Rebecca Lynn - Finding Your Customers - [Invest Like the Best, EP.309] - Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy

My guest this week is Rebecca Lynn. Rebecca co-founded early-stage investor Canvas Ventures in 2013 and is regularly featured as one of the best VCs in the market. She has deep positioning and go-to-market experience, which she honed during her time at Procter & Gamble, and that's the focus of our discussion. We cover the details of great marketing, why you should say no to customers, and how she has built Canvas. Please enjoy my discussion with Rebecca Lynn.

For the full show notes, transcript, and links to mentioned content, check out the episode page here.

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Invest Like the Best is a property of Colossus, LLC. For more episodes of Invest Like the Best, visit joincolossus.com/episodes.

Past guests include Tobi Lutke, Kevin Systrom, Mike Krieger, John Collison, Kat Cole, Marc Andreessen, Matthew Ball, Bill Gurley, Anu Hariharan, Ben Thompson, and many more.

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Show Notes

00:02:37 - [First question] - What she’d do a great job teaching if she could teach a singular 401 level course

00:05:20 - Defining what the umbrella concept is

00:06:10 - What about her career at P&G applies most to the kinds of companies she spends her time with now

00:12:06 - What types of questions she asks to help someone building a product understand their marketing angle

00:15:34 - The top three things people do wrong when running a survey in tactics or strategy

00:19:33 - Categories of questions where surveys are always helpful and effective

00:21:06 - What the Go-To-Market Council is and what it does

00:28:21 - The ways that most funnels are commonly broken

00:31:17 - Defining great positioning and what it accomplishes

00:33:36 - How her knowledge and ideas most impacted the way she built Canvas

00:35:04 - Lessons learned about the world of digital health and the quantified self

00:39:15 - The base level attributes that most indicate investment potential when she’s investing in a company

00:42:32 - The shifts in the world that most have her attention today

00:46:10 - What has her worried systemically about venture investing

00:49:37 - The kindest thing anyone has ever done for her