com era. I worked with founders such as Evan Spiegel at Snapchat, Larry Page and Sergey Brin at Google, Jeff Bezos at Amazon, and Jack Ma at Alibaba. I have seen what they have gone through from the early founding of the company to the success they have achieved today.
Founders like to tap into some of my learnings and expertise from my experience. I can be particularly helpful with introductions to help their business grow faster given the Rolodex of contacts over the last 35 years of my life on Wall Street.
What is the difference between companies that you see at Screening versus those who make it through to Due Diligence?
In Screening, you have to be able to succinctly tell the investors what your product is, why it is so unique, and why it has such a huge opportunity against a large TAM. When you hit those check marks, investors become interested in what you can build and how big it can ultimately be. That leads you to Due Diligence, where you really start diving into the nitty-gritty of some of the questions around the product and the opportunity.
What advice would you give founders starting to fundraise?
Capital is fungible. As you think about who you are taking capital from, it is a little bit like dating versus marriage. You want to pick a partner that’s going to be there for you in the long haul, who can help you when things are not as rosy as they are right now when you do run into trouble. You would also like this partner to be able to help you with the business, whether it is through key introductions or key insights based on past history. You’re looking for a long-term partner, not just quick capital.
What advice would you give to early-stage investors who are considering joining New York Angels?
Do your diligence. Ask around the ecosystem about New York Angels. That is what I did, and I was so impressed by the members and the professionalism of the organization. Look at the angels on the website. Look at their backgrounds. What has attracted these very successful people to New York Angels versus other angel groups? I think you will see what I learned was that there is a tremendous amount of resources here. Not only will you be able to learn from the other angels and the processes, but your founders and your investments will also be able to benefit from the vast expertise that New York Angels brings.
When you look at your past investments, what is most critical for founders to deliver a successful exit?
To secure a successful exit, you need to understand 1) your product differentiation from other products out there, 2) the TAM you are pursuing, and 3) your go-to-market strategy. But it’s never a straight line to that exit, so the key to success is the ability to pivot along the way, adapt with the market forces you’re seeing, and ultimately realize that where your end goal maybe originally was has perhaps changed.
What expertise do you bring to New York Angels?
I think the expertise I bring to New York Angels is my 35 years on Wall Street dealing with finance, particularly in the tech sector, working with young companies that were just coming out of concept stages to very, very large companies like Google, Amazon, and Alibaba today. I have seen a lot in those 35 years: the problems these companies ran into, how they pivoted their product along the way, how they adapted to the changing climate. I think having some of that history and those learnings can be helpful for founders as they build their companies.
Can you share one story from your career that stands out?
When I was covering eBay back in 2003. I received a call from a company I had not heard of, from a person named Jack Ma at a company called Alibaba in China. At the time, eBay was the preeminent force in China. It had acquired the number one player there, EachNet. This young startup, Alibaba, wanted to try to take eBay down and win China.
I happened to be going to China a month or two later, so I stopped in Hangzhou to meet with Jack Ma and Joe Tsai. They told me about their vision of why they were going to take eBay down, how they could do it, how the market was different from what eBay understood, and that it would take some time, but they thought they could do it.
Since then, history has been written. They were tremendously successful in doing exactly that and expanding the business beyond that core. It was a tremendous ride for me to be able to sit next to such a visionary entrepreneur changing a huge market.
What is one little-known fact about you that has contributed to your success?
One little-known fact about me is that I’m an astrophysics and cosmos nerd. I love the whole intrigue, mystery and splendor of the cosmos. It has helped me in my career because I learned early that not only is the cosmos vast, but it is expanding. The landscape is changing. Not only are objects moving within what we can see, but the whole universe itself is expanding. That took me back to my thinking on internet companies as I was covering them: the near-term TAM we see may be the near-term TAM, but is it expanding? Are new opportunities coming down the line? Will the roadmap be a lot bigger and longer than we can see in the initial stages, and how does it develop and grow? That expansion of the TAM and the company is very analogous to the expansion of the universe.
