Episode 1 - Relationships as a Superpower with Sree Kolli

I think the thing that really helped me be interesting to Ventura Funds was that I was already very involved in the ecosystem. I started building relationships with people very early on and it was as simple as reaching out to folks at companies that I was excited about. Hey, welcome everyone. I'm JJ. I'm Austin and we're the hosts of the Going Vc Podcast. Going Vc is a professional development program that aims to help you take your next or first step in Ventura Capital. And to that end, we're really excited to bring to you today the first episode. Our goal with this podcast is to full. First, to pull back the curtain on a career in VC, as well as give you a peek inside some of the lesser-seen parts of industry through conversations with LPs, academics, and more. New episodes will premiere every second Monday at 6am Eastern and on each we'll talk about their career path, as well as tactical feedback for thriving before diving into Q&A. Whether you're new or on your third fund or just curious, it's our hope there'll be something interesting for you in each episode. Bowring from our friends at the Associated Podcasts, if you're new to the industry and there might be some jargon you're unfamiliar with, we'll do our best to collect them and put together gloss through in the Going Vc blog. If you have any questions for us, let us know at [email protected]. That's right, we're all ears. And with that out of the way, let's get started. Our guest today is Sree Kohli. Sree's the founder of Conduit, a platform connecting the world's best operator investors with founders from around the world. Before that, she was an associate for two years at the Partnership Fund for New York City, and before that, an analyst at JP Morgan. She's also the former head of community and marketing at All Raise East, a nonprofit dedicated to increasing the number of woman decision makers in Vc. In today's episode, we learned about Sree's background, the importance of operational experience, breaking into venture, why she thinks building great relationships as her superpower as well as what it's been like starting Conduit. Yeah, and I think we're off to a great start to our podcast of Sree. For those of you who want to break an adventure capital, grab a note pad and iPad, any sort of pad to write down all the takeaways. We hope you enjoy the conversations as much as we did. Thanks again for joining us today, Sree. Let's dive in. To get started, could you tell the audience a little about your background? Sure, yeah, I spent about two years at the Partnership Fund for New York City, and I was mostly early stage enterprise opportunities. I did a lot of digital health life sciences and some FinTech as well, but I would say that it was a great way for me to initially understand how the venture ecosystem in New York specifically operates, and the fund itself is backed by a lot of the large corporations in New York, the major banks, financial institutions, real estate companies, etc. Making the ability to really understand how the corporations interact with startups and how New York is evolving over the last few years has been really interesting. I've always thought about it as a financial hub, but being able to kind of explore from the healthcare lens was really interesting, and that was my first exposure to venture capital. Making the flexibility and opportunity to really meet lots of people across the ecosystem was exciting. A lot of my time was spent sourcing new opportunities and building relationships with other stakeholders in the ecosystem, whether they be founders, future founders, other investors, or folks with strong industry experience. So overall, definitely like a great way to get your feet wet. I think any of these two to three year programs are a really good way to help junior investors understand what venture really is, but I think it's valuable to get operating experience prior to sticking to it long term. You also develop a lot more, I would say, rapport with founders because you've actually been through that process yourself. Yeah, definitely. Wondering if we could rewind a little before we move forward, before you were at the partnership fund, you were at JP Morgan, right? Sure. I started my current investment banking. I was in the tech group at JP Morgan in New York. It's been a few years there. Started to really understand kind of the finance industry as a whole and realized that there was a lot of opportunity to work with early stage founders in the venture ecosystem versus more traditional finance. So I started to think about various ways to get involved. And I found that venture would be the best way to have a broad exposure to a variety of different sectors on geographies and would enable me to kind of figure out what I really liked within the tech industry and then dive deeper into solving a particular problem or focusing on a certain industry or subsector and venture just is so broad. But I really liked the opportunity to kind of explore a bunch of different things at once and then dive deeper later on. Oh, that's awesome. Working at a big company like JP Morgan Chase is obviously quite different. Was there some sort of genesis moment you had that you realized you maybe wanted to go quite the bit of the other spectrum? It wasn't one particular moment, I would say. I think working in investment banking is a really great experience, especially right out of college. It gets an amazing opportunity to get access to really sharp people and understand the intricacies of how some of the largest deals in the world happen. And that experience was phenomenal. I had interned on that team the year prior and I'd always spent my summer working in New York at various banks but that particular opportunity was really fascinating to me because at the age of 21 it was very rare that I would have had that opportunity to interact with the types of people that I did and kind of be part of some of the largest deals in the world at such a young age. And I felt that sort of exposure would lay a really strong foundation in whatever direction I wanted to go there after, which is why I took that path out of school. And after that point I realized that the process of doing deals becomes pretty monotonous and it's more process oriented and I wanted to spend more time thinking about how key decisions were made and focusing on how early stage companies really create value long term. And that sort of an insight can only be gained if you're working very, very closely either at the company or working at an early stage fund where you get that sort of exposure on a day to day basis. Makes sense. Could you expand a little on some of the differences between your time at JP Morgan and at the partnership fund? And was there anything that you learned at JP Morgan which you thought will prepare do you particularly well for moving to venture afterwards? Culturally yes, it is very different. I would say any financial services role is pretty institutionalized in a lot of ways and has a lot of structure which is great when you're initially starting your career and laying the groundwork. I think that all of the skills I learned there have enabled me to operate in a more unstructured environment for what it's worth. I think that it gave me the confidence and the ability to really think beyond what already exists and had made me into much more execution focused as an operator. And so I became a lot more efficient. I was really analytical and was able to distill complex topics into very simple things which enabled me to build rapport with founders and other investors and being a very extroverted person and being very involved in a broader ecosystem has really helped me develop relationships and I think that was something that I was missing. When you work in banking, your relationships are limited to the deals and the company that you work with. But when you work in venture, it is a very collaborative ecosystem. A lot of the opportunities that you find and you end up doing are often a result of having a connection to somebody and building those organic relationships has become very much part of my ethos, I think. And it's really fulfilling in a lot of ways because you meet such incredible people that come from all walks of life and you can really learn a lot from each other. So I think long term, I was trying to optimize for growth and learning and at a certain point, I was initially excited about no longer existed in a traditional sector. Nothing to say about banking as a industry, I just think when you move into an unstructured role, there's just a lot more opportunity. It's a lot more challenging and it's a bit scarier, but I think with that comes a lot of growth. Sure. No, I think that's awesome. I'm curious. I think there's a lot of people who are in investment banking who would like to move to venture capital. If you could talk a little bit about how you actually made that move. Sure. At the end of the day, I think yes, a lot of folks, when you come up on your two or three years in banking, often think about, okay, what direction do I want to take my career? For me, it felt like the options were going into a private equity fund, going to a hedge fund or exploring the venture space more thoughtfully. I was trying to optimize for working with a different stage of company versus where I was working at my bank. When you think about it, private equity is much later stage growth equity is growth stage, obviously, but venture is a very nebulous concept. It could be anywhere from pre-seed or pre-idea even sometimes to early stage growth capital. That spectrum is very broad, but I was so enamored by it. I thought it was such a unique opportunity to really understand so many different things from a sector standpoint, from a functional perspective and just meet incredible people that I wouldn't have the opportunity to otherwise. When you leave banking, I think most people typically go into private equity or go to a hedge fund. That's mainly because those institutions really value the modeling skill set a lot more than I think an early stage fund would. That's mainly because it is really important to be able to analyze metrics and be able to think about projections and be able to vet those theories and figure out if a company is a viable investment opportunity or not. It becomes very number-striven. When you go earlier stage, a lot of the analysis is qualitative when it comes down to it. It's really about the team, kind of the team that they're going after the initial technology and then the traction in that order. When I think about my background, I came from a very structured financial services background which enabled me to have all the analytical skills that I would need, but I think the thing that really helped me be interesting to venture funds was that I was already very involved in the ecosystem. I think it's important to develop a personal brand, especially in the early days so people feel comfortable in your ability to sell the vision of their fund, sell the vision of how they can support a particular founder or share your skill set in a very genuine way where you're not just someone that can crunch numbers all day, but you can also build a relationship and really leverage the more EQ side of things. That I think is so underrated. People often feel that financial services is a very transactional industry which it is in certain ways, but I've come to realize that those sorts of relationships are really unfruitful long term and for me it's always been about developing relationships with founders early on, with future founders, with other investors and industry professionals that have strong expertise in various domains. Because at the end of the day you can spend hours reading about a topic or you can tap one of your friends or acquaintances and say, "Hey, I know you're an expert in this space. We'd love to chat with you for 15 minutes. I'm looking at a deal in this area." I think that is a much more valuable thought-provoking conversation than trying to learn everything about a sector and then try to sell the founder or make them believe and trust you. It is very much of an organic relationship that you have to build and it's really hard in the earliest of days. I started my recruiting process almost 18 months to two years before I was even thinking about leaving. I did not go through the traditional private equity process. For me it was more of a, I really enjoyed banking and if I were to leave I wanted to do something that was very much in my line of interest, but I was also very particular about the type of role that I wanted. I think a lot of people that already knew that they wanted to do venture, maybe they only took four months or six months to really land their job, but I was a bit more nebulous in my approach. I wanted to really learn a lot about the industry and then decide how I wanted to break in because there is also a world where you can go to a startup and then try to pivot into a venture role thereafter. For me, the entire process was a learning process and I wanted to use that next two to three years to integrate myself and immerse myself in this ecosystem and then figure out what part I really belonged in. What do you think set you apart during that 18 month process? I think what really set me apart is that I have very strong emotional intelligence and I'm really strong at being able to build relationships with people and I think that's what made me successful in landing a job in venture. And I understood how the broader ecosystem was interacting with each other and how certain players were kind of working together whether that be various venture funds or certain founders in a particular sector. I spent time building relationships in each of those areas before I even brought up that I was interested in working for them. I think it was more of an organic thing and relationship driven initiative in the sense I wanted to work at XYZ funds but I used to think about okay who are their portfolio company founders, what sectors are they interested in and prep before every conversation I had with anybody at that fund. And being able to add value to a conversation is so critical versus just thinking about okay what can this person do for me. It's really hard to cast a wide net and be thoughtful in every single interaction but it's also important for people to realize that the world is very small and everybody talks to each other. So you want to make sure that you're coming off in a very genuine way versus just seeming like you want a job in venture. That's not good enough and doesn't really tell anyone about who you are or why you want this job or what value you're going to provide. They should never ask you why should I hire you. That should never be a question. The question should be it's amazing you've done so much for us already we'd love to find a way to work with you either now or that's the golden statement that you want people to say to you. And I think when I initially started recruiting I did not have that. I was trying to figure out how to break in and I was so focused on that versus thinking about how do I just create a lot of value for everybody and then kind of position myself for the role I want. The other thing is yes people are hiring for certain roles but you can also create your own role. This is 2020 literally anything can happen as we've realized this here and I think it's about figuring out what your strengths are and understanding how you can play to that over a period of time. And not if there is no single formula for getting a job at XYZ fund. It's really showing your true personality and your true passion and figuring out how do I create the role that I want and that might not look like the way that you are envisioning in the initial days but it's important to really have a broad picture and really optimize for learning and building new skills versus optimizing for a logo on your resume. Yeah, absolutely. The sum of the best advice I've heard for people interested in venture. You're not focusing on a checklist of things you need to be a good candidate but instead of relationships being helpful and almost creating your own serendipity because like you said it's 2020 and anything can happen. Yeah, I mean at the end of the day like I think my experience was great in the sense that I really enjoyed that coming out of banking I felt that venture was more unstructured in the sense. I think that took me a little bit of time getting used to. It was more about figuring out how I wanted to spend my time and what I thought the most valuable opportunities would be from a sector perspective and from a analytical perspective as well because no one tells you okay these are the five companies you have to research them you have to understand the stakeholders understand the state of the industry where the gaps are and then figure out who the key players are. Yeah, it definitely sounds a lot more self-directed. How does that shift like? I really enjoyed that shift from a learning perspective and professional development standpoint but I think the initial curve from a culture standpoint was a bit jarring because I was so used to having like very strict schedules and working in a particular way and I think you have to kind of tone that piece down and think more broadly around what am I trying to achieve and what's the best way to get there versus how do I get this done as fast as possible and as efficiently as possible and make no mistakes. Exactly. Were there any other big changes? I think it's a very different mindset. The things that are transferable are really having a lot of hustle and being intellectually curious and working really hard. I think all those things are super critical but I think being able to really push yourself to think differently is something that is outside of the world of a traditional investment bank and you develop over time. So it's not to say that banking isn't a good starting point. I just think banking is one starting point in adventure. It's not everything. I think that a lot of people that come out of startups are probably better suited to work in early stage venture versus folks that kind of banking are probably better suited to go into growth equity unless you're able to train your mind and be fungible in the way that you think about things. And on that last point, what advice would you give to someone who had a similar background? Diving really deep into a specific topic area. Let's say you are interested in five funds. Figure out what the mandates are for each of those funds and understand what their portfolio looks like and where the gaps are in their portfolios and then pick some general trends. You might realize that three of the funds that I'm interested in are Fintech funds that are looking at the payment space. Great. Then do a deeper dive into the payment space and figure out where the gaps are. What sorts of startups would be interesting then find opportunities in those areas and then reach out to people and say, "Hey, I've been doing some thinking in this space. I'd love to share my thoughts with you." I think that's a really good way to get in touch with folks. One is you can continue to build your own personal brand as a thought leader and create content in that domain and then get surfaced by one of these people. I think that's really valuable. And then another thing is, "Tandentially connected, I would find a list of startups across the portfolios of the venture funds and touch with those founders and figure out what their problem areas are and just help them with as much as you can. And become a really valuable resource to them and then break into the venture fund that way. I've seen so many people do that and it's a great way to build operating experience as well. And having operating experience is so, so valuable. I analyzed it until I started working on a company myself. I think it is so helpful. You realize a lot of the theoretical suggestions that you give as an investor are necessarily logical because on the execution front it's very challenging to do some of those things. And that sort of empathy can only develop if you've been there or you've seen it very closely. Yeah, I'm just if you could expand on that operational experience. I think a lot of folks think that that's maybe founding a startup. But what types of roles actually, how low could you go working in a startup or something like that where you could say, you know, I've got the operational experience now to go work on the other side of the table at a venture capital fund. I think it's it's not really about kind of what part of the startup you're in. I think it's being in that environment. So it could be anything if you're a technical person being an early engineering hire to start up is super valuable understanding how to go from the initial ideas of a product and actually building that and iterating on that is really interesting and kind of managing that process is incredibly valuable because then you have empathy for technical founders that are looking to hire and you realize how important those initial hires are. You probably have more relationships with folks. You become super valuable in that way. If you come out of a consulting or banking background, maybe working in sales, BD operations, all these titles are also different based on the stage, but basically company and wearing multiple hats and seeing various functional areas of all the scale over time is so helpful because you understand how the customer journey has evolved. You understand how sales and marketing teams kind of work together. You understand how like the executive team is thinking about a particular concept and how that goes from ideation to execution and understanding KPI management also critical and underrated because the moment you go to a venture fund and you have a book of your own portfolio, the more questions you're going to ask and get asked from founders about, "Oh, how do I handle XYZ with my company? I've never done this before." And you can say that, "Oh, well, at my prior role, I've done this. I know XYZ works." By the way, like our other companies have tried similar strategies. You just have more context and you become more valuable. But I'd say it's more about the stage of company and the type of roles versus being super junior or being super senior. The end of the day, if you're an early stage hire, it doesn't matter. Like your title might be one thing, but you'll probably be doing a bunch of things day to day, which I would think is a huge positive. If you want to go to an early stage venture fund, I would suggest joining a company that is early stage, right? I don't think what we do a large tech company is going to give you the operating experience that's relevant to being an early stage investor. So you have to think about stage and sector. I think sector is less critical. It's more about function and stage. I'd love to switch gears now over to Conduette. Relationships, as you mentioned a couple times already, are a big and pretty important part of the venture industry. I'd love to hear more about Conduette, how your platform is trying to help with that relationship piece and how it got started. Yeah, if you could just start with the elevator pitch so folks could sort of know if they don't know Conduette. Even ventures such a networking game, it seems like an obvious thing to build. I'm curious if it was obvious and sort of how you got started with it. Sure. I spent about three years in investment banking almost two and a half years working in venture and then my co-founder Edward Lando, who is a very prolific angel investor in New York. We met through a mutual friend a year ago. Both of us always had a strong passion and continue to have a strong passion for finding operators in the earliest of days and connecting them to strategic capital. In five to ten years or so, the venture ecosystem has become incredibly noisy and capital has become commoditized and founders are really eager to find folks that can add a lot of value on their cap table beyond just a check. What we've noticed was that a lot of the larger funds don't necessarily have the bandwidth to give the attention that these founders need. Then the angel investors that come from more of an operating background and have expertise in an area, they don't have the track sizes that these founders need. In the day, it's like a trade-off between the amount of capital and the area of expertise, but there is a clear value proposition for being able to connect strategic capital to really interesting opportunities all over the world. That became our thesis. There are lots of platforms out there that run syndicates and have grown quite a bit over the last several years, but all of those solutions in our mind have really become noisy and they've optimized for having a lot of breath versus having really high quality. That became the underlying basis for conduit. We wanted to build a marketplace with really high quality talent on both sides. That's exactly what we decided to launch. Nice. How's it been going so far? It's grown to over a thousand users in less than four months and we're really excited about it. We have a bunch of investors that really fall into four buckets. They're exited founders, successful operators at large-time companies, family offices, and strategic high-net worth folks, and then more of the traditional venture capital funds. On the company side, it's been mostly preseed to series-a founders that are raising somewhere between 500K to a few million, and they are looking for strategic folks to really help them from a advisory perspective as well. From a sector standpoint, about a third are in the enterprise space, about a third or consumer facing, and the rest are a mix of different areas ranging from logistics, to security, ventact, etc. What's really compelling in our mind is the fact that a third of the population on conduit is overseas. That is what's really exciting to us because in this world where everything is remote, we think it's really valuable to be able to find opportunities in pockets of the world that maybe aren't as active as some of the cities that we hear about. And there are tremendous folks there. They just aren't getting connected to the really strategic angels and operator investors here in the States or in Europe. So it's been a really great way for us to capitalize on building a strong marketplace for startups and investors, and we're really excited about it. That's super impressive to have a third of your users be overseas, especially given how early you guys are in conduit and everything that's happened this year. Could you talk a little more about how you've grown the marketplace so far and how you manage to have so many international users? Sure. So conduit has been completely referral driven. We don't really market the platform broadly. We think that the product should speak for itself. So from that perspective, we've been really thoughtful around how we've been connecting with founders. My co-founder Edward, he has invested in hundreds of startups. Those founders have also referred us to other folks, given their experiences working with us and with folks in our ecosystem. Through it, we spend a lot of time thinking about and researching different markets around the world, whether that be Asia, in Latin America, Africa. There are emerging cities that will become strong startup nodes, so we've laid the ground work there to really start building relationships and being the answer to their concerns. So founders are still actively fundraising. It's an incredible time to build a product if you have capital and runway. You don't have runway. Then it's also an interesting time for you to be fundraising because you'll get access to investors that previously may not have had the bandwidth to really support you. So I'm curious, one of the things you mentioned with conduit was you were looking at more emerging markets. One of the key tenants of that book is the Silicon Valley is saturated. Companies tend to build in existing markets. There's so much opportunity in emerging markets. He invests a lot in companies in Africa and non-developed markets. I'm curious your perspective on that and how you see potential advantages to that and where that mix to your business comes into play. Yeah, I think at the end of the day, there are incredible founders and future founders all over the world. Most of the time, these people come out of large organizations, corporations and are now looking to take their experiences and issues that they've identified and go start a company. Or two, they've recently graduated from a program at a university, have really strong academic experiences and are now looking to start a company. Or three, they've been an early stage hire and have seen a company reach escape velocity and continue to grow. And now they've developed the skills that they've feel they need to go start their own business. And four, they come out of more of a traditional sector, but they have this craving and hunger for starting a business and really immersing themselves in the ecosystem. So those four types of categories exist all over the world. And being able to find those people is really compelling to us. A, I think exploring these sorts of markets will be an incredible way to learn about potential opportunities there and be, find people who are experts in their area, finding someone in the US that is trying to build a solution for South America. Yes, sure, might, might be interesting, might, might work, but I would bet that someone in South America probably has more of an understanding of their local market and probably can create a more compelling company faster. 100%. I couldn't agree more. Changing gears again, we're getting towards the end of our time. Is there anything else you'd like to leave the listeners with? Yeah, definitely. At the end of the day, I think it's important to remember that VC is not binary and that relationships compound over time. When you are reaching out to folks and trying to find ways to potentially collaborate in some capacity, you should always try to add value. People shouldn't be asking why should I hire this individual rather. They should say, I really want to work with this person and we should find a way to collaborate. But in my mind is the Golden statement. Well, that's a wrap. We hope everyone enjoyed our first episode of the Going VC podcast. A big thanks to Sree for her time. We hope you enjoyed the conversation as much as we did. As we mentioned, the intro, keep an eye out for new podcast episodes every other Monday. If you enjoyed today's episode, be sure to subscribe for more VC research at goingvc.com. Until next time, stay safe and stay healthy. (upbeat music)