Venture Unlocked: The playbook for venture capital managers

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Base10's TJ Nahigian on using automation and research within the firm as a competitive advantage, ways to optimize outcomes in the current investing climate, and thoughts on crossover investing. Nov 09, 2021

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Follow me @samirkaji for my thoughts on the venture market, with a focus on the continued evolution of the VC landscape.Our guest today is TJ Nahigian, co-founder and managing partner of Base10 Partners, a SF based early stage firm focusing on investing in companies that help automate the real economy. They currently manage over $600MM in AUM and have invested in companies such as Figma, Notion, Brex, and Plaid.Prior to Base10, TJ was the founder and CEO of Jobr, which he led to a successful acquisition by Monster in 2016. Before that, he worked in investment roles at Accel, Summit Partners, and Coatue, where helped launch the private investing efforts of the firm. A word from our sponsor:Invest in innovation. Allocate allows investors to access top-tier private funds and co-investment opportunities within the technology sector.Despite the enormous growth of the private markets and the rapid increase of retail demand for private alternatives, investing in the highest quality private assets within the innovation sector still remains limited to institutions and ultra-connected high net worth individuals.With Allocate, wealth advisors, banks, family offices, and other qualified investors can have a streamlined way to responsibly invest with confidence.Go to allocate.co to find out more and please sign up to the waitlist to learn more and get early access to the platform.In this episode we discuss:01:17 TJ’s path to VC03:16 How past experiences at Accel, Coatue, and Jobr contributed to his view on the type of firm he wanted Base10 to be. 06:47 An inside view on the early conversations he and his partner Ade had to chart a common vision. 10:07 The decision to start a new firm for the first time rather than joining another well-established firm. 11:28 What they got right and what went wrong with their first fundraise15:22 The benefits and potential risks of having large anchor LP funds as early investors18:10 The ingredients an emerging manager needs to thrive in today’s market22:37 How the firm leverages research and automation to source and win deals. 25:31 How their research helps them find non-obvious deals in lesser trafficked geographies. 29:54 Why purpose and diversity is central to Base10’s investment thesis37:47 How the long time to liquidity has changed the investing market41:46 Reflecting back when he helped start Coatue’s private investments focus43:17 The biggest myth about investing 44:11 The investor that’s had the biggest impact on his career46:07 The experience that helped define him as an investorMentioned in this episode:Base10 PartnersI’d love to know what you took away from this conversation with TJ. 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.Transcript:Samir Kaji:Hi, I'm Samir Kaji. And welcome back to another episode of Venture Unlocked, the podcast that takes you behind the scenes of the business of venture capital. Our guest today is TJ Nahigian, co-founder of Base10 Partners, a San Francisco based early stage firm focused on investing in companies that help automate the real economy. The firm currently has over 600 million in assets under management, and has invested in companies such as Figma, Notion, Brex, and Plaid.Samir Kaji:Prior to starting Base10, with his partner, Ade, TJ was the founder and CEO of Jobr. And prior to that he worked in investment roles at Accel, and Summit Partners, as well as Coatue where he helped launch the private investing efforts of the firm. Having known TJ since the early days of Base10, it was so fun to go back in time to hear the origin story of the firm, how they've evolved using automation to drive better outcomes, and how they think about navigating the current markets to drive alpha for their investors. Without further ado, let's get into the episode to hear all of that and more. TJ, it's so great to have you on the show. Thanks for being on.TJ Nahigian:Thanks so much for having me, Samir.Samir Kaji:There's so many threads I'm going to pull on during this entirety of this conversation. But let's actually start from the beginning. You've worked at a number of firms, including some iconic ones like Coatue and Summit, and others, but how did you first get into investing?TJ Nahigian:I grew up in an entrepreneurial family, which is what got me into business in the first place, and then graduated with a finance degree in the middle of the financial crisis, which many would say it was just awful timing. But it ended up being probably the luckiest thing that's ever happened to me because it actually brought me out to Summit Partners in the Bay Area in early 2009 just as the world was starting to emerge from that financial crisis, and venture led on a significant change starting then. In '09 there were 20 to 30 different venture firms all cobbled around Sand Hill Road and Palo Alto. I was at one of them. So, I was lucky. And if you look at the landscape today, it's meaningfully different. And there's a number of reasons why but platform shifts like mobile, social, etc. have enabled so many companies just to grow to be so much larger than I think anybody had ever expected.Samir Kaji:Yeah, it's interesting you started your career right after that global financial crisis, which actually turned out to be one of the best times to start investing. It also came several years after AWS redefined what it meant to develop software and certainly via the iPhone the year after. I look at your career, and you've been at firms that are both later stage and early stage. And I was thinking about when people start firms it's like a blank sheet of paper that you're staring at. And you have to figure out an ethos, an operating model, an investment thesis. If you have a partner, you have to have a shared vision of what the firm is going to be. But looking back at your experiences, whether it was Accel , Coatue, Summit, oftentimes there's things that you want to pull from those firms, and there's things that you don't want to pull for them, those firms. What exactly was that mental model for you as you were sitting with Ade in the early days of saying, "This is the type of firm we're going to build together."TJ Nahigian:First of all, I feel so lucky and fortunate to have gotten to work at Summit, Accel, Coatue, and then later actually become an entrepreneur and start a business called Jobr, because those all as you mentioned totally shaped my experience. Each of those firms is great in their own right, and will be long standing firms. When I look back on it, what we've done with Base10, is we've tried to pull the best of those places for the opportunity that we feel like we're going after. Base10 just for those in the audience that don't know, we're focused on automation for the real economy or problems for the 99%. And we started out in 2017 setup to invest the early stage and now at the late stage into some of the largest trends that are shaping the real economy, leveraging technology.TJ Nahigian:When Ade, and I sat down to start Base10, that was really the most important thing was figuring out that what. What are we going to do and what are we going to be? How was also really important and I would say that's where experience at those different investment firms, and being an entrepreneur has helped us significantly. And so, we've invested from the early days in building out a research process that we think is unique and differentiated and really helps to win both in the real economy, but also in this new venture landscape that is markedly different than the 2009 venture landscape.TJ Nahigian:The way that works is we summarize it by saying we do very much trend based research, like a hedge fund. So, very similar to what Coatue will do. We do outbound and we're proactively reaching out the best companies in a given trend. Very much like growth or private equity firm. This is very much like a Summit Partners, an Accel, or an Insight where a few of my colleagues have come from. We still invest like a venture fund. But this is where Ade and to an extent my background come in handy is we do so with software and data at our core. We use workflow automation, and data so that we can actually effectively manage that process, and pipeline. And so, that's really the how of what we do at Base10.Samir Kaji:I'm glad you brought up some of the threads that you did pull from some of these other firms in instructing how you fill out that blank sheet of paper in terms of the vision. What also struck me is that your experience you had some experience starting a company and being a founder, which Ade I know was an investor in the company. But a lot of your time, pre Base10 was actually on the investing side. I think Ade is almost reverse in that he spent time at Workday ventures, but really was a serial entrepreneur. And oftentimes, when you have those two backgrounds with such extensive experience both on the operating and investing side, it brings some really interesting ways that you can build a firm and help founders.Samir Kaji:There's the off balance sheet, also that I also think about, which is a function of looking at somebody and saying not only are they good from a complementary standpoint because they've had operating experience, but they have a shared set of values. I've seen a lot of funds get with two partners that have just met each other and you have a high risk of partner divorce over some period of time. How did you feel comfortable the two of you were the right people? And what were some of those discussions that got you to the point where you said, "hey, we have a shared vision, we can do this together?"TJ Nahigian:I was again very fortunate in the fact that I actually got to meet Ade well before starting Base10. I'd just started a business called Jobr, which actually was really informed from my time at Coatue, where I helped start our first private investment fund, and was leading a lot of our work on mobile investing. And we essentially built a mobile app in the job space called Jobr. Ade became one of our first investors in that business. So, Ade, as you mentioned Samir, is entrepreneur turned investor. I’m the opposite, I'm investor turned entrepreneur. Ade, ironically, was my VC.TJ Nahigian:He ended up being by far the most helpful VC that we had. But he also quickly realized that I had an investment background. And he was ramping up his personal investing and work at Workday Ventures, which he had started, and started pinging me with regularity around different investments. And so, that's what brought us closer and closer together. By the time we had scaled and sold Jobr, Ade and I had become quite close and thinking about starting a new venture fund and what we thought would be the most impactful mega trend over the next 20 years of automation in the real economy.TJ Nahigian:The thing that was most compelling to me about partnering up with Ade and vice versa is just how I would say unique and special he was on so many different aspects. And then how mission, values, and work ethos aligned we were. And we've had a number of amazing guests on the show, Samir. I think almost everybody will tell you starting a venture fund is no small feat. Being an investor actually doesn't really help much in starting a venture fund, ironically, being an entrepreneur does. And so, going from zero to one, honestly, the number one thing that we needed was grit and a mindset of being able to teach ourselves and learn how to do things. And I saw that with Ade massively. Ade is just so incredibly unique in so many different ways. But also, the skill set is very complementary to mine that when I was setting out on this, hopefully 50 plus year journey with Base10, the most important thing was who I was going to be doing that with. And so, that made it easy to make that decision despite a number of other very interesting opportunities to potentially pursue.Samir Kaji:I think you've pointed out something that I remember when you started Base10. And you and I met pre fund one when you were starting to get into the fundraising. We'll get into that in a second. And it really is building a company from scratch. You're writing checks versus code, certainly. So, that's a little bit different from a software company. But there are all of these elements that can be quite scary when you're starting a firm. You had historically worked at really well established firms that in many cases had been around for decades with astounding success. What was the internal calculus that got you when you decided to go back into investing to actually go down this path of starting something from scratch versus what you had done in your past, which is work at these large firms where you can spend all your time really focusing on investing?TJ Nahigian:I was fortunate and lucky to have the opportunity to go back to some of those firms. When I started there, they may not have been as large as they are today. I think Coatue has grown 10 plus times since then. And Accel has also grown dramatically. I think part of it was really a huge opportunity and the belief that there was a change coming into venture. So, I think that was one thing that we did get right, that the venture landscape would change. And two, that a new type of firm was needed. Three, and again, the most important thing was just who I was going to be doing that with, and do we have values and mission and work ethos alignment on that? And so, that was the main calculus for us. I think if I was honest with myself, I knew how hard it would be to actually get started. It would not have been as easy of a decision. But now four and a half years later, since we got started in 2017, it definitely was the right decision.Samir Kaji:Well, speaking of degrees of difficulty, oftentimes the most difficult thing to do is get that first fund off the ground getting to a first close, and at the risk of bringing back a traumatic event that you experienced in fundraising. Tell us how you engineered that first fundraise and how you approached it? What was it like? And what do you think now looking back you got right and what you get wrong?TJ Nahigian:A ton, a of ton of learnings from the early days, and Samir, you had a front row seat to this when we were working together. We were fortunate. Our first fund, our target was $100 million to do seed in series A investments in a relatively concentrated portfolio focusing on automation for the real economy. Our initial strategy was to get to a first close so that we could get started. And so, we were fortunate enough to find two groups that we ended up going deep with and really just took a bet on us. One of them, we've worked with in prior lives, and that let us get to that first close so we could actually start investing. But we knew if we wanted to build Base10 for the long term we would need a diversified LP base. And we would want an LP base that could scale with us longer. We started proving that we could actually make investments and start to build our Base10 track record different than our prior track records, and then went back out to market focusing primarily on institutional piece that we thought could scale with us.TJ Nahigian:I think we were really fortunate in those early anchors that we found that took a huge belief and leap of faith in us. I think that may have gone to our head a little bit and saying like, "Oh, this will actually be easy." But we had a rude awakening. I think we talked to hundreds of LPs really before we knew what it actually meant to raise a fully institutional fund. Hon…

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Glasswing Ventures Rudina Seseri on frontier tech, the KPI's Glasswing uses to measure their value-add to founders, and why diversity is central to their investing ethos Nov 02, 2021

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Follow me @samirkaji for my thoughts on the venture market, with a focus on the continued evolution of the VC landscape.Today, we have the great pleasure of chatting with Rudina Seseri, Founder of Glasswing Ventures, an early-stage venture capital firm investing in AI-powered software companies. With over 17 years of investing and related experience, Rudina has led investments in companies such as Celtra, Crowdtwist, ChaosSearch, Plannuh, Reprise, Inrupt, and Zylotech (recently acquired by Terminus).Prior to moving into venture capital, Rudina was a Senior Manager in the Corporate Development Group at Microsoft Corporation and started her career as an investment banker at Credit Suisse. Rudina was appointed by the Dean of the Harvard Business School (HBS) for four consecutive years to serve as Entrepreneur-In-Residence for the Business School and has most recently been named to the HBS inaugural group of Rock Venture Capital Partners.A word from our sponsor:Invest in innovation. Allocate allows investors to access top-tier private funds and co-investment opportunities within the technology sector. Despite the enormous growth of the private markets and the rapid increase of retail demand for private alternatives, investing in the highest quality private assets within the innovation sector still remains limited to institutions and ultra-connected high net worth individuals. With Allocate, wealth advisors, banks, family offices, and other qualified investors can have a streamlined way to responsibly invest with confidence. Go to allocate.co to find out more, and if you are a investor in funds of any kind, please sign up to the waitlist. In this episode we discuss:01:01 What inspired Rudina to become a full-time investor and what was her early investing philosophy03:06 The firm’s structure and methodology05:42 Learnings from the first fundraise08:35 Frontier tech investing12:13 What type of frontier tech companies the firm looks for14:11 How Glasswing specifically evaluates companies 21:01 How they thoughtfully built the team at Glasswing to drive unique support to their founders25:03 Preserving ownership in companies during the current market conditions without having to substantially increase fund size28:36 Deciding on when to make an exception on valuation or ownership30:44 How the firm deals with unconscious bias and group think when evaluating investments34:50 Using diversity of thought to drive better decision making38:55 The most counterintuitive lesson Rudina has learned as a VC40:52 The investing miss that taught her a lesson42:13 The investor she most admiresMentioned in this episode:Glasswing VenturesI’d love to know what you took away from this conversation with Rudina. 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.Transcript:Samir Kaji:Hi, I'm Samir Kaji, welcome to another episode of Venture Unlocked, the podcast that takes you behind the scenes of the business of venture capital. Today, we have the great pleasure of chatting with Rudina Seseri, founder of Glasswing Ventures, an early stage venture firm investing in AI power technology companies. With over 17 years of investing in transactional experience, Rudina has led investments in companies such as Celtra, CrowdTwist, Talla, and Zylotech. During our discussion, we talked about her view of what frontier tech means to them, the KPIs that Glasswing uses when measuring value add services to founders, and why diversity is so central to their investing ethos. Now, let's get into the episode to hear all of them and more. Rudina, it's great to see you and thanks for being on the show.Rudina Seseri:Hello, Samir, happy summer and thank you for having me.Samir Kaji:Now, let's get into your start into venture capital. You had a myriad of other roles before you became a full-time investor. What inspired you to be a full-time investor? What was the opportunity you saw and what type of investment philosophy did you have?Rudina Seseri:I had been in investment banking as a little low analyst. Remember those? 120-hour weeks. And I was in tech investment banking. So I joke that after three years of investment banking, I was done with the banking hours, but I had permanently caught the tech bug. So and this was the early 2000s, both the bubble and the burr. So both sides of that equation, but really became hooked and was excited by the innovation and the transformation and that passion. So, I knew I wanted to do tech of some sort and VC sounded very, very sexy. Have you met an MBA that doesn't love VC? So, I went to HBS to get my MBA and there I met Rick Grinnell, who was already a VC, and not coincidentally today my co-founder and partner at Glasswing Ventures.Rudina Seseri:We launched the firm together, but Rick was already a VC. And as a student, I actually did a few projects with him, particularly one around the mobile landscape. Mobile and smartphones were going to be a big thing. This is 2003 and 2004. And then I went on to join Microsoft, always with an idea that four or five years down the road, I would come back to venture and the notion of balancing sort of the passionate for tech and the background in M&A and financing, et cetera, with operational experience at Microsoft. It happened sooner than I expected under two years because Rick and our old firm were raising a new fund and they were building the team, so they poached me, but that was sort of the genesis of my coming onto venture. Put differently, on a good day, I thank Rick. On a bad day, I blame Rick for my venturing experience.Samir Kaji:I think it can be a little bit of a roller coaster for sure. And the two of you did launch Glasswing in 2016, you're effectively a lift out. Tell us a little bit about Glasswing itself and what really catalyzed the start of that firm.Rudina Seseri:So the idea was that while we were in our old firm, we kept seeing opportunities around sort of the evolution, if you will, of frontier tech, particularly having crossed the chasm from advanced analytics to something else, which became really AI and narrow AI and applied AI these days. But we kept evolving our thesis in that regard and we're seeing the impact because we're end market investors, so we look at enterprise security platforms but with an angle around frontier tech and this is going back really to the sort of 2012 through '14 timeframe.Rudina Seseri:We were particularly seeing that emerge out of academia with deep learning. And some of the emergence of that wave and making its way into academics and, fundamentally, all our thesis and the investments we had made were telling us that it was going to become all pervasive. It may sound strange today in 2021, but there were a lot of nonbelievers. I mean, when we did the spinout to have this focus around frontier tech with their AI and applied AI being a driver, I had many, many, many questions around, was AI really a thing? Was it really a wave? So you look back and you're like, "oh, my gosh. Now, it's an entirely forgotten conclusion." But from the perspective of the time, we really thought there was a big, big market opportunity for a focused strategy. And so far, so good, knock on wood, but it has panned out quite nicely.Samir Kaji:There's a number of ways that people start their own firms. It's usually with a few backgrounds. They were an angel investor and decided to be a full-time investor. Somebody that was an entrepreneur, an operator that decided to be a full-time investor. And then sometimes, it's coming out of another shop and starting really your own firm. And the latter is kind of where you and Rick were. The two of you had worked together for almost a decade investing, started Glasswing in 2016 as a newly formed firm. But a lot of people asked me the question when I have people that are effectively spinouts, do LPs give you a lot of attribution for what you did in your old firm? And how do you navigate through some of those questions in the early days where some people may wonder, "well, your track record before was maybe not as relevant as it is now and you were part of another firm," walk us through a little bit about that first fundraise.Rudina Seseri:It's the crux of what your product is. And I joke with software founders and technologists, even when they pitch VCs, they have a demo. They have something to show. You walk into a room and you're pitching an LP on a new firm and a new fund and your track record in your strategy, those are your products. So with that as the backdrop, I'm really sort of proud of the approach we took with our spinout and how we launched Glasswing at multiple levels. One, it was probably one of the friendliest spinouts that I could have ever envisioned. With our partners in the old firm, we did not abandon them or the LPs in the funds, or most importantly, perhaps our founders. We literally did a legal spinout to where we have been seeing that portfolio through and maintained our board seats, did not orphan our founders, and got track record attribution.Rudina Seseri:The track record attribution really speaks again to the fact that prospective LPs would not have to call five different folks to get to, "did Rudina or Rick really lead that deal?" We had the legal attribution. We were on the board. They could call the founder. We had access to our track record. So from that perspective, we lowered the barrier, if you will, to diligence. And also, there weren't five partners making claims to X, Y, Z deal. It was very clear who sourced it and who led it and who was seeing it through. Fundraising is never easy. Even when it's easy, it's not easy. And it's even harder when it's a first time fund and you're just establishing and a new firm, but I will say that doing a spin out on the up and up and that dynamic helped matters a lot.Samir Kaji:The continuity aspect does help a lot when you have a team that's been together and that's one of the main risks that LPs do underwrite too. The other one is looking at the investment thesis itself and understanding why is this manager uniquely positioned to execute on a certain thesis. You're right. Five years ago, frontier tech was something that a lot of people didn't understand, or at least at worst or at best rather, skeptical of. Today, you see firms like Lux and DCVC doing Founders Fund doing a lot of it. Take us back to 2016 for a second, how did the focus on frontier tech guide your investment thesis and strategy in terms of the type of companies, the stage of companies? And what type of risk you were underwriting to with those early stage frontier tech companies?Rudina Seseri:Absolutely. So the good news, going back to 2016 and onward, is that it's not as though we were in a different focus or different space and woke up and said, "Oh, my gosh. I got to do frontier tech." It has been very, very much continuation of strategy. So we came out of a generalist tech, early stage tech fund where Rick and I had this focus. And we and the LPs that backed us fundamentally shared the view that it was a bigger enough opportunity for us to stand on our own. So in many ways, going back also to your earlier question around how did the spinout happen and what helped it, it's been a continuation of strategy. It's been an evolution. So, our focus and our strategy is very much around end markets. And then from wave of disruption to wave of disruption, what the catalyst is evolves, changes, or transforms over time.Rudina Seseri:What do I mean by that? So end markets being really enterprise platform security, okay? But I've just said to you, this is... What? Trillion dollar market opportunity, so that's not really focused. Where the focus comes in for us is that I'm not just looking at an enterprise SaaS business in X, Y, Z, I'm actually looking beyond the execution, the founder, the usual criteria you'd see. I'm looking for that frontier tech that is so disruptive that it will transform the current market either to disrupt the incumbents or to market make in a new category. And for us and where we are in the evolution, AI has been the grand majority of that. Now, that's sort of one piece of the equation. The other piece is the stage that we invest in. I am very, very nervous to even throw sort of letters or nomenclature today because I assure you if this podcast stays on for a few months, the nomenclature will have shifted.Rudina Seseri:So five, six years ago, I would've said, "oh, we're the first institutional or maybe a little longer than that, but we're the first institutional investor in, hence the series A round. And oftentimes, the first capital in." Today, the series A has taken a very, very different dynamics. So, let me articulate it differently in a way that I think has persisted time. We are early stage investors. Right now, that nomenclature is seed, but I'm not married to it, you can call it whatever you want, where we are investing in companies that are two to four quarters away from product launch or the product has been in the market for a couple of quarters. So we're not really taking any raw, if you will, tech, algorithmic, and even data risk. What we are taking is product market fit and go-to-market risk. And that's what we have done for many, many years and that's what we will continue to do. So let's focus on nomenclature, more around what stage can we come in, and how do we help the business derisk from there.Samir Kaji:You're investing in these companies that are six to 12 months away from releasing a product. And one of the things that a lot of folks think about frontier tech is high technical risk. It could be two, three, four, five years sometimes before a product goes to market. And sometimes, these companies raise tens of millions of dollars before that happens. It sounds like what you're focusing on is a very different type of company that is a little bit more conservative when it so early cash or in getting a product to market.Rudina Seseri:Not necessarily. I think maybe we alter our definition a bit. You might be equating frontier tech and deep tech. And sometimes, they are the same. Oftentimes, they are not. Frontier tech, I'm talking about really at the cutting edge of innovation, not necessarily that it is deep tech, that's going to take three to four to five years before you can commercialize it. That, in fact, would be beyond our horizon for launching. And that's why I prefaced our discussion by saying I'm in marketing. We're end market investors. So, pick DeepMind. It has its AI as much AI as you'd want. And in fact, it's probably one of the more forward sort of oriented companies if you think about it around the area of general AI.Rudina Seseri:But we would've missed it every time by design because we do not invest in companies that have tech in search of an application or a use case. Instead, I'm starting with, "okay, within enterprise, I'm a thesis-driven investor." So, we haven't talked about that. I have this five or six or seven themes or thesis. And then underneath them, I go deeper and deeper. I'm looking for this type of opportunity to apply to this problem with this budget or with this budget in the making or with this pain point and it's a must have. So when you come at it, if you will, I'm already looking for a solution to a problem, but instead of your run of the milll SaaS, I'm looking for a degree of tech that is truly cutting edge that can give you an advantage in addition to the execut…

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Eniac Ventures Hadley Harris on portfolio construction fundamentals, partnership durability, and views on the shifting seed market Oct 26, 2021

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Follow me @samirkaji for my thoughts on the venture market, with a focus on the continued evolution of the VC landscape.I’m thrilled to bring you my conversation with Hadley Harris, one of the founding partners of seed stage investor Eniac Ventures. Over their history, Eniac has invested many amazing companies including AirBnB, Cameo, Hinge, and Soundcloud. After starting with an initial $1.6M Fund I 11 years ago, they currently grown and expanded to now managing over $300MM in AUM. It was fun chatting with him on the origin story of the original partnership and how they’ve evolved over the years together, and with the introduction of new team members. Also in our conversation we spoke about portfolio construction, which I personally find fascinating given the different approaches that exist. For those that haven’t seen it, check out Hadley’s post on portfolio construction (“Seed Portfolio Construction for Dummies”) as it’s a great post. Prior to Eniac, Hadley held various operational roles including head of Business Market Strategy at Vlingo, which was acquired for $225M by Nuance Communications. He did his undergrad and MBA at the University of Pennsylvania.A word from our sponsor:Vouch Insurance is a new kind of insurance platform for startups. Built by founders for founders, Vouch’s fully digital coverage takes minutes to activate. Vouch is trusted by the biggest names in the startup economy — such as Y Combinator and Silicon Valley Bank — who partner with Vouch because everything from onboarding to claims is designed for startups by experienced founders. Because Vouch is an insurance platform, and not a broker, it works with its clients to manage, mitigate, and avoid risks. http://www.vouch.us/ventureunlockedIn this episode we discuss:01:48 What led Hadley and his partners to start Eniac Ventures03:43 Considerations they thought through when starting a firm together after being friends for so long. 04:47 How they think about conflict resolution 07:00 The KPI’s they needed to meet before raising larger funds 08:49 Experiences as operators and investors that helped Hadley and his co-founders shape Eniac10:24 Drivers that led to institutional LP backing12:16 How Hadley thinks about fund sizing and how they arrived at their last fund size15:26 How the current market has shaped Hadley’s thoughts on portfolio construction and deployment18:08 How they balance optimizing for speed while maintaining integrity of due diligence processes. 22:01 How to build a strong succession plan to ensure firm durability24:13 What Eniac looks for when hiring and onboarding25:32 Breaking down his “Seed Portfolio Construction for Dummies” blog post34:34 Why more portfolio companies is often a better bet for smaller funds37:41 His market predictions40:06 The most counter-intuitive lesson he’s learned as an investor40:42 The thing he got most wrong about investing41:53 Who is an investor he really respects and why?Mentioned in this episode:Eniac VenturesSeed Fund Portfolio Construction For DummiesI’d love to know what you took away from this conversation with Hadley. 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.Transcript:Samir Kaji:Hadley, it's so great to have you on the show.Hadley Harris:Thanks, Samir. I appreciate you having me on.Samir Kaji:Maybe where we could start is the beginning of Eniac back in 2010. And what I'm really curious to hear is the backstory of what brought you all together, the four of you, and what was that shared vision that you seized the opportunity that really led to starting the firm together.Hadley Harris:So, my three partners and I, Nihal, Vic, Tim and I all went to undergrad together. We're all engineering students at Penn. So, we actually graduated way back in '99. So, now have known each other for 25 years or so, which is crazy, makes you feel really old. The seed of Eniac started about 2007 timeframe. Vic and I, he was working at RRE Ventures, I spent a short period of time at Charles River Ventures before joining a seed stage company that they invested in and we were talking about, eventually, getting into venture. And honestly, the catalyst of why we wanted to start our own firm was, mainly, we just couldn't see ourselves, especially at that time, spending 10, 12 years kissing a bunch of guys asses to become a real GP. And it seemed like an easier path, which is probably not correct, to start our own firm.Hadley Harris:We recruited Tim who had a background in venture law as well as had been a founder and the three of us started planning together. And one of the most successful founders I knew was Nihal who was a close friend, also, from school. I reached out asking for some intros to folks who could fund us, some angels and he replied that he was in, meaning he wanted to join. So, we, after a couple of conversations, decided to do that. And that was the very beginning. Started working on 2008, started investing in 2010 and that was the origin story.Samir Kaji:One thing I'm always curious about is, in situations where partnerships come together and there's these pre-existing relationships, that I think are great because they do bring along an embedded level of trust that's hard to replicate. At the same time, we've seen situations where friends have come together and those personal synergies don't necessarily translate into a professional context. What were some of the conversations you had in the early days to ensure that, from a professional standpoint, you would have those synergies and alignment?Hadley Harris:It was a long evolution, honestly. We went from friends and it took time to really get a working relationship. We were pretty thoughtful, I think, about that. We started working a couple years in with a professional coach and have now been working with the coach pretty consistently over the last eight years or so. Because it's one thing to be friends, it's others to have that working relationship and, in some ways, being close friends, while it has its advantages around trust and shared values, it has its, I think you were alluding to it, its disadvantages and that things can get personal a lot quicker. I imagine you'd see that we're a family business as well. So, for us, it was really about being intentional and understanding that we still had a lot of work to do even though we knew each other really well.Samir Kaji:Take us into those conversations. You guys are talking, were there particular considerations or a particular set of values you've all agreed on and said, "hey, this is how we're going to operate together. These are the protocols and let's ensure that, as we go along, things like conflict resolution are done in the right ways."?Hadley Harris:Yeah. If I were starting again, I think we would make sure to have those conversations. To be honest, it was more of a natural progression. I think everything for us, and I'm sure we'll talk about other areas of the business, has been constant iteration over these 11 years or even before we started investing. And this is definitely one of them where, I think, we jumped in and started working together and then handled the different challenges as it came over time.Samir Kaji:So, you mentioned 2008 and then really starting the firm in 2010. And 2009, of course, was this barren wasteland of anybody allocating capital. How did you guys get comfortable doing this with four people with a really small fund?Hadley Harris:Yeah, the fund was tiny. It was $1.6 million, our own savings and some friends from Penn who were silly or naive enough to give us money when we didn't know what we're doing. And yeah, I'm very happy that they actually did quite well because that would really bothered me. We were still doing our own thing, so we're running our companies. So, in a lot of ways, we looked like more angel investors and almost like an angel group in terms of how we operated. So, our partner meetings were Wednesday night and Sunday night. We were meeting founders during the day, but pretty fluidly.Hadley Harris:And then, as our companies got acquired, I was the first one to go full time in our second fund. When my second company got acquired, then we started focusing on it full time. So, it was really our third fund where I'd say we were quote unquote, institutional and that happens also [inaudible 00:06:16] we had institutional investors. Those first two funds, I think, allowed us to pick up a lot of experience but in a relatively unstructured environment.Samir Kaji:I love the story of starting off with a million and six as, really, your proof of concept. And I remember, even back then, we used to actually refer to a lot of folks as super angels that were writing more significant checks and, often, managing other people's money but still in the early days. What did you guys see as the inflection point where you decided, "hey, we are now wanting to do this as a full-time gig, it's not going to be a franchise." It sounds like it was really the jump to fund three, which I think was about $55 million or so. What did you have to do to get to that point?Hadley Harris:Yeah, I think a big event for us was we had an early investment, a company called Tap Commerce, that had a pretty quick exit for about $100 million in about, I think, about two years. And that, even though it seems very small, returned a big portion of our first fund and we had a couple other smaller exits. So, interestingly, we had really solid DPI going into our third fund. Again, these were small funds, so you're not returning huge amounts of money and for us, that was really important. Because when we raised our third fund in 2014, that was the very beginning of, I think, where most of the LP community were starting to notice and see, they weren't really investing.Hadley Harris:We were fortunate, our lead investor, a major university endowment, had a program they had put together, invested in us and a couple of other seed funds like Homebrew and Freestyle that were around our vintage. So, we were in a good place, at the right time and had somewhat of a track record, even though, again, it was in this relatively unstructured manner. So, those things came together and we had, also, rolled off our own founding companies and those companies have been acquired so we could focus on full time. That became a nice inflection point for us.Samir Kaji:There's two type of emerging managers that are formed in terms of what their prior, most recent experiences. One is, there are former founders that decided full time investing is what I want to do. The other is somebody that worked at a big firm and then rolled out. You did both. Your partners, actually, somebody did work in RRE and they also worked at a company. How did those experience shape how you wanted to build a firm and the type of firm?Hadley Harris:So, Vic had spent two years at RRE, I had spent just a summer at CRV. So, my experience is pretty thin. We really came at it very much from the founder angle and a lot of what we were doing in the early days, I think was, what we saw, it's bringing more of a founder mentality to seed. I think that you can be successful in both. I think that people are coming from more investing backgrounds can be great pickers of companies. I find, and I'm obviously biased, that folks with operational and founding backgrounds tend to have a little bit more to add in terms of their background and experience, but also a certain empathy for the founder experience, which is extremely difficult, that is really hard to learn from afar.Samir Kaji:That certainly makes sense. And I agree with the empathy variable which, of course, there's so many parallels to what you guys have done both as operators and founders but, also, founding a firm together and that you have to build brand and you have to raise money and all those things are hard. Eventually, you did hit that inflection point of becoming more institutional. I think that was around fund three when you raised your fund size and you started to talk to some of the institutional investors be it the university endowments and foundations and things like that, you had some DPI at the time. But I'm curious, if you look back at some of those conversations, what type of factors were they really evaluating in deciding whether to invest in a fledgling firm? Was it the DPI or was it something else?Hadley Harris:Yeah, it's interesting. I think you see that a lot more now where the seed ecosystem is a lot more developed, where LPs are looking for more of those institutional signs. I'm sure that that was a factor. It was just so early and there were so few LPs that are even considering seed that, in some ways, I almost feel like, maybe, the bar was lower from an institutional point of view because I don't think we were very institutional. I think there was an interest in this space because it was clearly becoming a thing. To your point, when we started in 2010, people would call it super angels, people didn't even consider it venture. It was definitely looked down upon by the venture community as a whole in terms of its level of sophistication.Hadley Harris:By then, I think it was clear that this was a thing and LPs are trying to figure out how they're going to play with it. I don't know that they expected the level of institution that we have now and folks like us. I think, surprisingly, the DPI was a big factor because it's like, "The bar is low and these guys actually can return money and they seem to be in some good companies and they got in at these crazy low valuations compared to the rest of our portfolio." So, I think that was more of it, surprisingly.Samir Kaji:One of the things I often see with institutions that are investing at the early stages, be it a fund two or three or even a fund one, is once they deem a firm is investable, the thought is, not only invest in that fund but multiple funds and, over time, scaling their check amounts. And, in your case, you haven't materially increased your fund size relative to your peers and, certainly, not tripling or quadrupling even though the seed environment and the average seed grants have increased so much. Can you walk us through how you think about fund sizing and how did you arrive at the fund target of your last fund?Hadley Harris:You're asking about shared vision that we all had and things that we all felt strongly about when we were going into it. I think one of those things was that we'd rather be really good at one thing and doing that well. And we'd rather be the best seed fund or strive to be the best seed fund in the world rather than trying to be yet another multistage fund. So, for us, it's often come down to focus and this is certainly one of those areas. I think we're at a place right now, where our fifth fund that we started investing in six months ago is $125 million. I personally think, especially for a more concentrated approach, that that's as big as you can be and be a pure seed player. That number may change in the future where we can have a larger fund, I doubt that it was going to happen, but if you did see some contraction to the smaller fund, that makes sense. And I think you'll always of see us focus on that so that we can do what we do well.Hadley Harris:Every time we raise a new fund, we can take a step back and consider, "Hey, let's pretend we hadn't done anything and what would we do." And there's a lot of interesting strategies out there. I think there's an interesting strategy for a smaller A fund, call it a t…

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LP Roundtable with Chris Douvos (Ahoy Capital), Beezer Clarkson (Sapphire Partners), Guy Perelmuter (GRIDS Capital) on opportunity funds, red flags they watch for, and the state of the market. Oct 19, 2021

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Follow me @samirkaji for my thoughts on the venture market, with a focus on the continued evolution of the VC landscape.As we move towards the end of 2021, we wanted to record an episode that focused on the LP perspective on current capital and ventures. To that end, this week we are joined by joined by Chris Douvos, founder of Ahoy Capital, Elizabeth “Beezer” Clarkson, Managing Director of Sapphire Partners, and Guy Perelmuter, founder of GRIDS Capital.The three of them have spent decades investing in venture funds and companies across multiple cycles. While we didn’t come into the discussion with any set agenda, we ended up covering everything from emerging manager views to global capital trends. This was a fun one to record, so hope you enjoy. A word from our sponsor:Vouch Insurance is a new kind of insurance platform for startups. Built by founders for founders, Vouch’s fully digital coverage takes minutes to activate. Vouch is trusted by the biggest names in the startup economy — such as Y Combinator and Silicon Valley Bank — who partner with Vouch because everything from onboarding to claims is designed for startups by experienced founders. Because Vouch is an insurance platform, and not a broker, it works with its clients to manage, mitigate, and avoid risks. http://www.vouch.us/ventureunlockedIn this episode we discuss:02:22 Complete this sentence: Venture today is "[Blank]04:51 How are they as LPs navigating the seed and early-stage market for manager selection15:39 View of the late stage boom and potential for returns24:40 Perspective of Opportunity Funds and whether they represent a good product for LPs34:29 Returns Beezer is writing to on a multiple cash on cash basis on different types of managers40:05 Things they look for beyond track record in emerging managers44:41 Common mistakes and red flags for emerging managers that can scare off LPs47:15 Tangible characteristics that they look for in emerging managers53:15 How non-traditional and non-mainstream managers can attract institutional LPs56:08 What emerging managers should lead with when they don’t have a track record beyond the last few years60:22 The investment category each are most excited aboutMentioned in this episode:Episode 013 Chris DouvosEpisode 021 Beezer Clarkson(Guy’s episode will drop in early 2022)I’d love to know what you took away from this conversation with Chris, Beezer, and Guy. 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.Transcript:Samir Kaji:All right. So I'm super excited about bringing the first LP roundtable to Venture Unlocked, where we dive into a number of different topics that relate to venture. And we'll look to dive deep. This will be an unscripted conversation, so we'll let it go where it goes. I want to first introduce three of the best LPs in the business, Chris Douvos from Ahoy Capital, Beezer Clarkson from Sapphire Ventures and Guy Perelmuter from GRIDS Capital. One of the things we were talking about before this podcast started was how fascinating a time we live in right now. And within venture, it certainly seems A Tale of Two Cities where it's the best of times, and it's the worst of times. And we'll get into that during the scope of this discussion over the next hour or so. But let me first start with an icebreaker for the group here. If you were to complete this sentence, how would you complete it? Venture today is X. Chris, why don't you start? What is X today?Chris Douvos:To get hype for this is discussion I watched some TikTok so I'm feeling like I've been around a long enough time that I got to stay current and stay youthful to be relevant in venture. So if I had one word based on what I've been hearing from the kiddos it's "lit," this market is lit. And that's both a good thing and a bad thing. I mean, we can go into that, but hey, for the moment, we're lit.Samir Kaji:All right, Gee, are you going to top that? What's your description of the market today?Guy Perelmuter:Top Douvos? Never, sir. That's impossible. I will say that, for me, the current venture market is extraordinary. And I mean it literally, right. I mean, it's beyond ordinary. We're now a few standard deviations from everything we've seen before. And again, as Chris said, this could be good and could be bad. So for me, in one word, it's extraordinary.Samir Kaji:That's a great word. Beezer?Beezer Clarkson:I think I'm going to go with "spicy," "spicy."Chris Douvos:Oh, caliente.Samir Kaji:I like it.Beezer Clarkson:Caliente.Samir Kaji:I like this.Beezer Clarkson:I was going to say fuego, but I'll say "spicy."Samir Kaji:So between spicy, lit and extraordinary, it's very clear that all of you think this is a very heated marker with a ton of momentum. And I would agree with that. And I was looking at the Q1, Q2 numbers and roughly $300 billion went into venture-backed startups, two-thirds of that, as you can imagine, was late-stage. And it seems like the venture market has, or at least the capital market for tech companies, has moved into a barbell where on the right side, you have large aircraft carrier type of firms that are investing across stages, have the ability to pump a lot of dollars in at those late stages, let's say series B and later and series C and later. And then on the left side of the market, you have a ton of seed funds, which by number, are quite high, by dollar amount, are still pretty low.Samir Kaji:I feel like from an LPs perspective, it's harder to navigate than ever before to figure out where can you place capital to get the best risk-return? And we've all talked about this, it, feels like managers are coming back really quickly. There's not always that much differentiation that matters, and it makes it really tough. And so, I'd like to start with, maybe, Chris on this question, how are you navigating in today's world?Chris Douvos:I'm old enough to remember, as we all are, but I started at Princeton's endowment back in '01. And I remember I became a venture guy because our then venture guy left. And at a Monday meeting, somebody was like, "So who wants to do venture?" And it was like that nose game where everybody touches their nose and last person not touching their nose gets stuck with whatever task. And that was me, and I became a venture guy. And I remember like 2002, 2003, 2004, the wreckage. And those were years were like $5 billion, I think, in 2003, went into startups and like 20 billion... I remember Bill Helman at Greylock was like, "What is the rational size of the benchmark? Is it $20 billion a year?" It's like those numbers seem quain. But in fairness, the scale of exits has made those numbers seem reasonably quain. It's not like this is an outrage and people are just spending like drunken sailors.Chris Douvos:But what I'll say is, there are a lot of risks that have been taken off the table, and like a main risk is financing risk, right. And it's because there's so much like plentiful capital out there. I come from like a classically trained institutional investor standpoint, you're always thinking about risk-adjusted return. Well, how do you adjust return when there's like actually no risk and it's been like such a one-way market for so long? And I think people have forgotten that actually the trees don't all grow to the sky.Chris Douvos:And that's something that for the last, maybe, year and a half, has really influenced my own thinking, which is why, maybe to my great detriment, I've doubled down on what I call the "grownups" in my portfolio. So we're doubling down on firms where the investors are really kind of seasoned. Maybe seasoned is a fancy word for geriatric. Whether they're established groups that we've backed for a long time like First Round, or True, or newer groups like Neil and Trae over at Defy that have a long kind of history of investing. But I want people who have kind of seen what actually happens when risk exists again, because I think too many people have grown up in a world where the only answer is buy, and if you can't if you can't buy yesterday, buy today.Beezer Clarkson:I think I went through a bit of like... What is that called? ... the trough of despair, and then there's like the arc of euphoria, whatever those like sine curve is. I think right now I'm finding it actually really fun, which I know it's a little bit of the... If you don't need to sleep, it's actually a really fun time to be doing venture, because it's unbundling in a way that I love. I think the options now for where an entrepreneur can get money is awesome, for an entrepreneur.Beezer Clarkson:It's interesting questions for an LP and where to put your dollars. But there's so many more alternatives now, you can do the classic funds, you can do what Chris is talking about. We've been trying to keep some dollars available for newer managers and trying some newer methodologies, not just... We've done some sort of new but classic kind of structured funds. We're trying to look at, are there other alternatives? The rise of the solo GPs, there are syndicate structures, there are some service for equity structures out there. We haven't done a rolling fund, but I find them fascinating.Beezer Clarkson:So I think right now, I actually feel really greedy because I'm like, there's so many different things I'd like to invest in. And it's just a question of, no LP has unlimited capital, there has to be the constraint, because nobody has all the money in the world, and you wouldn't want to index venture anyway. But I just find that hard time picking because there's so many awesome things I'd like to do. So I find it right now, a fun but challenging market from that perspective.Guy Perelmuter:Yeah, one thing that comes to mind when I look at this market right now, it reminds me a little bit of what happened in 2000, 2001, in the hedge fund industry, because that was a time where a lot of prop desk folks were leaving their jobs at investment banks to start their own hedge funds. And you could see like on a weekly basis, there was a new long-short equity fund sprouting from nowhere. And it was not really long-short per se, if the manager had like 40 longs and two shorts, he would call himself or herself a long and short fund, right.Guy Perelmuter:And something that really catches my eye in this environment is the sheer amount of new funds coming to market by people, by "portfolio managers." And again, that's fair for people to try their hand at running other people's money. But to get your stripes and to be called a portfolio manager, that's a process, right. I feel like this title is misused a lot. We had to have some sort of standard process to make sure that someone can put that in their resume.Guy Perelmuter:So right now, the venture environment, and I agree with what both Chris and Beezer said before, the options are incredible and we are living in a world where the opportunity costs, to Chris' point, is zero, right. Interest rates have been almost zero for longer than any one of us have ever experienced, paradoxically, the pandemic has accelerated so many trends in the minds of so many different people from different walks of life. And it seems like, at this point, all roads point to venture, right. Everybody has their own reason to think of, "Okay, I should expand my venture portfolio. I should add more chips to this particular asset class." And it doesn't feel like this is going to necessarily end badly. And I'm sure we're going to go into that over the course of this conversation.Guy Perelmuter:But one thing that I think it's inevitable is that some of the GPs out there who have already earned their stripes, I think they're going to be at the premium in this market because, inevitably, we're going to see failures over time, it just takes a little longer in venture, but they'll be there. And these GPs I expect them to continue to do well. And I think there's a list of probably 20 to 30 names out there that are going to be in great shape in another three to five years. And for those newcomers, I think the environment is going to be increasingly challenging for raising money and for being able to be in the cap table of really interesting deals.Chris Douvos:And by the way, that's a great point because, in venture, all of our train wrecks happen in slow motion, right. And what's actually has always been kind of acute to me is, in the public markets, if an idea goes sour, the capital is destroyed and the managers who were pursuing that strategy get kind of lit up and exit the business. In venture, we're surrounded by melting ice cubes, right. And all it takes is one great deal to get that melted ice cube back in like kind of solid ice condition.Chris Douvos:I was having lunch with a good friend of mine the other at the Creamery here in Palo Alto and a GP walked by, and this is somebody who like literally had been an incinerator of capital. And this person leaned into me and said, "Oh my God, can you believe that guy's in company X and they put in like a million dollars and it's now worth like a billion and a half dollars and it's going to like rescue this fund, which has been on life support for years?"Chris Douvos:So in addition to like these funds that like kind of never die, you got what Beezer talked about is like all these, not only all these new managers, but new modalities of investing. And for somebody like myself who tries to do like one new investment a year, it's crazy. It's like we always used to when I was at Princeton's endowments, "It's harder to get into our portfolio than it is to get in our college." And that dilemmas only been kind of magnified by an order of magnitude.Samir Kaji:I sort of look at where the market is today, and I remember starting my career back in '99 actually, and it was like the height of the tech bubble. And remember, I forget if it was '99 or 2000, like a hundred billion was raised by venture funds. And it was at a time where the public market cap was like $13 trillion. Venture was still very much a vertical industry on the fringe. And technology, in particular, right, we were still internet 1.0, less than 350 million people were online. And you sort of look at the maturation of technology in '06. What happened was AWS came out and it made software development cheaper than ever before. In '07 was the iPhone. And that made, not only you had the development cheaper, but now you had the distribution channels. And today, of course, over 5 billion people have smartphones. So part of me thinks this is just a continued evolution of the technology market and now capital is starting to catch up.Samir Kaji:The 14-year bull run has certainly helped. But the size and scale of these companies now are at points we've never seen before, right. If you look at the top five public companies, they're all technology companies, total market cap of 9 trillion. But look at what their revenues are, look at what their profits are. And then you see some companies, even like a Canva, for example, if you look at their revenues, we would've never seen companies hit those type of revenues, but now you have the distribution and tech being truly horizontal.Samir Kaji:Now, I do have a question though, which is related to one side of the barbe…

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Human Ventures' Heather Hartnett on studio models, developing their business creation platform to add value to founders, and their fundraising learnings from raising their first significant fund Oct 12, 2021

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Follow me @samirkaji for my thoughts on the venture market, with a focus on the continued evolution of the VC landscape.My guest today is Heather Hartnett, CEO and founder of Human Ventures, an NYC-based venture firm founded in 2015 that leverages a very unique model that combines traditional fund investing with business creation and startup studio model in order to back and assist exceptional founders. Human Ventures has over $50M AUM, and has four exits including Reserve, Girlboss, and Clark.Prior to founding Human Ventures, Heather’s career spanned across roles at firms including CityLight Capital, and Claremont Creek Venture, and the David Lynch Foundation, where she worked with some of the country's largest family offices and investment institutions. Heather is a member of the Kauffman Fellows program and a frequent contributor to Forbes on the topic of venture capital. A word from our sponsor:Vouch Insurance is a new kind of insurance platform for startups. Built by founders for founders, Vouch’s fully digital coverage takes minutes to activate. Vouch is trusted by the biggest names in the startup economy — such as Y Combinator and Silicon Valley Bank — who partner with Vouch because everything from onboarding to claims is designed for startups by experienced founders. Because Vouch is an insurance platform, and not a broker, it works with its clients to manage, mitigate, and avoid risks. http://www.vouch.us/ventureunlockedIn this episode we discuss:01:31 The hypothesis behind Human Ventures04:20 Why it was so important for Heather to build a larger platform to provide value to founders06:35 The challenge of raising capital with an unconventional fund09:22 How did they narrate the vision to LPs to be able to close a $50M fund in 2019?12:42 The power of conviction when fundraising14:33 How Human Venture uses a venture studio model in unique ways to fund and create companies18:21 The process of co-creating companies in their incubator and why it’s been successful24:25 How their three pillars—the venture studio, “humans in the wild”, and the fund franchise—work together26:46 The KPIs Human Ventures uses to measure success28:22 How the pandemic validated their human needs economy investment thesis31:26 The advice she would give to emerging managers33:51 How Heather views the Seed Market currently38:02 Heather’s most counterintuitive lesson as an investor39:08 The lesson she took from her biggest investment miss41:05 The Investors that inspire herMentioned in this episode:Human VenturesGive and Take by Adam GrantI’d love to know what you took away from this conversation with Heather. 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.Transcript:Samir Kaji:Hi, I'm Samir Kaji and welcome back to another episode of Venture Unlocked, the podcast that takes behind the scenes of the business of venture capital. On this week's show I'm excited to bring you my conversation with Heather Hartnett, CEO and Founder of Human Ventures, a New York based venture firm that leverages a really unique startup model that combines traditional fund investing, any business creation platform in order to back exceptional founders. Before starting Human Ventures in 2015 Heather's career spanned across roles and firms including City Light Capital, Claremont Creek Ventures and time at the David Lynch Foundation where she worked with some of the country's largest family offices and institutions. Heather was also a member of the prestigious Kauffman Fellows program in class of 21 and is a frequent writer about VC on Forbes.Samir Kaji:We had a really fun conversation covering topics like creating a successful studio model, navigating in today's early stage of market where capital is a commodity and her experience in raising for a firm that has so many non-conventional parts. Now, let's get into the episode to hear all of that in more. Heather, it's so great to have you on the show. Thanks for joining us.Heather Hartnett:Thanks for having me.Samir Kaji:Usually, when I start these conversations, it's going back into history of what catalyzed somebody's journey into investing, but your model is so unique. I actually want to jump ahead to 2015 when you started Human Ventures, what was the hypothesis that you had and what exactly does Human Ventures do?Heather Hartnett:Human Ventures is an early stage venture firm, and we are focusing on pre-seed to Series A investing in primarily consumer tech and product in areas that we call the human needs economy. And we can unpack that a little bit too, but largely in the areas of health and wellness, future of work and innovating technology that supports those human needs. Large part of what makes a successful startup ecosystem is the concentration of founders building together and helping one another and I met my partner who I founded Human Ventures with, Joe Marchese, about 12 years ago. And he's just a consummate entrepreneur. We very much connected on the fact that entrepreneurs see the world 10 years in the future and a lot of times they feel misunderstood. Having a community and a support system is so crucial, especially at the earliest stages of building your company.Heather Hartnett:And there wasn't really a lot of fundamental resources for founders in New York City. New York is a massive economy. So many different industries. Tech was not the center of that by any means, but now all of the industries are becoming tech enabled and founders are the lifeblood of innovation. And so, we're starting to see more and more founders start their businesses in New York. And so, in 2015, my background, just quickly, I actually started venture in 2005. I was out in the Bay Area. My father was an entrepreneur. I was exposed to entrepreneurship at a very early age. Kind of got thrown into venture at a time where there was not a lot of upward mobility there, there was not a lot of proliferation of venture firms. And so, but I did get exposed to it and I got bit by the bug early.Heather Hartnett:Fast forward, I was at tech companies. I was in philanthropy for quite some time and it built up my network of family offices quite a lot. And in New York, when I moved to New York, we really saw that the next generation philanthropists was an entrepreneur. They were people who were wanting to make a change, but they were doing it earlier. It wasn't that you have to make your money for the first 70 years of your life and then you gave back. Founders were starting to see where there were challenges and see where there were opportunities and they were building around that. And so, we decided in 2015 to start of a business creation platform, we called it a startup studio. And that was really to be able to help founders build together and create an opportunity for them to have shared resources, operational expertise and just build a community around that.Samir Kaji:Looking retrospectively, it definitely seems really pressing to actually create platform versus just a traditional fund. But it does introduce a different degree of difficulty when so many firms when they first start, they keep it really simple. They just raise a traditional fund, invest in companies and maybe there's some aspect of value add that they incorporate. You had all these different moving pieces. Why was this so important to you?Heather Hartnett:Yeah. I mean, even then it felt like capital was a commodity. It was, how are you actually giving back to the founders? Why are they choosing you as a source of capital? Why are you seeing the best companies? And for me, the funding gap was the very earliest idea stage from zero to one. And it wasn't necessarily that there weren't first check investors because San Francisco had made that become a thing with angel investing. But I think founders were more, it's easier than ever to start a company, it's harder than ever to win. So how are you really building in those first 100, 150, 200 days with people who know how to cut the corners or the hard stuff, you always have to go through it. So can you give founders some more resources to be able to do that faster?Heather Hartnett:And so, I think I said, "What would Andreessen Horowitz be if it started today?" You start with the platform first, should you start with the funding first? There were a lot of funds out there. I had a background in building. My partner, Joe, was a founder in building. Our third partner, Michael, led us, corporate, M&A and finance and operational expertise. So together we created the system to be able to create businesses. We felt like that was going to be more of a value add to founders. And then as our company started to grow, the ones that we were building together with founders, then the funding source made sense and then kind of evolved from there.Samir Kaji:Can I maybe go back to that time when you're creating this? And I think there's so many things here that, today, it's very clear that capital is even more commodity and how you differentiate isn't necessarily around what your brand is. But it's really, what are you providing? How quickly can you move on opportunities? And are you building certain relationships with these founders that allow you to, to get into the companies you want? The counterbalance with a lot of people listening to this podcast is, "Well, that sounds great, but I don't have the capital." If I raise a $10 million fund, I have $200,000 in management fees that barely puts food on the table for me. As you thought about the model in the early days, how did you think about capitalizing it? Because you did need to bring on team members, you needed space. Tell us a little bit about that raise, and were there other ways you had to be creative in capitalizing the actual platform?Heather Hartnett:Yeah. Definitely. I mean, Joe and I were both founders in our own DNA. And so, you really do have to think about creating a sustainable model. It's not the scarcity mindset of just operating on management fees. And building an ecosystem of connected individuals is truly the biggest differentiator. And it takes time and effort to be able to create that engaged and connected community. So we knew that you couldn't just start that from day one, but what did we have? We had our trusted networks. And that forced me to say, "What do you want to start with?" We went out to our trusted sources of people that we knew would believe in us. And we raised capital as a parent company structure to be able to hire people, to be able to help add value to founders from day one.Heather Hartnett:And that was very much a part of our DNA. Can we be founders as well first? And I think to be able to create a firm, not just a fund, where you have multiple funds and you have multiple product serving founders, you really have to think about building a firm, not building just a fund. So we started with the platform first and we aggregated Titans of industries who cared about where founders were building. Because if you are in a Fortune 100 company right now, what's keeping you up at night is not necessarily your shareholder earnings call. It's who are the disruptors that are coming around the corner? So some visionaries like David Solomon from Goldman Sachs and Beth Comstock from GE and Shari Redstone from Viacom, they all we, had trusted personal relationships with them and they backed Human from day one. And that set us up, right? That connected network of individuals who cared about innovation in New York, set us up then to be able to start adding value to founders that they wouldn't get from small fund.Samir Kaji:And then when you go out and raise a fund and you have the platform that you've set up, which does have this very unique platform, that's really actually hard to replicate. This is not an easy thing to do. Did investors, traditional LPs as you're raising their fund, how did they view the platform? And tell us a little bit about the story itself? Because I always find from at least my perspective in talking to a lot of limited partners, is that they want comparative advantages and they want differentiation. But when I talk to managers that have a lot of differentiation and a lot of pieces of the story, it's hard for those people to really get to a decision point because they get paralyzed by the analysis of so many different parts. How did you become successful? Because I know you closed that $50 million fund in, I believe it was 2019 based on the public clippings. Tell us a little bit about how you brought all that story together and how did the LPs really understand what you were doing?Heather Hartnett:You really have to sell a vision. And we were talking about this, I think the risk appetite of limited partners is not all the same. There's a continuum. And I say, that founders are 10 years in the future, traditional LPs by nature have to be 10 years in the past. Emerging managers are kind of the gap. They're bridging the gap between the two of them. So how are you finding and picking people who are seeing the world as it should be, but then also selling to your investors that you know how to bridge that gap? And that is a big task to do. And so, it's not easy. You have to find people who bet on you as builders, so that we were company builders and we could do this. You have to find people who were building on you as money manager or betting on you as money managers.Heather Hartnett:You have to find founders who are betting on you as trusted partners. And so, it's a lot of trust building. A lot of trust building and then execution. So in the beginning, yes, we were not like any other fund. We didn't check the boxes of a traditional fund. And we also weren't checking the boxes of a traditional studio necessarily. So you have to find visionary capital sources. And we found our niche with family offices. James Murdoch is a Partner, him and Catherine they have Lupa Systems, which is their big investment shop. They themselves were very visionary in how they wanted to build that and human fit and align with that thesis as well. So you start to know who your buyer is, right? Who are people who see the world the way that you want it to be and how they're going to back that.Heather Hartnett:Then as you start to gain proof points and you gain track record, then the people who you know are incentivized, and it's their job to be more risk averse, right? If you're managing a pension fund and an endowment, you're not wanting to take these huge bets on a young gun like me. But if you start to see that you have the ability to rinse and repeat starting a company and getting that unicorn and seeing some of the metrics that you are more useful, then you start to come on. So I think it's really finding those people who are along the same risk continuum you are on.Samir Kaji:You're hitting on some really interesting points that I do want to even unpack further as we get into this conversation. But talking about the continuum between fund managers, entrepreneurs and LPs, and I love the description of our GPs that's kind of sitting in the middle, where entrepreneurs are looking 10 years in the future. LPs are really looking at what happened in the past to assess and make decisions, I would say that the emerging manager community probably is closer to the continuum of where the entrepreneurs are, then the LPs and it creates a little bit of a misalignment. The thing that I always think about though, is as you're going, and you're talking about finding their true believers, people that really understand,…

Full show notes at the publisher

Global Founders Capital’s Don Stalter on their belief in larger portfolios, managing a global investment firm, and building systems and processes to deliver value at scale Oct 05, 2021

Show notes

Follow me @samirkaji for my thoughts on the venture market, with a focus on the continued evolution of the VC landscape.

On this week’s Venture Unlocked episode, we had the pleasure of hosting Donald Stalter, Partner at Global Founders Capital, a global multi-stage venture firm that has raised $1.6B across two funds and has backed companies such as Kalshi (led by Don), Deel, Headway, Slack, Away, Hellofresh, and Brex. The firm has a very unique model that employs capital across geographies, stages, and industry sectors, and Don provided insight on how the firm executes on this strategy so effectively.

Previously Donald co-founded CityDeal, which he later sold to Groupon where he built Groupon's international offices in Europe and Asia. He subsequently led BD at Airbnb global.

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In this episode we discuss:

01:36 Don’s journey into Venture Capital

03:18 How being an operator influenced Don’s path as an investor

06:30 What is Global Founders Capital mission and focus?

09:08 The fund construction model for Global Founders Capital

10:27 How they balance growth vs. early stage and how location factors into their investments

12:50 How Don and his team add value at scale across his portfolio

14:45 How their operations team and investments team work together

17:20 The risk/return Global Founders Capital underwrites to and their return targets

20:32 How the frothiness of the market in growth-stage investments affects how they approach growth investing.

22:52 The non-obvious opportunities for global investments

25:03 How the firm manages global investing out of a single fund

26:20 The benefit of bringing a strong operations background to global investing

28:30 Global Founders Capital’s pitch to LP

30:13 Differences between US LPs and international LPs

31:28 Recapping the recent market conditions and what the future looks like

33:38 What is the most counterintuitive lesson he’s learned as an investor

34:37 The investor he admires

35:32 The firm he feels is the best in the world

Mentioned in this episode:Global Founders Capital Felicis Ventures

I’d love to know what you took away from this conversation with Donald. 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

Founders Fund Delian Asparouhov on Miami as a major tech hub, what he thinks as the drivers for innovation now, and the pros of incubating companies like Varda within firms Sep 28, 2021

Show notes

Follow me @samirkaji for my thoughts on the venture market, with a focus on the continued evolution of the VC landscape.Today we’re thrilled to bring you my conversation with Delian Asparouhov of Founders Fund, a Silicon Valley and now Miami based firm that has long been known for backing some of the most category defining companies in the world including SpaceX, Palantir, Facebook, AirBnB, and Stripe. While at Founders Fund, Delian also co-founded Varda Space Industries, and previously worked at Khosla Ventures.A message from our sponsor:Pacific Western Bank is a full service commercial bank with over $34 billion in assets. The venture banking team specializes in financial products and services for startups, venture-backed businesses, and their venture capital and private equity investors.The experienced team is committed to the space and dedicated to delivering high-touch, tailored solutions, helping innovators take their business to the next level.In the first half of the year, the venture banking team has booked over $800 million in new loan commitments to help support the community. No matter the size or stage of your business, you can expect guidance, resources and flexibility, making them the perfect team to support your evolving needs.Turn your vision into reality with PWB. For more information, visit www.pacwest.com/lending-solutions, or follow us on LinkedIn and Twitter.*Equal Housing Lender & FDIC insured*Total assets & loans booked are as of June 30, 2021.In this episode we discuss:01:43 Delian’s journey to becoming an investor05:24 Why he felt VC was a better path for him than operating roles 11:52 Why he chose to go from Khosla Ventures (& now Founders Fund) instead of starting his own firm14:24 The decision to co-found Varda while being a full time investor17:38 How Delian attracted co-founders for Varda.21:31 Why there are a relative lack of investment dollars into areas like space. 25:22 How Founders Fund looks at the risk in investing in areas such as space.28:07 The catalyzing events in tech that will help drive exponential innovation. 31:27 Ingredients Miami has that will help it build a significant presence in tech, and why is talent going there?38:47 The most counterintuitive lesson Delian has learned as an investor40:56 Delian’s prediction for the venture market for the next few years43:47 The legendary investor that has most inspired himMentioned in this episode:Founders FundVarda Space IndustriesKhosla VenturesI’d love to know what you took away from this conversation with Delian. 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.Transcript:Samir Kaji:Hi, I'm Samir Kaji, host of Venture Unlocked, the podcast that takes you behind the scenes of the business of venture capital. Today, I'm thrilled to bring you my conversation with Delian Asparouhov who's a Principal at Founders Fund. Based in Miami and Silicon Valley, the firm has long been known for backing some of the most category-defining companies in the world, including SpaceX, Palantir, Facebook, Airbnb, and Stripe. While at Founders Fund, Delian also co-founded Varda Space Industries and then previously worked at Khosla Ventures. I had a lot of fun in this week's show as we talked about a number of things, including incubations within larger firms, the arc of where he sees technology, and what's going to drive innovation in the coming years, and why regional hubs like Miami will be major forces and drivers of innovation. Now let's get into the episode to hear all of that and more.Samir Kaji:Today's episode is sponsored by Pacific Western Bank, a full service commercial bank with over 34 billion in assets. The venture banking team of PacWest specializes in financial products and services for both startups and the venture and private equity funds that back them. I've worked with many of their team members over the last few decades, and I can attest with their commitment to bringing a high touch and personalized experience for every startup and fund manager client they have. So whether you're a founder or a fund manager at any stage of development, and you want to find out more, check them out at www.pacwest.com.Samir Kaji:Delian, great to see you, and thanks for joining us.Delian Asparouhov:Thanks so much for having me. Excited to be on today.Samir Kaji:Well, this is going to be a really fun conversation given how multifaceted your background is. And actually going from a waffle boy to becoming an entrepreneur and getting into tech, to now being a full-time investor at Founders Fund. Tell us how you got interested in tech in the first place and what led you to investing.Delian Asparouhov:Yeah, I had always been a computer scientist. My dad studied computer science and statistics and was a software engineer for basically his entire career. And so I think my first website I put up, I think summer between eighth and ninth grade, I had my first paid software gig summer between ninth and 10th grade, and so, the waffle boy experience was actually like, "I can tell where this life is headed and it's unlikely to have a service job in its life unless I intentionally do it now, and I think it's an important skillset to have, because I can't wait of just get paid for just working with your hands."Delian Asparouhov:And so, I actually had a much higher paying job the prior summer, where again, I was a software engineer and then I was like, "I'm gonna be a waffle boy this summer. I'm not going to do any software engineering." I did a some of that and I was like, "This it for me. I'm not a very good waffle boy." I basically quit at the end of the summer to go back to high school, but I think I got fired too. I think they were at their wit's end with me of, I really just like overselling the waffles more so than I like making them.Delian Asparouhov:And so yeah, I basically had this software engineering background, thought that I was headed into the world of academia. I really liked software robotic space, and so the plan was, both of my parents are PhD academic types, my mom's a professor, my dad's basically a professor, and so I was like, "Okay, my path in life is going to be academic robotic space." That points me towards undergrad at MIT, grad school at Caltech and then basically working at JPL/NASA on robotic space missions.Delian Asparouhov:And basically in freshman year at MIT, I had a couple of chance encounters with the most maybe influential, being with this guy, Bilal Zuberi, who's actually now a partner at Lux Capital, basically met me on I think fourth or fifth day of undergrad, and just introduced me to the world of venture capital startups, just like a potentially alternative path that had a much near term and faster path, should we say, impact on the world.Delian Asparouhov:And so I got hooked on that. I started going to these weekly dinners at MIT. They were these entrepreneurship dinners hosted and funded by the entrepreneurship center. And then just very quickly got obsessed, started reading about all these things, reading Hacker News, and had this idea stuck in my head where I was like, "Man, Jack Dorsey, he seems like he's the best entrepreneur right now. I got to figure out how to go work for him." And so that basically spring of my freshman year, I hustled my way into getting a summer internship with Square.Delian Asparouhov:And so moved out to Silicon valley in whatever, late May of 2012, fell in love over the course of that summer, had a really awesome experience in the summer of 2012 working for Square. I think I interviewed when the company was a 100, 120 people. By the time I joined, it was 150 and then by the time I left, it was 300. So, I remember when I left the Android engineering team at the end of the summer, one of the other engineers was like, "Oh, f**k, you're an intern? You're not a full-time really? You've been here longer than the rest of us." And I was like, "Yeah, but I'm actually just an intern and I guess I'm going to head back to school/head back to school with the intention of figuring how to drop out and get back here as soon as possible." Because I was like Square is awesome, but I'm young enough that, the risk reward curve, I should probably go start my own thing rather than working at a bigger company.Delian Asparouhov:And so I was lucky enough to be roommates with a guy who was friends with a Thiel Fellow and I learned about that program, applied, and then managed to make it out full-time to Silicon Valley in May of 2013. So yeah, thank you Bilal for teaching me about startups and eventually leading me out to Silicon Valley.Samir Kaji:It's a really interesting story. You think about 2013. You drop out of MIT to pursue being a startup entrepreneur, which comes with a lot of risks. And then ultimately you did that for four years and then took on a jump eventually with Keith Rabois at Khosla Ventures. And I always think about, as you go through your career, you're always making decisions that have opportunity costs. Why did you decide to go into venture versus staying within the operating role, either running a startup or actually working for a startup in some of the spaces that you really enjoyed?Delian Asparouhov:Yeah, so the original role at Khosla Ventures was actually due to me wanting to actually start another startup. I had this idea around cybersecurity insurance that I've been towing around with Keith for a while, and didn't feel like I had the right founding team yet to pull the trigger, but I really did want to figure start working on it. I had actually been having dinner with Keith talking about this, but then also happened to be talking about a friend that had dropped out of Harvard, but had gone back and finished school, and was graduating that was looking for what his first gig was going to be.Delian Asparouhov:And Keith was like, "Hey, I really like your friend, maybe I should hire him as my chief of staff." And so we talked about what the chief of staff role would entail, how it would work, et cetera. And I remember calling my friend literally right after that dinner and being like, "Hey, Keith wants to me to pitch you on this role." I literally got halfway through the pitch and had this set of an aha moment where I was like, "Oh f**k, I think I want to do this. And then I'm going to work on the cybersecurity insurance idea on the side while doing it."Delian Asparouhov:And so literally I was doing this call outside Keith's house after this dinner, and I knocked on his door after I was done with the call. And he's like, "What the f**k are you still doing here? We finished dinner like an hour ago." And I was like, "I've been outside on this call, but by the way, I think I just want the job. What do you think about me being your chief of staff? And then I'm going to work on this cybersecurity insurance idea and just use Khosla Ventures and this role as the platform to find these potential ideal co-founders, and in parallel, just learn a lot from you."Delian Asparouhov:And he was like, "That sounds great." We came to an agreement that I would do it for at least minimum of a year. So even if I did find the exact team, I would still keep doing the chief of staff role for at least a year since he was going to have to train me up on it. And I was like, "Great, I'm happy to do it for a year, and then I'll go back and operate this company."Delian Asparouhov:About, let's say six or seven months in, I had a couple of different realizations that hit me all at once that convinced me that I should potentially take the idea of staying in venture capital for the longer term actually made sense. Because nowadays I think people think like venture is cool, blah, blah, blah, but how? When I was growing up in Silicon Valley, 2014, '15 and '16, venture capital is where you went to retire. Nobody cool was doing venture capital. All the cool people were starting companies. And I think that's still honestly mostly the case.Delian Asparouhov:But I had a sudden realization that hit me about six months in where two things, the first was that my personality and skillsets were much more likely to make me a highly effective venture capitalist than they were to make me a highly effective founding CEO. I am super ADD. I'm super intellectually curious. I like to speak my mind even when it's relatively controversial and out there takes, and I don't particularly love managing other people's emotion ends or acting as a therapist. All those things are huge cons to be a founder, right? The ideal founders are monomaniacal, very perfect in their storytelling and are careful not to step over any bounds, are very good at being a therapist and managing people underneath them, and if anything, dislike contact switching.Delian Asparouhov:I realized, I was like, "Huh, these things are all huge cons to the founder, and yet they're all huge pros as an investor, right?" The best investors are intellectually curious and context switching and don't necessarily need to manage people. And so I'd always given other friends the advice of, when considering various career paths, you should generally likely lean into your strengths rather than try to mitigate your weaknesses, because by leaning into your strengths, you're much more likely to be top 1% and top 0.1 top 0.01% of the people in that particular category.Delian Asparouhov:And so I was like, "I think if I really, really worked hard, I could make be a top 10 or top 5% CEO," but it would take like a lot of work. Or I could do the thing that clearly comes much more naturally to my skillset and personality and just do that. And I can probably work less "hard," and I'll actually be top 0.1 or 0.01%. And then I had this sudden aha moment where I can't describe to you, up until then I'd had this obsessive, since that day with Bilal and then reading about Silicon Valley, I was like, "Oh, okay. To be one of the greats, you have to be a founding CEO." And so like, "I'm going to be a CEO. I'm going to be a CEO." And it was literally obsessive in my mind. And every day I was like, "In some ways, I don't care about the idea, I don't care what I'm working on, but I have to be the CEO."Delian Asparouhov:And then it was just this first crack where I was like, "Hmm, seems like I can be one of the greats and have a really great impact on the world without necessarily being a CEO. And then who knows maybe one day I'll figure how to do the job half, half and co-found something again one day," which eventually does happen four years later. And so yeah, maybe a month, six or seven or so, realized that.Delian Asparouhov:And then the second thing was, I actually happened to basically stumble across and source an aerospace company that Khosla Ventures ended up investing into at roughly month six or seven. And so the second aha moment that I had was, I'd always really wanted to work in aerospace, but the only models that I had for how to do that were either you went and worked at SpaceX as an engineer, which I had friends that did that, and I didn't really love the day to day life of just being an engineer. And then I had the second type of model, which was the Chamath, Elon, et cetera, which is basically, "You got to get rich in normal tech and then you get to go do space tech."Delian Asparouhov:…

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Banana Capital's Turner Novak on his unconventional path in breaking into VC, being a successful stage agnostic investor, and leveraging social platforms to build advantages Sep 21, 2021

Show notes

Follow me @samirkaji for my thoughts on the venture market, with a focus on the continued evolution of the VC landscape.We’re thrilled to bring you my conversation with Turner Novak, founder of Banana Capital. While fairly new to venture, Turner continually brings some of the most interesting perspectives about technology, and is one of best venture follows on social media. Turner has an incredible backstory on how he broke into VC, and ultimately within a few years was able to found Banana Capital in January 2021, with $9.99M in commitments, including several institutional investors. Prior to having his own fund, he was General Partner at Gelt VC and also interned at a pre-seed firm Afore Capital. We talked with Turner about the value of social media in VC, how he thinks that successful investing can be stage agnostic, and his views on where the public and private markets are today, and where they may go in the future. A message from our sponsor:Pacific Western Bank is a full service commercial bank with over $34 billion in assets. The venture banking team specializes in financial products and services for startups, venture-backed businesses, and their venture capital and private equity investors.The experienced team is committed to the space and dedicated to delivering high-touch, tailored solutions, helping innovators take their business to the next level.In the first half of the year, the venture banking team has booked over $800 million in new loan commitments to help support the community. No matter the size or stage of your business, you can expect guidance, resources and flexibility, making them the perfect team to support your evolving needs.Turn your vision into reality with PWB. For more information, visit www.pacwest.com/lending-solutions, or follow us on LinkedIn and Twitter.*Equal Housing Lender & FDIC insured*Total assets & loans booked are as of June 30, 2021.In this episode we discuss:02:00 Turner’s journey into Venture Capital03:21 Getting his first internship in VC at Afore Capital07:43 The early days as an investor and his first investments11:25 How he built a strong deal flow channel despite being so new. 13:37 Choosing to raise his fund without a 506c provision and going the traditional way despite a huge social following. 15:42 The impetus behind raising $9.99M18:55 Turner’s scaling plan22:04 The role of speed in the capital environments today25:26 Using social media to amplify his strategy and brand30:51 How he strikes the right balance on social media to ensure he’s productively adding to the brand, but while staying authentic. 34:28 Turner’s investment criteria and how he evaluates deals and companies38:06 What he believes the markets will look like in the next 2-3 years43:18 The most counterintuitive thing he’s learned as an investor45:10 The lesson he’s learned from an investing miss46:51 The investor that most inspires himMentioned in this episodeBanana CapitalGelt VCAfore CapitalI’d love to know what you took away from this conversation with Turner. 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.Transcript:Samir Kaji:Hi, I'm Samir Kaji, host of Venture Unlocked, the podcast that takes you behind the scenes of the business of venture capital. Today, we're thrilled to bring you my conversation with Turner Novak, Founder of Banana Capital. While fairly new at venture, Turner continually brings some of the most interesting perspectives about technology and venture and also happens to be one of the best follows in social media.Samir Kaji:He's also got a great backstory on how he broke into this sea and ultimately within a few years was able to found Banana Capital in January 2021 with 9.99 million amendments, including several institutions participating. Before starting his own fund, he was a general partner at Gelt VC and also had interned at pre-seed from Afore Capital.Samir Kaji:We covered a lot of ground at this podcast, including the value of social media in VC, how he thinks being stage agnostic can be a successful strategy and his views on the public and private markets and where we're headed. Now, let's get into the episode to hear all of that and more.Samir Kaji:Today's episode is sponsored by Pacific Western Bank, a full-service commercial bank with over 34 billion in assets. The venture banking team at PacWest specializes in financial products and services for both startups and the venture and private equity funds that back them. I've worked with many of their team members over the last few decades. And I can attest to their commitment to bringing a high touch and personalized experience for every startup and fund manager client they have.Samir Kaji:So, whether you're a founder or a fund manager at any stage of development, and you want to find out more, check them out at www.pacwest.com.Samir Kaji:Hey, Turner, it's great to see you, man. Thanks for being on the show.Turner Novak:Hey. Awesome, thanks for having me.Samir Kaji:This will be a lot of fun given your backstory, which is really unique, and then all the great content that you put on Twitter and TikTok regarding venture and tech in general. But let's get back to how you got into this, why you became interested in being an investor. And then ultimately, how did you actually break in when you didn't have the traditional Silicon Valley networks that a lot of people that get into venture do.Turner Novak:The first time I really got interested in venture and knew it was possible to do it from Michigan, was I read a post from Blake Robbins at Ludlow saying, I forget the title, it was how I became a VC from Michigan. And it was always something I thought was fascinating because there's intersection of all these different things I wanted to do when I grew up and what I was interested in.Turner Novak:But yeah, I live in Michigan. I kind of thought I might have moved to a big city at some point, but ended up getting married right after school, met my girlfriend, now my partner during school. So, we never moved away.Turner Novak:And yeah, so I remember reading Blake's post was like, "Oh, cool. So, it's possible." And that was really the first thing that kind of got me. I mean, I had joined the investment club in college and was the president of the club for a couple of years.Turner Novak:And I just loved investing. And I was mostly investing in venture style things in the public markets anyways, kind of knew that's what I was going to do. But I never actually thought it was possible until that moment when I first read that.Samir Kaji:Yes. So, you read the post that inspires you. You're like, I think I can do venture from a place like Michigan. But it still requires you to find a landing spot, have somebody believe in you in the early days. And I know you interned at Afore, how did you go about actually getting in front of folks like that to even intern or even ultimately get a job?Turner Novak:Here's a long process. Initially, it started, I had just started tweeting, essentially. I'd use Twitter for, I don't know, a decade for fantasy football. I think that was initially what I use it for a lot. And I just noticed that it seems like a lot of people are on Twitter talking about this stuff. It's a way to kind of share your thoughts, build a brand, a kind of funny word to say but showing how you're thinking about things. And I kind of just slowly started to meet people that way.Turner Novak:And initially, I just kind of picked a niche or certain things to talk about with the end goal of eventually making the jump into VC. So, I kind of started, I think the first couple months I was on Twitter, all I talked about was Snapchat and just how I thought it was coming back. I mean, the consensus at the time was this is the next Myspace. And I was very firmly just thought that was just wrong. And if I just put my thoughts out there eventually over time. It might take a while, but I'd kind of show how I was thinking about things.Turner Novak:And then started tweeting a lot about TikTok when it first launched, just same thing. It was kind of crazy at the time, but I was just like, I mean, it's the best product I've ever used. I think this is going to be the most valuable company in the world one day. And again, crazy things to say, but that's what you have to do to be a good investor.Turner Novak:And then probably one of my big, I guess, the smarter things that I did that kind of accelerated things was I made this fantasy VC portfolio. So, it's fantasy football combined with investing. I had a fake million dollars, picked some startups, fake invested. Honestly, I had no idea how these companies were doing in most cases. It was going on Google, Reddit, Product Hunt, listening to a couple of the founders who go on a podcast.Turner Novak:And there's a 30, a 15-minute conversation, it was kind of like you talk to them, they talk about the business. Maybe they'd share some metrics and how they were doing. But it was basically just, essentially, what's the business model? Does it make sense? Does this seem like a good venture bet, to kind of hack together this fake portfolio.Turner Novak:And one of the founders actually found it and threw it up on his Twitter. And he had 100,000 followers at the time, and was just like, this is the best analysis my company I've ever seen. And I was like, "Whoa, did not expect that. That's pretty cool."Samir Kaji:What year was that? That was around what, 2018?Turner Novak:Yeah. It was the summer of 2018. I kind of just used that type of stuff over. It was like a two-year period, maybe a little under two years. But just DMing people pretty strategically, trying to line up meetings, San Francisco. And if enough people said, yes, I'd actually book a flight, take time off work to go.Turner Novak:And it was a very long process, probably had about five interviews all at once. We're kind of associate principal type roles moving to San Francisco and Afore was looking for someone to help out part time as an intern. But they're open to someone working remotely. And that was kind of insane a couple years ago. That was off the table at every firm. They weren't even open to discussing that because there's all these great candidates in San Francisco.Turner Novak:And so, I ended up taking that job. And it was interesting, because I remember having conversation with Anamitra, my old boss, and I told him, I'm just going to quit my job and I'll work for you full time. But you can treat me like I'm an intern. And it actually took me a couple days to convince him. I was just like, "Don't worry, I will drive for Uber. I'll do whatever I need to do to just make money."Turner Novak:And what I ended up doing was I couldn't afford my mortgage. So, we just sold the house we were living in. And then I had a rental property, too, that I bought. It was like a couple of years prior, my mom had got some money from her divorce. And I used that and my tax return or tax refund as a down payment on a rental, and then she lived with me. So, she prepaid me 12 months of rent and lived with me in this house. So, I had a ton of equity in the house. And I sold it also and then we used that to live off of for a while. So, that was the initial kind of how it happened.Samir Kaji:That's a great story and certainly epitomizes some of the sacrifices you made to get into venture. And I'm curious in terms of when you started actually putting money in the ground between the constructing that fantasy portfolio and then pre-Banana Capital, which we'll of course talk about later. What was that process like and what were the early days of your investment career?Turner Novak:It was a lot of fun. It was interesting story. So, I had met Keith Wasserman, my partner at Gelt, a couple of years prior on Twitter. He'd been following me. We'd met up a couple times when I had flown out to LA to interview, meet with people.Turner Novak:And he was dead set convinced on I was going to be a good VC. We were going to raise this venture fund from his real estate investors. And then I was going to invest the fund split everything three ways. And he kind of convinced me that ... He was more for this than I was, that I was going to team up with them, and we were going to do this fund.Turner Novak:So, kind of how it went, I joined, no, October 1st of 2019, we started investing their personal balance sheet and kind of built a deck around the portfolio companies that I had invested in. And our first close was set for March 31st of 2020, which, if you remember what it was like then, it was pretty crazy. It made it a little bit difficult to get everybody across the finish line.Turner Novak:It also the dynamics of running a $1.5 billion AUM real estate fund and then a $5 million was what we're shooting for venture fund, they were really focused on the real estate business. And I was trying to raise this fund that I honestly had no idea what I was doing to be completely honest with everybody listening, never raised a fund before. I thought I might do this in 10 years.Turner Novak:So, I was basically just forced to go try to fundraise and a lot of people I was talking to, they were saying like, "I would love to invest in your fund, but this doesn't really make sense. If you ever do your own thing, maybe we can talk about it." And so, when you talk about what it was like investing it, I remember looking March, I think I have a couple founders on a waitlist. Three things I've committed to, doing the first close at the end of the month, and I can send you the money.Turner Novak:And then, we don't exactly have a first close. There's a little bit of money that came in, but there's a global pandemic. The economy is essentially like the stock market is collapsing. These founders need money and even over the course of the summer, it was basically like, I'm in to give you the money. I just need eight weeks to raise it. And I've got a couple people that actually need it more than you. And I was basically raising 100K, I've wired to a founder, raised 50K, wired to a founder. It really affected the kind of companies that I was investing in.Turner Novak:And I basically just had a really, really good relationship with the founder. I mean, it's basically founders that didn't need my money at the end of the day. I was coming in at the tail end of an $8 million round or something or couple million dollar round and I wasn't making the difference.Samir Kaji:As you're doing that, you're right, trying to close during the beginning of the pandemic, you'd spent a lot of time looking at the public markets and March 18th, I think was a low point where we saw the markets really dipped to I think the Dow was something like 18,000. And everyone was really nervous. I mean, if you talk to VCs, everyone's thinking about triage, think about their existing portfolios. LPs, it completely stopped. But here you are, getting a new close, you started investing.Samir Kaji:But you were still pretty early. You did an internship at Afore, now you're investing out of a fairly small fund. Why were founders allowing you in into these, it seems like these rounds were oversubscribed? How much of it was related to the fact that you had been putting your thoughts out there? And I do want to get into this creator economy and what we're seeing right now is so many funds that are 10 million or under raising in different ways than the past. But tell us a little bit about what really hel…

Full show notes at the publisher

Primary Venture Partners Jason Shuman on integrating partners into an established partnership, KPI's on measuring value to founders, and views on portfolio construction. Sep 14, 2021

Show notes

Follow me @samirkaji for my thoughts on the venture market, with a focus on the continued evolution of the VC landscape.Today, I’m excited to bring you my conversation with Jason Shuman, a partner at NY based Primary Venture Partners. The firm leads seed rounds for companies in NY and has previously invested in companies such as Jet, Mirror, and Latch. The firm recently raised two funds totaling $200MM. Prior to joining Primary, he spent time as Chief Of Staff for GLG founder Mark Gerson, was an associate at Corigin Venture, and founded and ran a company called Category Five from 2011-2015. We chatted with Jason about the importance of culture in building lasting teams, KPI’s for delivering founder success from their internal portfolio services team, and how he views both NY and the entire venture market today. A message from our sponsor:Pacific Western Bank is a full service commercial bank with over $34 billion in assets. The venture banking team specializes in financial products and services for startups, venture-backed businesses, and their venture capital and private equity investors.The experienced team is committed to the space and dedicated to delivering high-touch, tailored solutions, helping innovators take their business to the next level.In the first half of the year, the venture banking team has booked over $800 million in new loan commitments to help support the community. No matter the size or stage of your business, you can expect guidance, resources and flexibility, making them the perfect team to support your evolving needs.Turn your vision into reality with PWB. For more information, visit www.pacwest.com/lending-solutions, or follow us on LinkedIn and Twitter.*Equal Housing Lender & FDIC insured*Total assets & loans booked are as of June 30, 2021.In this episode we discuss:01:44 Jason’s journey into the startup world04:37 What he learned in working with GLG founder Mark Gerson07:05 The decision to join Primary versus starting his own firm11:42 How Primary was able to seamlessly integrate him into the partnership14:37 Jason’s advice to someone who is joining a successful venture firm17:42 Why being selective and keeping a smaller portfolio is important to Primary21:23 Primary’s philosophy on building a team 24:31 The KPIs Primary uses to assess whether they are delivering value to founders27:21 Why Primary has decided to remain geo-focused on New York instead of expand 29:41 How Jason views speed versus diligence when investing in today’s marketplace33:41 Thoughts on the seed market in 202137:15 The most counterintuitive lesson he’s learned as an investor38:03 The investment miss that he’s learned from39:54 The investor that inspires himMentioned in this episodePrimary PartnersI’d love to know what you took away from this conversation with Jason. 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.Transcript:Samir Kaji:I am Samir Kaji, your host of Venture Unlocked, the podcast that takes a behind the scenes of the business of venture capital. On this week's episode, I'm thrilled to bring you my conversation with Jason Shuman, a Partner with New York based Primary Venture Partners. The firm leads seed rounds for companies in New York, and previously invested in companies such as Jet, Mirror and Latch. Earlier this year, the company raised two funds totaling $200 million. Before joining Primary in 2018, he spent time as Chief of Staff for GLG founder Mark Gerson, was an Associate at Corigin Ventures and founded and ran a company called Category Five from 2011 to 2015. I found Jason to be really thoughtful and we had a great conversation on things like finding alignment when you join a firm, the tangible KPIs they use to measure success and what type of value they're providing founders and his view of New York and the market as a whole. Now let's get into the episode to hear all of that and more.Samir Kaji:Jason, it's so great to have you on the show and thanks for joining us.Jason Shuman:Thanks for having me, man. Appreciate it.Samir Kaji:Let's go back a little bit. I know you're now investing out of fund three, but what led you into becoming a venture investor and getting interested in startups?Jason Shuman:Yeah, so I'm from Boston originally and I grew up in a family of entrepreneurs. My dad was running his own company, my aunts and uncles, my cousins, it felt like everybody was running their own thing. So I became obsessed with startups when I was pretty young, like literally in middle school, I was writing business plans for mobile payments on flip phones. And in high school I went to work at this identity theft protection company that was run by my aunt and uncle. And they had a former VC from SoftBank working over there at the time and I just learned a ton from them about A/B testing and customer acquisition and LTV. And I just became a total nerd around startups more broadly, which ended up taking me down to the University of Miami for college, where I studied entrepreneurship and marketing and launched my first company, which was direct-to-consumer footwear company back in 2011.Jason Shuman:It was good timing, but pretty bad execution if I could say so myself. So when you can't operate, go ahead and invest, is sometimes that I joke about, but literally about a year out of school we had gotten the thing around profitability, but co-founder breakups, cashflow issues with that company, I just decided to wind it down. I couldn't imagine myself really doing it for the next 10 years. And sitting there as a 23 year old in Boston at the time at home, I was like, "What do I want to do next?" And I didn't have the confidence to start a new company and I didn't know if I really wanted to go operate at a friend's company, but this thing called venture capital became super interesting. Really at the beginning, it was for four reasons. The first one was I could learn about different industries nonstop and I'm a huge nerd and so doing that was great.Jason Shuman:Number two, is I wanted to be able to fundraise easier and number three was really that I could meet a better team for the next time around. And you only know an A-player when you've seen it. And I felt like the VC would put me at the forefront of meeting some of the best operators really in the world. And lastly, venture really aligns with my why in life. And I'm sure we'll get more into this, but the idea of being able to go help others, give them the confidence, the skill set, the tools, the relationships to live a more successful fulfilling life, venture really aligns with that. So I drove for Uber at night and sourced deals during the day for free and eventually found myself getting a 90 day trial offer from the guys over at Corigin Ventures to be their first hire and the rest has been history.Samir Kaji:So you started at Corigin which at the time was the venture arm of the parent company. Ultimately did that for a while and worked then I think with Mark Gerson of GLG. You and I have talked about that offline. That was an interesting experience where you got exposure to a lot of different things. It wasn't just traditional venture. Tell us a little bit about the experience with Mark.Jason Shuman:Mark Gerson's an incredible guy. He did an incredible job building GLG to the behemoth that it is. I would say the quiet behemoth that it is actually in New York City being a billion dollar plus market place business. But he's also an incredible philanthropist and he has his hands in so many buckets. So when I came over there to really get the family office stood up, I was doing a slew of different activities. One, was venture capital investing, the second was we were working on incubating companies. The next was LP investing. We had some philanthropic efforts that I was involved in, in Israel and Africa. And then the last thing that I was supposed to be doing was spinning up a mentor network between ultrahigh net worths and pro athletes.Jason Shuman:So one of the first people that actually we onboarded was a guy by the name of Kevin Beacham who has gone above and beyond all expectations that I ever had in terms of his investing career now, and really become like a brother to me in many ways. But about six months into that gig, I actually got pulled into a portfolio company of Mark's to operate again. So at that point I was doing both operating, raising some capital for the company and also investing in startups. So it was a heck of a time and it really made me have a lot of empathy for founders, even more because of the fact that during my first startup, I didn't raise venture. But during that one, I was a big part of the process and going out and fundraising.Samir Kaji:It's such a unique experience to be able to run so many different things from investing directly in early stage startups to doing LP investments, to working with debt funds. And you probably learned a lot of how the investment world works and the fact that there are so many ways you can make money and there's so many ways to capitalize companies. At a certain point, you probably were deciding like, "What do I do with my life and on a go-forward basis?" And where you spend your time. You ultimately went to Primary Ventures. And my presumption is that there were a lot of things that you've learned during your time with Mark that really shaped your view on the type of firm you wanted to join. Walk us through exactly the decision model you had of "I'm going to join Primary, not another firm, not start my own." What was that like and take us inside your head at that point.Jason Shuman:Yeah. So I need to give credit to Ash Egan. He had actually just launched his own fund Acrylic, which is in the crypto space, but Ash and I were having a conversation when I kind of hit this point that I knew I wanted to move on. I knew I wanted to go back into venture full time. And I went through this exercise that was like, "what do I want out of my next gig and what do I want to optimize for?" And I went down to my notebook and I wrote down the different types of funds that fundamentally existed at seed. And on one side of the spectrum, you have these funds that are like, "Spray and pray, come over here, hustle your butt off, go and network nonstop, but write 250K checks and 30, 40 companies a year."Jason Shuman:And you're networking mainly with VCs because at the end of the day, that's where you're probably going to get a lot of your deal flow from. On the other side of the spectrum, I was like, "do I want to go to a multi-stage fund? These guys are starting to come down the stack and they're starting to get some seed practice going and do I want to start that for them?" Because I've always considered myself relatively entrepreneurial. But then in the middle of the spectrum was the absolute sweet spot and what I love. And honestly, life is too short for you to do something that isn't what you love. And that sweet spot for me was high conviction, hands-on investing at the seed stage and that meant leading deals, and it meant leading very few deals a year.Jason Shuman:And so when I drew each one of those buckets, I wrote the firms down below each one of those buckets that I knew, or that I had worked with. And in one day I had sent out about 35 emails to folks saying, "Hey, so-and-so, I've really enjoyed getting to know you. I'm thinking about my next move would love to have a conversation." Now that weekend, I got a phone call from Luke Schoenfelder at Latch. And he said to me, "Hey man, I think you really need to talk to Ben and Brad. They just announced their second fund, $100 million from an investment strategy perspective. You guys are super aligned and they're just great humans." And so I met up with Ben at Le Pain Quotidien on Broadway and 21st that morning and what was supposed to be like a 30 minute meeting turned into two hours.Jason Shuman:And what I realized was that from a strategy perspective, we were literally the most aligned that you could get. I mean, fundamentally we believe that at the earliest stages, there's many ways to make money, but startups are hard and founders deserve better. So if we're focused and we're pushing them to be focused, we need to be even more focused. So it's like we're New York only, we're seed only. We only lead and we're trying to bring a tank to a knife fight. Like we invest more in our portfolio impact team than anybody else. And when I was looking at funds in full transparency, there was a few that I was at the offer stage with.Jason Shuman:And some that were even giving me offers to make more money or have a better title from day one. But when you have two firms that have the exact same AUM and one firm has a team of 13 people, and out of that more than half are on portfolio impact. And the other firm is only a couple of GPs and a platform person. I said to myself, "which side of history do I want to be on?" And ultimately I am where I am today.Samir Kaji:Looking back then you sort of go through this decision model, which sounds very thoughtful, right? You've kind of forced rank what you cared about. You had this view that Primary in itself, and the partners were just incredibly aligned with the way you thought about it. But going into a new firm, especially a firm that's already established, you a couple partners with Ben and Brad that had worked together for a long time. And a lot of firms have struggled with integrating new senior investment professionals having a seat at the table and having a culture. How did you yourself think about those intangibles when joining? What has Primary done right to be able to integrate new people in a way that provides really long-term viability and the right culture?Jason Shuman:Ben and Brad get a ton of credit for this. I think it starts with trust. When they go out to find new people to bring on the team, the interview process is not just about getting to know you as a person, but it's getting to the place where they feel like they can really trust you. If I can give a piece of advice to young investors that are going into a firm with an established partnership, it's really that the skill of, "getting a deal done," is really about trying to help build consensus. And if you can't build consensus, it's about articulating your framework from an investment evaluation perspective and getting people to see your point of view and your perspective. At the end of the day, we have an investment framework internally where we write down a list of got to believe in any investment and it's like, if you believe in X, Y, and Z, then we should be doing this investment. And the thing is in a diligence process, maybe two out of the three gotta believes you can diligence and check that box and say, "that's obvious. Let's just say that's completely obvious." But the third one is the one that gets debated the most. And at the end you never know, one person could be right and the other person could be wrong, but this is the type of business where we're arguing about things that nobody really fundamentally knows the answer today.Jason Shuman:And so if you're working with people whose point of view you trust, and you think they're really smart and they worked their butt off and have learned through years of experience, then you're going to give them the leash. And to my credit, I think to Ben and Brad is that they've given me the leash to really go out…

Full show notes at the publisher

Broadhaven Ventures' Michael Sidgmore on democratization of venture capital, why Alts are the future of private portfolios, and the role of wealth management firms. Sep 07, 2021

Show notes

Follow me @samirkaji for my thoughts on the venture market, with a focus on the continued evolution of the VC landscape.

Today we’re thrilled to bring you a very unique conversation with Michael Sidgmore, Co-Founder of Broadhaven Ventures and host of the Alt Goes mainstream podcast. Broadhaven Ventures is fintech focused and has invested in several platforms that make alternatives more accessible including, Republic, Party Round, iCapital, Alt, and of course our startup Allocate.

Additionally, Michael was an early employee at iCapital (currently valued at $4B), which enabled private wealth managers to offer top alternatives to their clients.

Michael is also a Venture Partner at Goodwater Capital, one of the top global consumer focused venture capital platforms in the world with over $2 Billion of assets under management.

We covered the broad topics of retail influence within alternatives, the future democratization of venture capital, and why a larger supply of LPs is coming.

A message from our sponsor:

Pacific Western Bank is a full service commercial bank with over $34 billion in assets. The venture banking team specializes in financial products and services for startups, venture-backed businesses, and their venture capital and private equity investors.

The experienced team is committed to the space and dedicated to delivering high-touch, tailored solutions, helping innovators take their business to the next level.

In the first half of the year, the venture banking team has booked over $800 million in new loan commitments to help support the community. No matter the size or stage of your business, you can expect guidance, resources and flexibility, making them the perfect team to support your evolving needs.

Turn your vision into reality with PWB. For more information, visit www.pacwest.com/lending-solutions, or follow us on LinkedIn and Twitter.

*Equal Housing Lender & FDIC insured

*Total assets & loans booked are as of June 30, 2021.

In this episode we discuss:

01:06 Why Michael got into investing

08:02 The world of alternatives

12:55 How the demand for alternatives assets has changed over the years

18:31 Navigating the challenges for people to access alternatives

24:19 The long term progression of alternative investments

29:29 Important thematic trends in the next generation of investors

34:09 What adding value to investments means to Broadhaven

37:52 Balancing the relationship between founders and VCs

41:43 Successfully scaling for value

Mentioned in this episodeBroadhaven Ventures

I’d love to know what you took away from this conversation with Michael. 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

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