Ramtin Naimi - Building Abstract

Most software companies try to maximize your time on their app to juice engagement. Ramp does the exact opposite. Ramp understands that no one wants to spend hours chasing receipts, reviewing expense reports, and checking for policy violations. So they built their tools to give that time back, using AI to automate 85% of expense reviews with 99% accuracy. And since Ramp saves companies 5%, it's no wonder that Shopify runs on Ramp, Stripe runs on Ramp, and my business does too. To see what happens when you eliminate the busy work, check out ramp.com/invest. [MUSIC PLAYING] Hello and welcome, everyone. I'm Patrick O'Shanasi, and this is Invest Like The Best. This show is an open-ended exploration of markets, ideas, stories, and strategies that will help you better invest both your time and your money. If you enjoy these conversations and want to go deeper, check out Colossus Review, our quarterly publication with in-depth profiles of the people shaping business and investing. You can find Colossus Review along with all of our podcasts at join Colossus.com. [MUSIC PLAYING] Patrick O'Shanasi is the CEO of Positive Sum. All opinions expressed by Patrick and podcast guests are solely their own opinions and do not reflect the opinion of Positive Sum. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon as a basis for investment decisions. Clients of Positive Sum may maintain positions in the securities discussed in this podcast. To learn more, visit psum.vc. [MUSIC PLAYING] My guest today is Rampton Nami. Rampton is the founder of abstract ventures, one of the most talked about seed funds in Silicon Valley. What makes Rampton's story so compelling isn't just his firm's track record, including early investments in rippling salana and dozens of unicorns. But the unconventional path he took to get there. From running a hedge fund straight out of high school to filing bankruptcy at 24, then bootstrapping his way to building a $2 billion assets on our management venture firm using Angelist and Relentless Hossal. Our conversation begins in an unexpected place, the art world, where Rampton has become a sophisticated collector, learning from mentors like Michael Ovitz about market dynamics that's surprisingly mirror investing. We dive deep into how the art world actually works and Rampton explains how these lessons about masterpieces applied directly to identifying parallel companies in venture. We go deep on his approach to early stage investing and how he built abstract as a co-investment vehicle alongside firms like Sequoia, Benchmark, and Injuryson Horowitz. We explore his portfolio construction model, his philosophy on delusion-sensitive founders, and why he takes upwards of 30 pitch meetings per week to build what he calls his frame of reference. We discuss why abstract has the highest graduation rate from seed to series A among all seed funds and how this competitive advantage compounds over time. This is his first time telling his story and we discuss the power of pattern recognition, Relentless Work ethic, and the unique opportunities available to those willing to start from scratch and Silicon Valley. Once you've heard directly from Rampton, I highly recommend you read our in-depth profile on him. Rampton gave our managing out of their dumb cook unprecedented access to him and over a dozen people he's close to swift. The outcome is an excellent profile about one of the most exciting young investors in Silicon Valley, which has already been getting rave reviews. You can find that profile on our website at joincolossus.com and in the show notes of this episode. Please enjoy my great conversation with Rampton, naming. (upbeat music) I think the place we have to begin is in our world. I think you have the most systematic, intense art collector story that I've heard. And I want to start here not because it's some esoteric side topic, but because I think there will be lots of inspiring points for what we'll talk about in investing as well, not art but companies. Can you just lay out for us your art collecting journey where it started while you got interested in it and how you began to learn about how the art world actually works? I have two incredibly close mentors, one who introduced the two of us, Michael Oubitz, and then another guy named Stuart Peterson. Both of them have world-class art collections, Michael has a storied art collection, I'm sure you've seen it. But I spent a lot of time with their houses over the years and every time I went, I tried to learn a little bit more about what was in their house. They could both spend two, three hours walking you around their home and talking about what they have and how they got it and the story behind it, the history behind it, the significance of it. I always just thought that was really interesting. And I never really had much time for hobbies and it was one that I thought my wife and I could enjoy together. I needed to find the golf. I thought golf was a little one-sided. So for me, art collecting seemed like it could be golf for both me and my wife. So then I just started dabbling and understanding the markets and then I realized nothing in Michael's collection is attainable. So kind of scratched most of those artists off my list. And then I looked at Stuart's collection, most of it was unattainable, some of it was artists who were still somewhat attainable. And then I worked with an advisor briefly just so I can familiarize myself with the market. Once I spent enough time familiarizing myself with the market, I realized like anything, if you're going to invest time and resources into something, you're better off doing the majority of the work yourself. Obviously it's good to have people like advisors, who are experts who are boots on the ground and the ecosystem advising you here and there. But I think you need to maintain the relationships with the galleries yourself. You need to maintain the relationships. The auction house is yourself, even having some direct artist relationships yourself. So I spent time and energy and resources dedicated to learning as much about as I possibly could. I wanted to collect primarily contemporary artists and primarily living artists. And I decided to collect three different buckets of artists and I break them down by generation. So I have artists who are two generations before me. And these guys are in there, mid to late 60s or early 70s. Artists that are maybe one generation before me, these guys are late 40s to late 50s. And then artists of my generation, and that's everyone who's 28 years old to 38 years old. I started to understand who is important in the conversation in a given time and who is getting museum institutional interests, who are museums paying attention to, who are museums hosting exhibitions for. What makes this artist unique, or does this artist drop inspiration from? There's a lot of artists that are great and have all those boxes, but might necessarily be something that I want to live with. I personally, my wife as well, we like living with our art. Even if something could be a great asset to hold, if we don't want to hang it up on our walls, you don't feel right about the concept of just buying art for the purpose of putting it in storage. Two generations before me, it tends to be more heavily dominated white male artists. Guys like Richard Prince, Christopher Wool, George Condo, a generation before me, it's guys like Mark Grouchon. And a lot of female artists like Jenny Savile, Laura Owen, Cecilie Brown, Jacqueline Humphries, and then my generation, it's more along the lines of Rashi Johnson, Christina Quarles, Avery Singer, Marina Ryan Gants, and Alliance. And all of these artists tend to be now represented by all of the Blu-chip galleries. When I started dabbling into the art world is when I realized that there's an overwhelming number of parallels between the venture world and the art world, primarily in the way Blu-chip galleries work and the way that the big platform venture capital firms work. But if at any given time, there is 50 important practicing artists in the world, or even the estates of the most iconic dead artists, they tend to be represented by the big four galleries. How Zurig-Gugozian, Zwerner Pace. Once they're represented by those galleries, they are now deemed a Blu-chip artist and their prices are very, very high. But their prices tend to sustain or even appreciate because those galleries are very large and they have very big clients and they represent a lot of institutions so they can control the markets for those artists. So people tend to be more comfortable paying a premium to buy art from those galleries because of the inherent safety net you get when buying from them. But then I started to realize that there is smaller galleries and even smaller galleries beyond that that tend to share a lot of artists with the larger galleries. And it's because they were the ones who initially discovered them. It's the same ones over and over again, similar to the venture capital world. You have the four, five, six top venture capital firms in the world that tend to have exposure to every power of law company, any generational company, any given vintage. And then more often than not, you'll see the same firms that finance those companies earlier and earlier and earlier. And like the big venture capital firms try to maintain relationships with those firms that spot talent earlier and earlier, the big galleries tend to maintain relationships with a few of the smaller tier galleries early. So then what I started to do after that was spend time with those galleries that I started noticing were the early spotters of talent and finding these artists early in their career that had a high graduation rate to getting picked up by the blue chip mega galleries. And then the soon as that happened, their price is basically quadruple. Not saying that's the purpose behind doing this, but obviously it's nicer to pay 25% of the cost of something versus full value. Basically just started making those relationships and then trying to see what I actually liked from their programs because like anything, not 100% of the artists graduate. So from there, that's when you have to start apply some of your own judgment and hope that you have the right taste to identify what are other people gonna find appealing, what are institutions gonna find appealing? - What made a collection like Ovets is unattainable. Why could you not replicate it? What is shared in common from your perspective of the collections that you respect the most? - The reason Ovets is collection is not attainable is due to the sheer value of it. There is this one art list that ranks collections based on the means at which they were obtained, which is actually really interesting because people today say Steve Cohen and Ken Griffin have the world's greatest collections and they probably do, but they don't assign the same score to them because it's like a low IRR collection. - Exactly. If you can afford to buy any piece of art in the world, it's easy to know what the 50 most iconic things in the world are and everything's for sale in the art world. So as long as you're willing to pay the price, you can build that collection. And then the collection that scored the highest was a wife and husband who were both government employees. The husband was a postman and the wife was a librarian. And they spent their weekends collecting art in the '60s they were collected. collecting, Pollux and Rothkoes. They ended up giving it away all to museums. They never actually did it for any monetary gain, but their collection rank so high because they were actually able to judge based purely off of talent and skill before anybody had any idea who these artists were. And before there was any value assigned to their work. And every decade long window, there are certain bodies of work that are considered iconic. That if you think to that decade, these are considered iconic bodies of work. In the 80s, you have the Richard Prince Cowboys, which Michael has probably one of the greatest ones out there, Stu has a couple of great ones. These were basically old moral bro ads that Richard Prince had basically ripped out of magazines and then turned them into photography and sold them, but they became iconic because he owned the concept of appropriation as an artist. Early 2000s, late 90s, Richard Prince came out with those nurses where he was printing out those old nurse book covers and then painting over them. And then that became more iconic thing about appropriation. And then you had Tracy Eman. She was a lot more graphic than most female artists were in the 90s about female body as a subject. When you're trying to identify those things in real time, it's very, very difficult because there's a lot of exhibitions in any time in the city of New York. New York is the king of exhibitions. There's ones that are positively claimed by two, three years that artists fizzles out. When you're collecting artists who are practicing and active, it's very challenging because there is a thousand artists in any generation and only 10 of them end up mattering 20 or 30 years later by collecting active. And then I try to go back and look at some historical things for whatever reason in the art world. It tends to work like this cycle continuously where things that were iconic 20 years ago tend to be undervalued 20 years later then get very highly valued 30 to 40 years later. I tend to find things that were the undisputable iconic bodies of work from the 90s and 2000s that today might be out of favor. And a lot of the people who were very iconic in the 90s and the 2000s happen to be white male artists who are currently out of favor in the art world. And there's not a lot of demand for their work, but that's a really good buying opportunity for those artists at least in my opinion. And then the next thing you look for is depth in that artist's collector base. There are certain artists who have huge followings. They put out 50 paintings through their multiple galleries per year and they're all sold. They have 50 paintings that show up at auction and they all sell them. They clear large price tags because their art appeals to a large demographic of collectors and George Condon, Rashi Johnson are probably the two artists that fit the most squarely in that bucket today. And then they're artists who are a little bit more niche who have collectors and their markets are very, very strong. But their markets can't sustain 50 paintings, 100 paintings, transacting every year. Their markets can sustain eight to 12 very high value paintings, transacting every year. So you always try to think about that in your calculus. If the market depth is shallow and I'm a young collector and everybody else collecting this artist is 30 to 40 years older than me. And 20 to 30 years, am I going to be the only person who's collecting this artist? There's a lot of things to try to think about there, but I think at the end of the day, we're really just trying to buy art that stands a test of time. Is there any interesting thing you've learned about the literal cost of things and what generates your turn from there? This has changed dramatically in recent years. Ova's always tells me that he wishes I started by collecting 20 to 25 years ago versus starting collecting today. And I asked what was different about 20 to 25 years ago. And he said 20 to 25 years ago, entry-level art was $10,000. Blu-chip art, not Blu-chip causes and Rothgas, but Blu-chip contemporary art was in the order of magnitudes of low 100,000s. 20 to 25 years ago, you could walk into a gallery. And if there was a painting you liked, you could take it home, you could place it on hold. You could live it within your living room for two weeks and decide whether or not you wanted it. You could make a gallery and offer it a 20 to 25% less than what they were asking for and have the painting. The number of collectors in recent years is dramatically increased. Here's another parallel to venture. The same way that a number of investors have dramatically increased and as a result, the entry valuations to art have dramatically increased as well. And the competition to acquire art has dramatically increased as well. There's now 10, 20 artists exhibiting primary shows with a given gallery and that artist will present 12 paintings in that show and that'll be the only 12 paintings they make available to the public for the next two years. And 100 people want those paintings. Now you have to jump through hoops of, well, you're saying, well, I'll buy this painting and I'll also buy one painting give it to a museum if you give this one to me. So the real costs of actually collecting are not what the prices of art are the primary because you can't just walk in and pay that much for the painting and get it. And one of my mentors sells me is never bought a painting for less than $100,000. It has made any money on the barriers of entry are quite high to actually get the higher quality of Blu-Chip Art. Obviously, there are totally still examples today where you can get lucky and get something before it's truly discovered and do well on it financially. But when competition comes into the market, the market services that demand. So there's way more artists represented by these galleries today than historically. Historically, these galleries would represent 10, 15 artists. Now the bigger galleries are representing 75 to 80 artists, smaller ones are representing 25 to 30 artists. They're putting shows on for them constantly. Every day in my inbox, I'm probably getting 30 previews for exhibitions for new shows opening by new artists. So I'm going to see it investing. The volume of art you're being sent daily and the entry prices to access entry-level art are just getting astronomically higher. Your bar needs to be incredibly high for the new living contemporary artists. But it honestly makes the value investing of looking to what is the art that's proven the test of time that might be an opportunity to get a great example of today, what might those opportunities be? Probably the most interesting thing I've learned about the art world, which is something I didn't appreciate until I started active collecting is quality of a painting versus just like work by a given artist. And it's why you see certain Picasso's self for five million and oneself for 100 million. I never truly understood the concept of masterpiece until I started actively collecting. But on every exhibition put on by a new artist today, as I mentioned, there's 12 paintings. And of those 12 paintings, there's probably one that's incredible that everyone's going to be fighting over and two that are really good that most you will be happy with. And the rest of the show is the artist made 20 paintings and then the gallery is like we could sell 12 of them. What you start to notice over time is the most dramatic appreciation in art happens in the highest quality examples of their work. It's somebody good look back and be like, that was one of the best paintings that artist made. And that's what's so special about Michael's collection is he has definitive masterpieces by some of the most iconic artists in history. There are certain artists who have a lot of depth in their collection. They might have 20 Picasso's or they might have eight or nine Twombles. Michael, I think he's got three Picasso's, but I think he's got three best Picasso's ever and he's got probably the best Mark Rothko I've ever seen. He's got the best Franz Klein I'd seen. Even on contemporary artists, he has the single best Laura Owens abstraction I think that was ever released to the public. I think what he was really good at doing is like anything else, there's competitive dynamics people get drawn into the competitive game of, well, I can't get that paint. He's just gonna be this one instead. I think a lot of it has to do with the discipline of waiting until you can actually get the highest quality examples of the best work by these artists. 'Cause there's no shortage of collectors homes you could walk into that's low quality art by great artists where they just wanted to have the home filled with art by recognizable artists names, but nothing that in their collection is something that a real collector would say is truly great. When we talk about abstract, I'm gonna ask about the time that you spent studying parallel outcomes in companies. One of the lessons I've learned from doing this show for so many years is that that parallel concept applies literally everywhere and it sounds like not only is it applying art but actually within a given artist's collection of work. So the idea of masterpiece or high quality is really interesting to me. What can you say about those two concepts and what you've learned about them? It's so strange because there's no earnings against which to measure success, there's nothing really quantitative. It's an eye at the collective beholder. Try to define what shared and common amongst high quality or masterpiece works. I think in the art world, it's very definitive examples of what that artist is known for. Something that you could look at and basically say this is exactly what the artist was trying to get across in his message and it came through very clearly in this painting or the sculpture. Oftentimes you'll see a painting by an artist and you'll have to do a double take to realize which artist actually painted it. There are certain paintings that you look at by an artist and it's so obvious that it was painted by that artist within the first second of looking at it, you know who painted it. That's obviously a really good indication. A lot of it is just frame of reference. You don't actually appreciate what is a great example until you've seen tons of examples. So phrase it over, it's always talks about frame of reference. The same thing with the more companies you meet, the easier it gets to discern what the better companies are, the more art you look at and the more art you look at by a specific artist, the easier it becomes to identify what a great example of that artist is. Certain things you look at, you're like, well, this looks like one of their paintings but it looks like a messy version of one of their paintings or this looks like a painting that they started working on and they realized it wasn't going in the right direction because they kind of half-ass the rest of it. Versus, this is something they nailed and they know they nailed it. A lot of that just has to do with training your own eye and looking at a lot. Talk about the role of status in our world, both for collectors, for galleries, for artists. So that's a real thing. I don't actually get involved in any of that 'cause that I don't have time for it. I don't think I ever got into actual exhibition opening. It's part of the upside and downside of being in San Francisco is there's no art in San Francisco. I don't think I ever bought anything that I saw in person before buying it. I've only ever bought these past reviews. Yeah, 'cause you have to find time to actually fly somewhere and go see something in person and my schedule unfortunately is not lend me to have that leisure to do that. But I think it's very common in the New York world, especially among finance guys, who are active art collectors. I think it becomes competitive dynamics of, oh, you have one of these. I actually have the better one. Oh, we're both fighting over the same painting. I'm the one who got it. That's where the galleries leverage those competitive dynamics to do what's ultimately best for the artists. At the end of the day, artists actually don't want their art in people's homes. They want their art in museums. They don't want their art to go and someone's living room where only 20 people will ever see it. They want it to be hung up in the momma where millions of people will see it over time. And that's why you see a lot of these guys on the boards of those museums because those museums want ultimately foster the relationships of the people that have the greatest collection to those collections, at least the large portion of them one day end up in their museum. And that's why museum affiliation is also a really great way way to access great art because galleries are more inclined to give great paintings to people who are on the boards of the MoMA and the Met and the Whitney and the Guggenheim because they know that more likely than not this painting, maybe not tomorrow, but eventually we'll end up in the collection of this museum. So that is definitely where status comes into play. It's why when you see the boards of these museums, they don't look like boards of any other industry in the world because the boards unlock access to what these guys consider to be the greatest art. What is surprising about how the big four houses work that you've learned? The funny thing is that they compete for the artists very similar to the way VCs compete for deals. It's very obvious who are the artists who are the most in commercial demand, who are the most in institutional demand, and who they could see building their careers over the next 10, 20 years. The courting process is the same. We'll do a better commission split with you. It's not 50/50 with us. We'll go 60/40. We'll go 70/30. You want a signing bonus? Here's a million dollars cash up front. Go with us. Don't go with them. It's very competitive dynamics amongst them to get the best artists. Generally speaking, in the talent world, contracts are pretty ironclad. You can't just go from one person to the next. I still don't quite understand how that works. I'm still curious to learn that aspect, but artists do frequently go from one gallery to another. What are the keys to being known or building a reputation as a great collector? It's a lot of things. There are things that O.A. has taught me over the years. In the early parts of my collecting, there was a painting that I wanted and they didn't offer me that one. They offered me the consolation prize instead. I was talking to O.A. It's just you. I'm like, what do you think? Should I take it? They said no. If you do, you're the pastor. Exactly. They're going to know that they can keep giving you consolation prizes. Ultimately, they want you as a collector. If they realize you're only going to buy what you want to buy, they'll ultimately give you what you want if you play along and play ball. If you're the guy that can give second tier and third tier work to, you will always be the guy that gives second and third tier work to. There's that aspect of it. A lot of it is just staying top of mind, what's worked best with me. It's worked best for me in venture also. I see early stage seed companies at a high level of frequency because I stay top of mind for my founders who have friends that might be starting companies. I stay top of mind for angel investors that are actively grooming the next generation of founders and are looking for people to introduce them to lead their seed round. The art world is the same thing. It's sending your dealer a gift when their baby is born sending them Christmas gifts, checking in from them from time to time. The reason I mentioned staying top of mind is the most competitive time to get a painting is during an artist's primary exhibition or during a fair like Basel because they send that preview out to their entire collector base. 5,000 people are going to see that painting. You're definitely not the only person who wants that individual painting and your odds of getting that are close to nothing unless you're willing to jump through a million hoops to get there. Every single artist, they're working. They need to make money. So more often than not, in between exhibitions and in between fairs, they might make one painting and give it to the gallery and say, "Please sell this for me." That's where I found most of my work. The artist just made this one painting available. We're offering it to you and three other people. Please let us know what you think and your odds are much higher when it's shared with you and two or three other people. If you think about the artists, the galleries, both kinds of galleries, the collector who buys and then maybe sells in the future, other players, auction houses, etc. Who makes the most money? I would say the galleries? I think the big galleries do quite well. The big galleries that have great clients and are able to control their markets tend to not only manage all the primary sales, but they tend to also manage the majority of the secondary sales. And this is how they control the market. If you're buying great work from a house or a gozy and a smarner or a pace, then you want to sell a painting. They don't want that painting to go to auction. They want that painting to go back to them because they probably have 20 other people that might be interested in that painting. And not only did they get their 50% commission when they sold the painting to you in the first place, now they're going to get somewhere between 15 and 25% for selling it for you. Again, on multiple round trips of a painting, they probably made more money on the painting than the initial cost of the painting. I would say they make the most auction houses. You would think they have no costs except for marketing and displaying the art. And then they take anywhere between 15 to 26% commission depending on the value of the art. And then I started realizing that it's actually not the case. They have competitive dynamics also when Paul Allen passed away a few years ago. His entire collection became available for sale. And I think it was at Sotheby's, the collection sold for I think well over a billion dollars in cumulative sales. When someone like him dies, he's an extreme example, but there's plenty of people that have collections worth 50 million, 100 million, 300 million. And it's usually the estates of those people that the auctions want. And it's part of the reason that the estates actually have to go to the auctions because obviously you have a finite amount of time before you have to pay the taxes and the quickest way to sell everything to the Senate to auction. That's when the auction houses start competing with each other over commissions split and guarantees. More along the lines of, hey, we will guarantee you at least $500 million for this collection. We'll guarantee you at least 100 million for this collection. We will reduce our commission from 26% to 13%. We're going to give half the commission back to you. And there's no shortage of stories where they guaranteed too high to compete with the other auction house and they ended up losing money. Or their net margin on end at being 2 or 3%. I don't think the auction houses have huge market caps. I think Sotheby's about like a $3 billion market cap and it's well over 100 year old company. So I think good businesses, not phenomenal businesses. Their margins are a lot more volatile than one would think looking into it externally. But I'd say the blue chip galleries seem to have endless pockets. What they spend money on is beautiful gallery space and making beautiful exhibitions. But they have a cost of goods, which is basically zero and then very, very large tickets and then 50% rev share. Good business. Where are venture and are the most divergent in how the two worlds work? It's a lot easier to identify what is going to be a great company than who is going to be an artist that stands the test of time. There's a lot more tangible things you can look at. There's much more fundamental and technical things that you can look at that'll tell you that something is special and something is good. There is a market for pricing in the venture world that might not necessarily be the case in the art world. Fair market value is very clearly determined in the venture world. The company goes out to fundraise and auction is run and term sheets are offered and a price is set. The things are obviously very different. Those are the primary differences. It's really just venture is a much more tangible even though it's tangible. There's a lot more to underwrite. There's an E, not just a P. Exactly. I want to talk about the way that you've learned the entire early stage venture world works now. And abstract has very quickly become one of the firms whose name you hear a lot here, your name a lot. But I'd love you to explain in the same way you explain sort of the art world market structure. Could you explain your perspective on the early stage investing market structure, how it works and how it got to there? The simplest way to describe this is how I came up with the thesis for how abstract actually invest in the thesis as evolved over time. But the thesis in which I started abstract was trying to identify which companies of the highest likelihood of becoming power law companies and identified power law by any companies that had a private market cap or exited north of a five billion dollar valuation. What I'd realized over time was that if you eliminate Uber and Roblox from the equation whose seed rounds were led by first round capital, it's close to impossible to identify power lock companies in which the seed round was led by a seed stage venture capital firm. This is change in recent years, which is why our strategy is also evolved. But the thesis in which it was built off is a state constant and that multi stage chairman BC firms were better at seed investing than seed funds are. And it's not to say that they'll outperform them because I don't think the portfolio construction model allows for that anymore at the scale of those funds. But I do believe that the power law companies of the future will be more likely have seed financing led by multi stage venture capital firms and seed venture capital firms. And when the early days people didn't think multi stage firms did much seed investing. But if you look at Sequoia, they led the seed round for Stry, Airbnb, Dropbox and New Bank and Andreessen led the first institutional rounds for Octa, Databricks and Slack and Postal led the seed round for Instacart and DoorDash and Index led the seed round for Robin Hood and Figma. And Light Speed led the seed round for Snap and I think App Dynamics and the list kind of goes on and on. What became obvious to me was that seed funds that claimed they had proprietary deal flow or mostly kidding themselves are a little delusional. And it's hard to believe that a seed firm that has two or three people have more coverage at early stage and a multi stage fund that has 30 or 40 people. And then it became very apparent to me that when a multi stage fund and a seed fund tried to compete with one another, it was very hard for a seed stage venture capital firm to compete with the multi stage venture capital firm. Often times multi stage venture capital firms had brand-weight the seed funds going to compete with, but more often than not, it was the fact they were willing to offer valuation in terms that a seed fund can compete with. And I decided to build a seed stage venture capital business initially aligning my interest with multi stage funds as opposed to aligning my interest with seed funds. The reason I was actually thinking that people were wrong when saying multi stage funds were jacking up the prices of all these deals is we pulled the data on this. And if you look between 2008 and 2011, there were about 1000 seed deals funded in that time frame or at least publicly announced seed deals in that time frame. So there's some survivorship bias there. What you need to ultimately look at is that probably 80% of the companies got announced because that's just what ends up happening in Ventures. So let's assume there was a thousand companies and Uber was in that bucket. And if you wrote an equal sized check into every single one of those 1000 companies, you would have gotten a 3000 X just on Uber. So you would have actually had a three X net venture capital portfolio blanketing the entire market. There was also Airbnb and Dropbox and so many other companies and Instagram that were funded in that window. There is no world in which you could blanket an asset class and should be able to generate a three five seven X. So that was very clear sign that deals were too cheap back then. And as anything with markets get more efficient over time, deals start to price a little bit more accurately. And I thought that seed funds were holding on to those low prices a little too drastically. And multi stage funds had a bit more of the right idea. Now if you start to think that. a 3000X multiple on a CDL like Uber, give you a 3x across a blanketed coverage between 2008 and 2011, then you could argue CDLs need to be 3x more expensive as a floor. But if you mix in all the other companies, you could probably assume that CDLs should be 5x more expensive as a floor. And by the way, even if that's the case, that means that an average entry valuation of 25 million, if you blank at the entire market, you should be able to break even on your money, which should never be the case, because as you know, investing is challenging. So now we're in a market where you actually need to be better picking than you were historically. In terms of what we started to do, in the early days, what I did was I looked the last few hundred companies that were backed by the multi-stage share-on-venture capital firms, and I started to identify patterns that existed in the founders they were backing, and then there's a pattern matching business for better or for worse. But what I started to notice was that they liked founders that went to one of these schools, got one of these degrees, worked at one of these companies, and one of these roles, and one of these periods of time, and that company's inflection. So I started just tracking individuals that fit the bill on LinkedIn. It's probably, I don't know, six or seven thousand people that qualified, and any time one of them changed their job title to founder, I got a push notification, and I started reaching out to them, and that's 2016. And that's kind of when I realized that an unfunded seed stage founder might be like the easiest person in the world to get a meeting with. I wasn't nobody at this point in Silicon Valley, and the fact that anybody would take a meeting with me was nice. As their financing rounds came together, I would ask for any allocation. They would give me anything from a $25,000 check that it raised an angel upwards to a $500,000 check that it raises an SPV. And I'd use angel list for that. I'm probably like the number one angel list success story. Angel list really catapulted my career. And I think it's actually an amazing business that more people should pay attention to and leverage the same way I leveraged. But I think over my first 47 seed deals, I funded an 10 month window between August of 2016 and June of 2017. You did 47 in that first year, 47 deals in that first 10 months. And there I got an angel check into rippling. I got a first dollar check into Salana for sense of token. I got a seed check into clay. I got a seed check into cherry. A seed check into new front. A bunch of crypto companies. I got into the management company round of a hedge fund called polychain capital, which for a brief period of time was the largest cryptocurrency hedge fund in the world, and even privates as well. And then I got to see a bunch of the companies that spun out in the early crypto ecosystem. So avalanche, dydx, RSPVs have returned close to $100 million on angel list at this point. But within the first 47 companies that I'd funded, Ripple and Salana have coin market caps of north of $100 billion today. Rippling is approaching a $20 billion market cap. And everything else I mentioned is between a $2 and $7 billion market cap. So out of 47 companies, two cents to corn, one deck of corn and about eight or nine unicorns, these individual types of founders that I was tracking turned out to be the right types of individuals to track. Is that how you found all those people? For the most part, some of them were obviously I just spent time with every junior BC at every single venture capital firm in Silicon Valley. And I would have catch up meetings with all of them on a weekly basis. And when I heard multiple people in one week mentioned the same names over and over again, I just started reaching out to those individuals. How did you get into them? You must have had to have been quite aggressive. Very aggressive. What is aggressive for you? For me, it just not being relentless checking in constantly. What can I do? How can I be helpful? I really did focus on just being likable. I just wanted to be somebody that the founders are like, he's a good guy. He's working hard. Let's get him on our cap table. And I wasn't aggressive about my check size. I don't care if it's 25,000 or 500,000. Anywhere in that range, I'm happy with. I made myself flexible enough that it became hard to say no to me. If you give founders hard constraints on an allocation you need or ownership target, you make it very easy for them to say no to you because they're like, sorry, I can't make that work. But if you're flexible, people just generally, if they like you want to work with you. But after I financed those companies, three most recon co-investors we had were Founders, Fund, Andrews and Coastal Un. I didn't have a relationship with any of those venture capital firms. Individuals I was tracking turned out to be the right individuals and the firms that I wanted to co-invest alongside ended up being the firms I ended up co-investing alongside by the nature of finding these individual founders to back. Then that's kind of when my journey picked up was when Sian Bannister, who was a partner at Founders Fund at the time, but had spent a lot of time at Angel lists, she had noticed me and her and I spent some time together and she introduced me to her close friend Kevin Hartz. And Kevin Hartz at the time was a partner at Founders Fund and Kevin Hartz is a legend in Silicon Valley. He founded Zoom X-O-O-M Zoom in the early 2000s. And Eventbrite too, right? And Eventbrite as well. And he took a Zoom public and then ultimately sold that to PayPal for over a billion dollars. But he's also been a phenomenal investor. He was in the three million dollar post money valuation round of Airbnb. He was the first dollar into Pinterest. He was early in Uber. He was early in PayPal. And all roads from my network ultimately actually lead back to Kevin Hartz. So Kevin and I met him and I hit it off. He was maybe in his first year of 10 years a partner at Founders Fund and he started writing checks into a few managers. He wanted to find the way to work with me, but then also just opened up his network to me. And this is the most special thing about Silicon Valley is there are certain people in Silicon Valley who just want to help other people succeed. I've been fortunate to be blessed by having relationships with a lot of those people. And Kevin met me and when he ended the meeting, he basically said, "If you were this good at this not knowing anybody, I wonder how much better you would get if you know all the right people." Kevin introduced me to critics and at Andrews and Horowitz and Keith Roboi, critics and interesting and Marc Andreson. I think it was Marc Andreson, who introduced me to Michael Ovitz. Michael Ovitz introduced me to Bill Ackman and Kevin Worsh and David Sacks. And then ultimately a consortium came together with all those individuals and they bought an equity stake in my management company when I was 26 years old. That deal had a time around it because I didn't want to be owned by anybody in perpetuity and that lapsed a couple of years ago. So I'm proud to say I'm 100% my business again. It was kind of a surreal experience where I went from having no network. And these are only individuals that I'd read about to having met all those people in a matter of three weeks and finding a way to structure a deal with all of them. Kevin and Michael were probably the two most instrumental people in that and have stayed my two closest mentors to date. I kept doing the SPBs and I kept writing the angel checks for an additional year until at which point I realized that I actually can institutionalize this approach. I set out to raise seed fund one. That was a hundred million dollar fund that I raised in 2018. Those guys had anchored the fund with about 50 million dollars. Their remaining chunk of the fund came from a lot of people that looked like them. So Josh Kushner, Matt Kohler, Neil Metta, Leaf Excel, Dan Rose, Thomas LaFont, Chase Coleman, Santo Politi, and then I got a bunch of operators, Jerry Yang, confounded Yahoo, Frederick Krusty, confounded Octa. I ended up getting four institutional all-piece and fund one. Those four institutions were two college endowments and two fund of funds. But I basically re-broad the book on portfolio construction with my first fund and it stems back to what my initial part of the strategy was. But what I was basically doing part of the reason I had such hard time attracting institutional capital was institutions had this framework that venture capital firms needed to own 15% of a company in order for the math of a deal to work out. Which never made that much sense to me because I really stuck on that 15% framework for like the last 25 years. And the difference is in that 25 year window, these funds have grown 10, 20, 30, X, but that 15% threshold to state a constant or 15, 20% they wanted these firms to own. What I focused on was ownership as a relative metric as opposed to an absolute metric. I knew I could get 5% ownership in these deals very consistently and I knew the firms that I was co-investing alongside can get 15% ownership in these deals very consistently. And back then these firms are much smaller than they are today. So let's assume the typical multi-stage fund that I was co-investing alongside in 2016 was $1.5 billion and my fund was $100 million. If I can get 5% they were getting 15. Sure, I had one third their ownership but out of a fund that was 115th the size. So I actually had 5X the exposure. And this is actually frustrating explaining to people because people ask me if I had an index approach. It's the opposite of that. I'm the most concentrated exposure you can get to these companies. There's only four institutions that truly grasp that. And by the time we fully deployed fund one it became pretty obvious that in 94% of the companies we'd invested in there was not a venture fund you could have invested in anywhere in the world that would have gotten you more look through ownership in that company you would have gotten through abstract. And then our next fund was highly institutional and now we're very institutional today and everything over subscribed quickly in time. How many companies were in that first fund? About 55. But we did early on in that fund was purely co-investment model. I met founders and I now knew all the top guys at all the multi-stage venture capital firms. So the companies that I thought were the best I would introduce to the relevant partner at one of the top funds and I'd say I think these guys are impressive. I like what they're working on. You know more about this category than I do. I want to check a meeting with them and if you like it let's find the way to work on it together. You take your 15. I'll take my five and I did about 20 times perfectly and when I'm in by perfectly is 20 for 20. They got their 15. I got my five. I got a tier one co lead. My LPs were happy. The strategy was working. And then I started to get like a little annoyed. I felt like I was doing most of the leg work and getting this five person work. Exactly. I wanted to find a way to start getting more ownership in these deals while still being collaborative because I still had no name at this point in Silicon Valley and arguable whether I have much of a name today. But back then definitely nothing. What I wanted to figure out is the founders that I wanted to work with wanted those firms on the cap tables. There is no world in which I was saying it's me, Aaron Dreson. Who are you going to go with? Because I was going to lose that 10 times out of 10. But what I started understanding was that I could lead these financing and breed the multi-stage firms in as a co lead. And when I led, I still left enough room for a co lead, but I really started to stress test how far can I push a multi-stage firm down on ownership before they ultimately walk on a deal, but are still happy about it. And the number I settled on was about 10%. Pretty much every multi-stage tier one VC firm will do a seed deal at 10% if they have to. We push them down to six or seven. It's just not worth it. They'd rather wait for the series A. So then we started leading financing more consistently. We ended up leading 14 companies in that first fund. And the first four deals I have read led to had raised to follow on from benchmark, one who'd raised follow on from Sequoia, one who'd raised follow on from Andreson. So I had a very positive feedback loop that the deals that I was leading at seed were not adverse selection. And that gave me more confidence to continue leading. The more time I spent just focused on seed, I just get a lot more confident my ability to pick seeds versus relying on other people as proxy. Now we have a ton of data that actually shows quite great. clearly that the deals that we have led as a venture capital firm have actually dramatically outperform the deals in which we're not the lead investor, but we co-invested in. So nowadays, we probably lead like 80 or 90% of the companies in our portfolio. We pulled the data on every seed firm out there, and we are the firm that has the highest likelihood of getting a follow-on series A by Turbone BC firm. So the highest graduation rate of any seed fund from seed to series A to a Turbone fund is us by pretty wide margin. By the time we closed the first fund, it became pretty apparent that I accidentally built probably the most well-networked LP base in Silicon Valley, and I wanted to find the way to leverage that for the benefit of our founders, the ultimately our primary customers, and over time, we really started focusing on being the number one venture capital firm to get a founder from seed to series A. I'm curious how you got the capital in the angelist days to first do those deals, the 25K to 500K deals, and I'm also curious about the structure of the agreement to sell a stake of your management company that had the sunset provision in it. And I'm asking about both of these because there's always this cold start problem with people that want to do what you've done or want to run their own investing firm or get going. You solved that with these two ways, and so I'm curious to hear more about the details of each. I don't think there is any excuse saying that you can't start a venture capital firm with no money because it was literally flat broke when I started abstract. Did you file bankruptcy? I literally had filed bankruptcy at 24 years old when my previous startup company had failed. I was literally out of bankruptcy starting a venture capital firm. It's funny because at the time I was this humiliating experience, I put everything I had into this one company, turned out to be the wrong category to build a company in. I pulled the plug. Thankfully I got a job after that, so I was able to get back on my feet somewhat quickly, but no, I didn't have parents that I could rely on for seed cash to start being a venture capitalist. I didn't go to an Ivy League school where all of my friends parents were the guys who ran every single one of these venture capital firms, so I truly believe that there is no excuse. Because I think there is enough tools, at least in venture. I can't speak to other asset classes, that have really democratized access to capital. If you prove that you deserve capital, there is people in Silicon Valley who will give that to you. Angelus is the perfect platform for that. Angelus has capital on their platform, dedicated capital. If you find the deal, we'll put the money into it. I started finding deals and I started bringing it to the platform and the money showed up. That was like, this is real. I could bring a deal to the platform. I could write a summary on the company. I could write about the deal dynamics. And then within 24 hours, they're like, we raised $300,000. This deal raised $400. Remember the first deal I put on Angelus? It's kind of crazy. It's crazy. I was stunned the first time it's happened. The first deal I ever put on Angelus, I wrote the write up. I put this into kid up and then sent it to Angelus. And then I refreshed it four hours later and there was $470,000 subscribed to the deal. What was that? It was ripple. This is incredible. I can't believe this actually works. The money came from Angelus platform. You didn't know people that provided the money. I didn't source one dollar of the capital in that platform. Angelus sourced every penny of capital that came into those deals. And once I realized it was real, I just went ham. I went ham. I was looking for deals. I was just hunting for deals all day long. And what are the economics split between you and the platform in those deals? It's zero and twenty for the LPs. If Angelus sources the capital, which in my case they did in every single deal, they get five percent, I get fifteen. It's still a great deal. It's a fantastic deal. So you get zero and fifteen on all those. Zero and fifteen on every single one of those deals. And then I got so excited and so jacked up by this. I got so active that I ended up for a brief period of time. I think for six months, when I was one third of all the volume on Angelus. And it was fantastic. What cool thing about it was when I had stopped doing deals on Angelus and decided to raise my fund, a bunch of the syndicate investors who were actively supporting my own, like, what happened? Your deals are under the platform. I'm starting a fund. And those guys all became LPs as well. They even helped establish the platform for me to raise a fund with. But then also not every single founder in the world wanted SPBs. There's a public nature to that. I didn't want to be limited by the ability to invest in companies. So at one point, life speed invited me to be a scout for them. I put half my scout fund into the seed ground of Rippling. So that worked out well. I was working a job at Coronavision Capital. I had some money there and did some Angel checks and tan into everything. But yes, you could literally bootstrap adventure capital for amount of bankruptcy. And so looking down on you. I was told 20% to this consortium of the guys you mentioned earlier. How did you do that? How did you know how to price it? How did you talk through the terms? That was one of the situations in life where I was actually quite fortunate where there was a lot of demand for what I wanted to do. So I was actually able to set a price. I set a price that I thought was fair. And at the time, the price seemed high for me and retrospect. It seems low for them. I think those are the best deals in the world where everyone's happy. I was happy to get the deal up front and they're happy they made that deal at the end. Well, there's a price. The price was just shy of 50. I had some experience with this invested in the manager company of Polychain. So I learned a little bit about what a management equity financing looks like. And there were some learnings I took away from that. I wanted to ultimately own my own company. And I thought that over time, if I scaled having the founders of every single big platform fund owning an equity piece of my manager company is probably not the best thing for me long term. So we had set a sunset on that. I believe it's six or seven years. The nature of it was basically they invest because it's sunsets. They just got some top of waterfall participation in the first seven years of your economics or something like that. They get economics on everything I did in that first seven years in perpetuity. Everything I do in seven years and one day, they're not entitled to effectively last long. Exactly. They raise the fund in your six. They get it for another 12 years. Seven year timer and venture is nothing. They get no part. Most of the excitement and venture starts to happen years, nine and ten. And then you use that capital to finance the business and build a team. Yeah. And we built a really cool back end platform from scratch. We wanted to be seen as a very serious institution early in our fund's life cycle. Alex, my partner has a much more traditional background than I do. He's a bridge water Columbia guy. So very process oriented, very analytical, very data driven early on in our fund. We basically built a CRM from ground up, which we're actually spending out as a company right now because every venture capital has shown it to us. I'm like, oh, this is a product we would pay for it. So the guy who built that for us will is actually spending that out into a standalone business. There is a million ways to bootstrap your way into the venture capital world. So now if I start to think about more elements of the process here, 55 companies in the first fund, 47 and the angel of stays, talk me through the process of engaging with a new company that's young and the sorts of things that your pattern matching on or looking for and the things that turn you off and cause you to not be interested. I've learned over time that investing in founders for me works a lot better than investing in markets. I'm better at identifying what a good founder is and what a good market is. There is genetic makeup that I look for in a founding team of a company and whether it's spread amongst one founder or multiple founders, I'm looking for a combination of very strong commercial ability and very strong technical ability. I'm not technical, but Alex on my team is technical, Andre's technical will is technical. They're more suited to vet the technical capabilities of an individual than I would be. But when I mentioned the commercial aspect, I'm really looking for salesmanship and three different verticals. Vertical one is ability to fund raise seems simple, but building a startup company is hard and anything you do to put the odds slightly in your favor makes your odds of success that much more likely. There are certain founders who are good at fundraising, certain founders who are not good at fundraising. The founders who are good at fundraising get to build their startup company that much more easy than someone who's bad at fundraising. Most obviously you can sometimes solve for because you can help with that as an investor, but it's very beneficial when a founder has that salesmanship rigor. The next one is hiring. Hiring an early stage startup companies is sales. 85% of the companies we finance are based in the Bay Area. They need to hire engineers who can easily get a job at Meta or Google or OpenAI for $400,000 a year and the seed stage companies trying to hire that person for $150,000 a year. It takes a very specific person to convince somebody a $250,000 annual pay cut is in that person's best interest in exchange for equity in this company that just has a concept of an idea. That's really important because recruiting is something that I think a lot of people underestimate how important is a dearly stage. The founding stage of these companies and the next selling of product. Oftentimes V1 of these products are like these half-ass, broken, glitchy things that no one would pay for, but these founders are able to go out and find individuals who will at least be a design partner or a pilot customer and give them a shot to build something because oftentimes it's not even in their best interest. It's a time-suck. People will say come back to them and there's actually a working product and convincing somebody that it's actually worth spending time with them to perfect the product is also a specific type of individual. On the technical side, we're looking for someone with extremely strong technical capability that other engineers would actually work for. Some people are great engineers that other engineers might necessarily want to work for. And other people are great engineers that other engineers would happily work for. But I look for on that side as shipping velocity because this is the kind of engineer who's going to ship a product in six weeks or six months. And at the end of the day, I think seed stage investing, at least for us, is very momentum-driven. I want to build a portfolio of 60 high-momentium companies, hope that three to five of them escape velocity and become amazing companies. Another thing that I've started to gravitate to over time, which is a little counterintuitive to being adventure capital, because you want to own a lot of these companies, is I've found out how to a lot of success with delusion sensitive founders. You meet two buckets of founders seed stage and you ask them what kind of a round they want to raise. They're like, "I'm typical 5,25 million post-round down to sell 20 to 25 percent of my company, pretty standard." And I'm like, "I don't think there's anything standard to selling 20 to 25 percent of your company." You don't have to sell 20 to 25 percent of your company. Do you need $5 million? And then there's the other founder who comes in and says, "I need $3 million and I want to sell as little of my company as humanly possible for that $3 million." I've found that those founders tend to just be a little bit more high conviction of what they're building. They tend to believe that every percent of equity they give away is 1 percent of equity they'll never get back. And that's incredibly powerful because more so than negotiating with investors, which is great, they tend to maintain the highest bar of talent that they have. because they think about equity the same way whether it's going to an investor, whether it's going to an employee, and they want to make sure everybody they hire is worth every ounce of equity they get. Those founders also tend to be the ones that aren't wasteful with their equity. You know, if someone's not working out, they're going to fire them before they're 12-month cliffs so that there's not dead weight equity with, you know, 30 to 40 people that no longer work at the company, which is also really great from an IR perspective and their investment because it makes it such that the option will refresh and the next round is not as big as it would have been if they just loosey-goosey able-way a lot of equity. Those founders who were the delusion sensitive ones in my portfolio that have the highest bar for the talent, they hire, they're companies in my portfolio where all of those things ring true and the companies are doing quite well, people are always shocked at how small the teams of those companies are, relative to the scale of what they've achieved. So I truly do believe incredibly high-quality talent. It's like a multiplier effect on the company efficiency. How fast do you work your way through one of these? How much time do you spend with the founding team before making an investment typically? It varies, but it's typically somewhere between three to four, sometimes five meetings, and then doing a lot of back-channel work in between those meetings. Sometimes you have the time to do that, other times you don't. Having said that, the way our firm is set up, we have standing meetings multiple times a day. So our whole firm is designed around speed, and we built our model around being able to do what might take another venture capital from two to three weeks, we can do in two to three days. Okay, so talk through that. I want to hear the cadence of a week at abstract, if I just walked through the office all for a week. It's what I would say. A bunch of pitch meetings. That is what I think our time is best spent doing pitch meetings, and then helping our existing portfolio. Founders pitching us. I probably always tell people it's not a flex to get a meeting with me, because I pretty much don't say no to meetings. But I probably take an hour between 18 to 30 pitches per week. It goes back to the Michael Fraser frame of reference. The more companies you meet, the easier it is to spot the people that truly stand out. Obviously you miss things over time, but I think it's hard to know what great looks like without seeing a lot of things. I also find that the VCs that I believe are the most successful VCs, and have had the most storied careers, tend to be the people that take every single introduction I send them. And then the VCs who are still building their careers, and I send them deals, are like, I'm a little swamp for bandwidth right now. My guy, that guy's not going to make it. It's pretty obvious who really wants to meet Rulof at Sequoia. I think you heard this line from Doug Leoni. I think when I first met Rulof, he told me in order to be successful in venture capital, he has to have dumbbell ears. I mean, so you have to hear everything or see everything. And I saw Neil's podcast here yesterday where he was talking about how they don't care about coverage. I think that could be true at growth stage. I think at seed stage coverage is absolutely key, because there is no market map of everything that exists. Most of these companies don't even have websites yet. There is nothing to exist. You really just need to have your tentacles everywhere to get as many companies as possible surfaced up to you. And there is so little that exists about these companies that there is very little work you can do to qualify or disqualify in advance. So you really just need to spend time with them. What are the standing meetings that you have with your team in turn once? We have a 30 minute meeting at least once a day to just catch up on every company people that met with that day, because we meet with so many companies that it's very easy to forget what was addressing. On a daily basis, we're kind of just syncing up. Has anybody met anything that other people on the team should meet? In the meetings themselves, do you have favorite questions that you find yourself returning to again and again? To ask founders. The number one thing that I look to from founders is prove to me that you're exceptional. If you look at the most successful, impressive founders out there, they tend to have been impressive people prior to starting that company. They had a history of doing special and impressive things. And there was this famous question on Quora once upon a time that somebody asked and said, is it true that nobody's ever started a successful company after 35 years old? Because until again, everyone's like, and all the power a lot of companies are founded by younger individuals, which has some truth and also doesn't. And the people who answered that question were like, read often. He's like, I found a LinkedIn when I was at R35 and Mark Benioff. He's like, I found it sales force when I was at R35 and read Hastings. I found the Netflix when I was at R35. And every single one of those people were very successful by the time they had started those companies. It's hard for me to believe if I meet somebody that if I can't get a sense that this person is special or has been special or has done impressive things in their life, that the first impressive thing they're ever going to do is this company that they're asking me to invest in. So do you literally ask them, tell me the most impressive things you're done? I ask about what are entrepreneurial things you've done. Tell me your story. If there is something impressive in their story, they will make sure it stands out. Sometimes the special thing is they got into the school of their dreams. So did everybody else I went to that school? So like something that's truly different. I'm looking for resilience as key. That's a little harder to discern, especially with the age of founders that I back. Not everybody's had a situation where they've had to deal with hardship to develop that resilience. But some of the founders in our portfolio that have done pivot after pivot after pivot have survived for years. And then ultimately started a company that had nothing to do with their first company and that it being very, very successful. I'm not saying that every founder should stick with every single company every cent of time. There's founders should absolutely stop working on a company and either return cash or find the sauce landing or something and move on. But there are other founders who will just do these non local pivots. I think the local pivot is what kills companies and an example of this we invest in a company called paparazzi. We had seated them when it was TTYL and then TTYL pivoted five or six times until it turned into paparazzi and then paparazzi launch. I think it was the first consumer social application ever to debut at number one on the app store. And by the end of that day they had three term sheets from three tier one VC firms and they signed a term sheet with benchmark. Within six weeks he came very obvious that there was no retention. The growth was there but the retention wasn't there and he just returned cash. He had all this money from benchmark nobody was telling the company down but he was like I've only been thinking about consumer social for the last three years. I know if I pivot again it's going to be another consumer social idea because it's all my brain is wired to do right now. So I need to shut this company down and I need to return cash and I need to just go back to the drawing board. And if and when I come with another company I'm going to come back to the seed rounds. So I don't have this series evaluation hanging over my head and then there's other founders who have turned their entire team maybe even half their founders but they maintain the balance sheet and they went to like skeleton crew mode until they figured out things that had nothing to do with their first version of their business. Clay is a really good example. We were just a second to the seed round of clay I think eight years ago. I think they hard pivoted two years ago into what clay ultimately is. Bappy is a company in our portfolio that was originally called super powered. They're doing very very well they've scaled from zero to double digit millions of ARR within 14 months of launch but that was four years after I seeded them and seven pivots later. Craya is another example of multiple pivots until like they finally caught fire with the latest version of their product. Craya was originally called Jennifer's. So do you care at the beginning you told me a line about art one time all good artists ugly or something like that. Do you care much about the idea or you really really really just focused on the attributes of the founder that are really needs to be thematically interested in the market. And not an overly saturated market that shows some sign of novel thinking what I mean by that is there is this weird phenomenon. Silicon Valley that every time a tier one fund or maybe two tier one funds finance a company in a category and the next three months I'll get pitch 15 companies doing the exact same thing. And it's very hard to discern whether that person truly wants to build the company in that category or whether that person just wants to be a venture backed founder. And I know that there is capital available for this category right now oftentimes I'm looking for signs of novel thinking so it's either needs to be one of the first one or two times I've been heard this company pitch to me before or it's getting pitch me with a completely brand new perspective. A perspective that I haven't heard before that I think means that this person actually truly thought about what they were trying to build specific ideas less important to me. And I know more about the founders understanding of the idea it's very easy to understand how thoughtful someone has been about anything just by questioning them. There are certain founders you ask questions to their answers like depth their answers like substance and you end up in these situations where I'm like even when I ask you the question the answer is still isn't a real answer. I don't actually feel like you even know the answer and then there's the other founder who you'll ask a question and they can give you a 15 minute long answer to every question you ask. And I've either been asked this question five times before he's asked himself this question 10 times already and thought about every angle to it. That's saying that that's absolutely necessary but at least it shows to me that they came to this with like a first principles mindset and they truly have thought a lot about building this specific company. At the end of the day I do try to look 18 months in the future if this company does well how many investors do I personally know they'll be interested in leading a follow on around the financing for this company. That's three tier one funds have already led a series a or series B financing and most of the tier one funds are going to be more interested in falling on the one of those companies and the new company so then there's certain times or maybe it's a mistake where I just believe a category is too saturated. And the odds of success the risk reward ratio isn't quite there. So now we get through you like a company. How do you think about the pricing for a round that you will tolerate. There's some degree to which your price taker there's market prices for these things those seven flow or you just basically a price taker or do you have limits to what you'll do. It's basically pretty simple if there's multi stage funds around the table the deal will get done no lower than 25 and it'll probably get done no higher than 50. It gets done higher than 50 means one multi stage got really excited just turned it straight into a series eight which point it's not really fit for me anymore and that does happen. The 50 is something actually undertaken the consideration because every venture capital firm has a portfolio construction model and my portfolio construction model says that I want to own eight to 10% of 60 companies at seed and I want to maintain that 10% ownership and the best 10 of those companies through series B. I have assumptions for what my entry valuation needs to be into these companies that used to be I want to maintain average entry valuation of sub 20 million that's become impossible I used to do that but I could no longer maintain an average entry valuation of sub 20 million. Maybe my average entry valuation today I want to maintain is sub 30 million that means sometimes I'll do a deal at 15 posts because I found a deal that was off the beaten path and it's a precede maybe I took an early bet on people. Then there's a deal with the 50 posts but if I can maintain an average entry valuation of sub 30 it'll be nice. If you start doing too many deals that are north of your 30 you start messing up your portfolio construction model because the more deals you do. do over 30, the less number of shots you have on goal. Because if my goals have 60 companies per fund, and suddenly my entry valuation starts to deviate from what I modeled in my portfolio construction model, then I start needing to consider myself as investing in this company worth losing one shot on goal out of this fund. That's kind of when you see that they're starting thinking about price a little bit more discerningly. That's the answer is yes. I'm just like, I want to invest in this company. This company needs to be in the fund. You kind of need to convince yourself that you like it twice as much as another company in your fund because you're shooting two bullets on one deal. But once we've decided to invest in a company, price tends to be not something that dissuades us from investing in that company until it gets so egregious that you can only recall a seed deal. That's basically our point of view. Obviously, we try to get it to fit within the confines of a portfolio construction model. But oftentimes you have to deviate from that to get the company into your portfolio because ultimately ventures and outliers business. You have no idea if the deal you passed on due to price will be the outliers. So you kind of just have to swallow the bullet sometimes. Now I come to winning. So you have to convince the founders to take your money and not other peoples. I love this idea that the pitch you give to founders that's increasingly proven true is that by taking your money, they're effectively getting a fantastic fundraising partner for the future. You and abstract are lowering their future cost of capital. Talk us through that pitch that you give and then how you execute against it. Competing for deals is very challenging. It is an incredibly time-consuming process. For us, competing is a very labor and sense of process because prior to doing this podcast, there's nothing publicly available about me on the internet period. Pretty much all of the selling I need to do is explaining to the founder who we are, what we do, having seven or eight of my other founders and calling them and explaining the benefits of working with us and saying that if they were to start a company again, they would absolutely come back to us for our seed round. So when we do decide to win a deal, we really do go all in in terms of how much we're putting behind the make the case for the founder that we are their best seed partner period. In addition to fundraising, obviously, we have a full platform team now, like anybody else would expect from a large seed fund that we have today. We have an incredible head of GTM. We have an incredible head of comms. We have an incredible head of talent. So we can help with all of those things. But what we really wanted to do is be exceptional one particular thing or at least what I wanted to focus on. I think everybody in our team specializes in their own specific things. But one process that I thought was broken in venture ecosystem was the fundraising process when I first got into this and you're an investor. So you've seen these spreadsheets before when a founder wants to fundraise. They put together a Google doc and they share that Google doc with all of their investors. And on that Google doc on the left hand column, it's a list of every single venture capital firm they want to talk to. And then they ask all of their investors to go through that list and say, please mark whether or not you have a relationship with one of these venture capital firms, how senior your relationship is and how close you are with that individual. And then the founder will go through that list at the end and ask nine of his investors for intros to 30 different venture capitalists and they'll kick off their process. The reason I thought that was bad was there's too many people involved in the fundraising process. And there's too many potentially misaligned incentives. This potential investor might have a really close relationship with this VC. They might be trying to do their buddy a favor by helping them want to deal too many people work at these venture capital firms. And that's too many young people telling their friends about who this fund is talking to who's passing, who's not passing what the valuations are coming in. And these are just trying to gather information as much as they possibly can. And when you choke off that information, then their force to really just do their own work and truly build conviction in the company and they tend to work faster this way. After I closed my fund, as I mentioned all the LPs we had, it became pretty apparent to me that I became the person in Silicon Valley that had direct line to the most senior GPs at every single one of these venture capital firms. So in the early days, I got some of my founders to trust me and I'd say listen, let's not bring anybody else in the fundraising process. I will be the sole node and I'll help you with the deck. I'll help you with the data room. Let's do a few mock pitches with people on my team. I will make introductions to every single top GP that's the relevant partner at every single one of these venture capital firms for your company. We'll line up all of these meetings over a three day window next week. And at the end of every single day, I will check in with all of them and I will get feedback and I'll find out what's resonating, what's not resonating and who's truly interested versus who's not interested. And we'll keep the process going. We'll keep it tight. We'll keep it efficient and we won't have any information leaks and then we'll try to get you the best deal possible. But ultimately what the best deal possible is what I ultimately tried to do is get as much leverage for my founders as possible. Leverage comes in the form of term sheets. The more term sheets they have, the more negotiating power they have. Everybody wants negotiating power and making a deal for themselves and for their company and for their existing shareholders. When you don't have leverage, you will sell 25% of your company at Series A to whoever gives you the term should you want to work with. When you do have leverage, you can get that down dramatically. What I thought could be the number one value additive thing that I could do for my companies is make sure that by the time they exit, they own more of their company than they would have had an open on the cap table. Now we have data that not only do we have the highest graduation rate from seed to Series A, we're also have the highest desk style of average valuation of Series A and the lowest average delusion in the Series A. We can basically make your company have way better access to lower cost capital in the future from the highest quality partners. One of my founders do a reference with another founder saying that the likelihood that you own 10% more of your company exit is 10x higher with abstract on your cap table than not. Because I can save you 5% at the A and 3% at the B and 2% at the C. These things tend to add up nicely. If you end up exiting your company for $2 billion and you can end up with an extra $200 million in your pocket, I can't personally think of a single value add that Adventure Capital brings to the table that translates some more than next year, $200 million in your pocket. Having done so many of these where you're helping a founder, let's focus on Series A to start because that's what follows what you do. What have you learned about running these processes well? And I'm interested in very nitty gritty detail what time of night to call the VC or something to get the feedback or how to solicit true feedback that's not white-washed or something. I think I've been doing it for long enough that I have very trusted parties. Those just tell you. At every Adventure Capital, they'll just tell me. But how did that start? In the early days, it was really just a lot of who is this kid? Why is he running these processes? Why are these people trusting him to run this fundraise? Why is he the gatekeeper for this round? Over time, it just kind of became accepted that I was that person? The definitive thing that made a proven that I'm the accepted part to do that, whether it's at the A or the B or the C. As I think we've proven to do such a service for founders when we're running these processes for them, that even in deals where our co-lead is a multi-stage tier one big name platform fund, when that next round is coming, they will tell the founder we're more than happy to let Robton/abstract run this process because they'll do a better job at it than anybody else will. So I think once we got the validation from our co-investors that they think we would do a better job running this than they would, then I think it just kind of became accepted that for our portfolio comes this is the way it's going to be. You're a southerbie now for this. That's a fairly good describe it. What have you learned about the dynamics of who tends to win at Suris A when they want to? There is different types of ways rounds come together. There is the typical process where the founder puts together a deck and a data room and lines of meetings every single but your capital firm and they go out and they pitch. And then there is deals that happen outside of that dynamic that we have less involvement and oftentimes we help our founders build relationships with certain VCs in advance of the Suris A process because that's actually a good way that we get information on what should be this company's North Star metrics. How should we know in this company will be ready to raise a Suris A. Oftentimes one of those people will just come in and preemptively make the founder an offer and the founder likes this partner. The terms are fair and they don't want to spend the next three to four weeks their life fundraising and they call it a day and they move forward. Certain VCs are very, very good at doing that. But in like the bake off process when there is 15, 18, 20 firms around the table, very few companies end up getting more than three or four term sheets. There's a few companies that get seven, eight or nine term sheets. The firms who I think truly excel in winning hyper competitive series A rounds that I've seen from my experience over and over again and the B. Sequoia benchmark in Andreessen even to this day and somebody pulled out a stat that showed the VC firms that have the highest number of unicorns that they have led financing in prior to them becoming unicorns since 2015. And first place was the Andreessen second place was Sequoia, which validates this truth already. And then fifth place was benchmark, which is kind of shocking when you consider how much smaller their funds are and how targeted they have to be with the checks that they write. But typically when one of those three firms extends an offer to a company, they tend to win unless they're competing with one of the two other ones and then they tend to only lose to one of the other two. If you eliminate those firms, then it's a free for all and there are certain people who are more qualified to win certain deals and other deals. If you eliminate the dynamic, there's plenty of companies that could have absolutely raised a series A from one of those firms that somebody else ends up winning, but they preempt the deal and they just are very good at sniping deals. And I think those three individual firms have built brand weight that's so strong that founders really just want to be affiliated with them. And there are certain partners at those firms that have such amazing reputations as board directors that the series A is the first time you're giving up a board director seat not to say there are phenomenal board directors and a bunch of firms as there really are, but the density of high quality board members that have storied reputation to being great warm members of those three particular firms, I think outweighs the number of high quality board members that exist to pretty much any other venture capital firm. And founders the advice to get from their seat investor is an addition to optimizing for you know, a good deal for yourself at the series A. You really should be optimizing for who's going to be the best board director to have on this journey with you for the next 10 years. The early days in Dreson, who were the founding partners, every single one of them were operators who would sold companies for hundreds of millions of dollars. It was hard to compete with. This guy is going to be on your company who knows exactly what it takes to build a successful outcome in venture capital. And then the benchmarking is coil alternative. They have some individuals like that, but they also have individuals who have been on the boards of the most incredible outcomes in Silicon Valley history. So they have a much better sense of what exceptional looks like, more so than other people. They know things that work and they know things that don't work. And there's great board members at every venture capital firm and they're all very public. And there's a lot of people that does venture capital firms that don't have those experiences that haven't sold the company and haven't yet been affiliated with a great company. And those guys will do great and some of them will join boards and become one of those people individually. But when a founder is choosing, they're more likely to choose the person with that experience in the person without. If you take a snapshot today of abstract and you had to go out and gather feedback from like everyone that engages with the firm, founders, LPs, other venture investors, other random people, and you bucketed all that feedback into a spectrum, what would the most complimentary people say and what would the most critical people say, do you think? The most complimentary people would say that we'd become one of the leading seed firms in Silicon Valley in a relatively short period of time that we have a great reputation among our founders were routinely referred to as the most trusted investor on the capital of our portfolio companies. I think a lot of the multi-stage firms would consider us their most trusted seed stage venture capital firm partner. And I think some would say that we've achieved a lot more success than other people have that have started a venture capital firm in the same time duration that we have. I'd say the people that would say critical things would probably say that we're like heat seekers, signal chasers, which wouldn't have been inaccurate if you said that six or seven years ago because a lot of the model was aligned was around how do I get into deals alongside those firms, which candidly I had to because I wouldn't build where his SPB is otherwise. That's why the LSPB is going to be one of these. That's my go-to-market strategy. But over time, I think we became the signal, but I think people still tend to hold on to old narratives. So I could totally see that in the case. On the earlier days, we wore high volume. We're not anymore as a firm. I think we invest in 14 net new seed deals per year, which is a little over one deal per month. I don't think we're high volume today by any means, but as again, people tend to stick to old narratives and people will say that we're high volume and they're all call options, which I just would say is not true. I can't help but think about all the different art world analogies that you've built very quickly. I think a ghosty has a really cool story. He was a total outsider with no relevant pedigree. And he was kind of just dismissed his first few years or first decade until he ultimately became the leading guy in the category. Now I'm far, far, far away from that. And I think Silicon Valley is a more friendly place than the art world. Silicon Valley has been nicer to me than maybe the art world was to Larry Gugosi in the early days. So I don't want to draw the direct analogy. But I think the main thing is just staying consistent and maintaining the reputation and building upon that reputation and then producing great results. Ventures, the only asset class for historical results is somewhat indicative of future performance. You can actually somewhat forecast how about your capital firm will do over time based on how they've done historically. So I do believe if we just take consistent, we have a pretty long trajectory and a long career ahead of us. I'm 34 today. I started this when I was 26. I think I have at least 20 years left in me to keep doing this. And I think you could build quite a brand and then quite a platform in that time frame. What feels missing from the core machine today, you mentioned speed being an objective function that you optimize around a lot, what if you could just snap your fingers and improve some aspect of the abstract platform, would you improve or change? It would be brand. I think brands would trump anything else that the machine doesn't have today. Primarily because when a founder comes referred to us by an existing portfolio company, most of the work is done for us. You're not going to find much about these guys online, but they've been phenomenal partners to me. They've opened doors for me. They knocked it out of the park on our fund raise. They brought together the most solid angels to fill out our cap table and he's always available when I need him for anything. If we don't have that and we're cold reaching out to founders, it's much more of an uphill battle to convince them why we should be in the same conversation of all of the other venture capital firms are talking to whose names they've heard of before, which is why I mentioned that winning deals for us is a very manual process. Other firms just get to win because of their brand. They don't have to spend the man hours that I have to and call on all the favors that I have to to win the deal. Hard to the reason I'm doing this. Coming out of obscured. Exactly. But I think that's really the missing link. There's other people that work at the firm and you'd mentioned this earlier where my name you hear more often than abstract and I really do want the firm to be abstract. I think that'll be beneficial because scaling a platform, scaling a team helps when everybody at the team can do things. When everybody at the team can go out and compete, win and support their own portfolio companies. And if there is a brand way that they can all leverage to compete, that allows them to all have more level playing field and doing their jobs. Say more about that tendency for individuals to have more of a quote unquote brand these days as investors than firms. This was another VC that explained this to me once and I asked him how he identified who to hire for his venture capital firm and he said he tends to optimize for people who either already have personal brands or have the ability to build a personal brand. Very good venture capital firm, strong brands, but he was the one who actually explained to me. Sequoia, benchmark and Andrewson have incredibly strong brands such that if you're a less well known individual partner at Sequoia, a less well known individual partner at Andrewson, you can still compete and win some of the most competitive deals in Silicon Valley because of the brand that you're affiliated with. And he said now the amount of time and resources it takes to build a brand that can compete with those firms on brand is counterproductive to what it takes to be a great venture capitalist. But building a personal brand is something you do and tend them to be a great venture capitalist. I hasn't explained I was a collaborate with a personal brand for his venture brand. Because I hear the name Rampton multiple times a week. I hear the name abstract once a month. That's the difference between personal brand and venture capital firm brand. And he goes people know who you are, founders know who you are, VCs know who you are. You have a reputation. There's companies of people associated with you. There are skill sets that you have the people associated with you and people who have personal brand venture capital firms tend to be able to compete for competitive financing rounds. And if you look at every venture capital firm excluding those top three and even in those top three, this tends to be true more often than not for the most competitive deals. When those firms are competing or a hyper competitive financing, it tends to be the same one, two, or three partners who tends to do most of the selling and closing for those deals to bring those deals home. And very few venture capital firms have more than one, two and at the most three individuals that can independently go out and source and compete in close financing in the most competitive deals, which is why ventures hard to scale as an asset class, which is why a lot of LPs look at these large platform funds and say if I could just invest in these four GPs, that'd be way more appealing than investing in 16 of them and having to have exposure to the other 12 when I really just want to exposure to these four. Again, it's like the hard thing with the paintings for you to buy the. Exactly. You got to support the program. I do think there are certain individuals that you meet that tend to be charismatic, trust worthy, have good judgment and will have an ability that given enough time and opportunity, they can build a very good reputation and a personal brand for themselves as well. Do you think this whole ecosystem is in a healthy place? Yes and no. People argue that these AI companies are raising at astronomically high valuations and I actually don't know if that's true. And I don't think it'll know if it's true for another three or four years because while the multiple seem insane, the companies are also growing at unprecedented rates. Historically, you could look at a SaaS company and say, well, if it's growing 3X, 4X, you're over a year and you can project the 5X over the next two years, you can justify paying this price today. With AI companies, this company grew 20X year over year last year. It's on track to grow 15X year over year this year. Maybe it grows 10X year over year next year. What is the fair multiple to assign to that deal? It's hard to determine what the correct answer to that is. But there's also way less predictability in its potential growth because there's no shortage of application layer companies that become obsolete overnight. When it becomes a new feature of one of the foundation model companies, the company could have grown 20X last year and 10X this year that shrinks next year. I think at the end of the day, with venture, you're trying to capture outliers. If the companies are shaping up to be the next power law companies in the future, you'll do whatever it takes to get in one of those companies. So for the follow-on rounds, I will say that I don't think it's in a bad place because these are truly incredible companies growing at truly unprecedented rates and achieving adoption that no one ever thought was possible. So they're clearly have unbelievable signs of product market fit very early in their life cycle. So that's the side that I wouldn't say is healthier unhealthy. It's it's undetermined. It's good for the asset class overall. If you're investing in companies that are growing this fast, LPs will ultimately do well. Will they do as well if they would have these companies were invested in half the price and double the ownership, sure, but markets get efficient over time. And I think venture is an asset class is getting efficient and efficiency brings in returns back to the mean. And then you're starting to invest in managers that you think could find alpha in one way or another. But part of the ecosystem that seems unhealthy to me and is very reminiscent of 2021 is the timeline from graduation from seed to A, A to B, B to C. And the last six months, I think I funded seven companies that have already raised series A rounds within weeks of me leading their seed financings and at a four to five X multiple at which I financed the company at just a few weeks prior and not a whole lot of fundamental business products. And that time frame and that hasn't happened since 2021. In 2021, I was funding companies within a couple months. The series I got done and that is very actively happening again. I'm funding companies that are raising A's within a couple months and then B's within a couple months after that. And if you look at the company, well, to what I invested in versus what the company is today. They're basically just paying 10 times the price for the same exact company I invested in a couple months or four months ago, plus your minus a few hires and maybe some design partners. So I do think the industry's getting a little drunk on IRR and the same thing that happened in 2021 is happening again in terms of my latest funds are coming out of J-Curve way too quickly. I think in adventure your IRR should be back-weighted. - You're rising. - Exactly. In the 2021 vintage and the latest vintage our funds are getting to 30 to 40% IRR within the first few months of initial deployment, which shouldn't be the case, which would be negative IRR, at least during the deployment period. The velocity at which companies are raising follow-on funding is a little jarring. If I rewind back to prior to age 26 and thinking about the rest of your life, what are the things that have happened to you that have most made you who and how you are? - That a very non-traditional by Silicon Valley standards childhood. My parents are on Ian Immigrants. My dad immigrated pre-revolution, my mom post-revolution. I have an older brother, five years older than I am. And we grew up in Los Angeles, just outside of Calabasas. And my parents are small business owners. When I lived in L.I. my father on the couple of restaurants, couple of dry cleaners, and my mom was in school to be a dental hygienist. When we moved to the Bay area, 'cause that's where my mom had a sister and she wanted to be closer to family. That's where about 12 or 13 years old. My dad used an immigrant coming from other countries, so they're all financially motivated. He kind of in an early stage instilled in me that America revolves around money. You need to figure out a way to make it. I heard it a little too often as a kid. One of the things that I could point to when I was younger was the stock market. For whatever reason, my dad always had CNBC on in the mornings before school started and I always sat in the background. And when I was 13 years old, he was kind enough to lend me $2,000 in my mom. And I wanted to teach myself to trade stocks. And I quickly learned that $2,000 was not enough money to trade stocks. And I wanted to lend to trade derivatives instead. I learned that the multiple potential derivatives was order of magnitudes, what you get in the stock market. I did that through my iteration in high school. I only had two real jobs in my life. Job number one was when I was 14 years old, I sheltered books at the local library. And then job number two was I worked at West Elm, the furniture store, which is actually my wife's favorite story about my upbringing because of the way I did sales. - Tell us how to do it. (laughs) - I had this job when I was 16 and 17 years old. And I used it to finance a side hustle, which I'll tell you about in a second. But everybody in West Elm has a corner of the store. And every corner is its own version of a style of an apartment that you can have. And I worked there on the weekends. And I always kept an eye out for people that came to Marin from the city with zip cars. So they rented a car to take some furniture home. So I always spotted the people who rented a car 'cause they were there for a mission. And when they came in, West Elm was in commission base. It was an incentive based. You didn't get a percentage of your sales. You got a progressive bonus based on the size of a sale. You were incentivized to upsell people. If a sale was $500, you got a $10 incentive. If a sale was $1,500, you got like $150 incentive. The graduated exponentially. So somebody would come in and they would want to buy a sectional. And they were ready to take it home. Staging is everything in those stores. (laughs) I'd be like, "Do you guys want to take home the pillows? You want to take home the coffee table? What about the rug?" They're like, "No, no, no, no, we just want the sectional." And I would take everything off of it. To show them what it would look like when it got home, I would constantly encourage them to take it because they would be very unhappy with the way it looked when it came home. And there was no harm in returning it because unlike commissions, incentives were not rolled back when things were returned. (laughs) I did focus on that. And well, somehow, a lot of very low sectionals and sofas and I would ask them if they have a coffee table at home. Like, "Yeah, I'm like, there's a low coffee table." They said, "No, I'm like, well, have you ever seen a coffee table that's higher than a sectional?" Like, you need to prop your legs upward. It's not going to look good. It's not going to be comfortable. You should take this coffee table also. So I ended up having like the highest average ticket sales of the West Somme. The hourly rate was nothing compared to what you got on those incentives. I really just focused on upsiding those sales. But then half a summer and half a school year, I actually opted to go to the stockroom because I was going to get more work done in the stockroom because you're running the floor all day long. That's when I got an appreciation for hard labor because as I mentioned, West Somme was one of those stores that stocks everything. They had a deal with UPS. Every morning, UPS would pull up a truck and the stock guys would unload it and put it in there and that just had a main inventory. And I remember this is probably like the single hardest day of physical work I had in my life where our manager said, tomorrow we have four trucks. So we staffed six stock guys to unload these four trucks. It's going to take half the day and we're going to call it a day. And the guys at UPS, they didn't actually unload. The deal was just to drop the trucks off and then they would pick it up and they were empty. And I remember I showed up that next day and everybody called and said, except for me. And I had the single handedly unload four UPS trucks where the furniture. And I started at 7.30 in the morning and I think I was there until 7.30 at night. For whatever reason I ended, they very proud of myself. I don't know if I should have, but I really appreciated what hard work was. Well, I do think there's a consumable working hard and smart. I do think you have to do both. Hard work is just something that was always instilled in me in early age. And I think founders work hard. I think you have to build hard to build anything of value or anything of success. And there's certain people who are willing to work that hard and certain people who aren't. I would argue that the five people who called in sick that day aren't willing to work that hard. And they probably haven't really gone much further in life than that Weston Stock Room. But then my side hustle business, which were actually made most of my money in high school, was I grew up in Marin County, which is a relatively afloat neighborhood. There are some people that are a lot more afloat than others. There were certain girls whose parents would throw them very extravagant sweet 16s. And there were other girls whose parents wouldn't. And I saw a hole in the market there. My high school business was I would finance sweet 16s for anybody who wanted a sweet 16. And I did this for a couple of years between the years of me being 16 and 17 years old. I would run out of venue, I would get a DJ. And my only condition was they can bite anybody they want. It was going to be their birthday. Their name was going to be on the banner. The DJ was going to do shout outs to their name. But I got the charge cover charge. And I also got to make the party dramatically larger and invite anybody from every other high school in Marin County. I turned this into a real business. I would get the venue, I get insurance for the venue. I would go to the local gym and get the roided out meat heads, I'd give them 50 bucks for the night. They would block the side doors to nobody snuck in. I spent so much money on the first part of my parents' word that I was going to lose all my savings that I saved up at their that one event. And the funny joke was I had a pencil box to collect all the cash. And then within about 10 minutes of the party, there's too much cash. I couldn't close the pencil box anymore. So I ran to the bathroom and I took out like a garbage bag and I just started stuffing it with cash. And then that became like a business that ran for like the next couple of years until it didn't really make sense to host parties. So how much money would you make on a party year in summer? I would net like 2000 bucks a weekend. Then I would do like two to three parties per month. So it was good little side business for high school. Talk to you about the experience of starting a head fund and getting a little bit more serious about the investing side of things from your age. Wasn't it all my senior high school that I actually made money trading? I got very fortunate through a combination of locking out with wall utility and not understanding risk management where I was trading out of the money call options and put options against triple-levard ETFs that tracked the banking sector during the financial crisis. And a ETF that would swing anywhere between 10 to 30% on a daily basis given what the Federal Reserve was doing on tarp or no tarp or even getting bankrupt. Your baristering's getting acquired by JPM. And I had made a few hundred thousand bucks trading over a few short week windows on derivatives against those instruments. And that was like a good thing and a bad thing for me. The good thing was that it gave me a ton of confidence in myself and I convinced myself that I was genius. And the bad thing was it gave me way too much confidence in myself and convinced me that I was a genius. I decided that I wasn't gonna go to college and I was gonna start a hedge fund straight out of high school. I got a series 65 license, which is the license you need to start a hedge fund. There was a local financial advisor that I spent some time with for a summer and he did PWM for some high-knit worth individuals and some of those guys saw me trading on my screen. They're like, "Oh, if you start something, "we'll put like 10, 15, 20,000 bucks into it." I ended up raising a fund in January of '09. I rolled my money into that fund, which was the largest check in the fund. And then I raised this little $3 million from 45 individuals. So lots of tiny checks that didn't really mean a whole lot to anybody. And launch a fund in January of '09. So timing was definitely on my side. Focused on concentrated positions in triple-ever ETFs, momentum trading on high-ball tech stocks and then derivatives on those two strategies to get even more leverage on the first two strategies. I just had no idea what I was doing, but thankfully the market was forgiving of a strategy like that, but extreme volatility along the way. I had certain months where I was down 37%, one month that I was down 51%. August of 2011, I remember as distinctly being one of the worst months of my life 'cause it was the European debt crisis. When Greece was on the crux of defaulting, I think the market had 13 consecutive down days and I was short-balled. Actually, experience why you could actually go into debt running venture capital firm, but thankfully we recovered from that. It took a few months, but that was a very, very painful month. I was in the Bay Area and I just kept hearing more and more about tech. And I didn't particularly enjoy running a hedge fund. I did well financially relative to my age doing it, but I didn't like sitting in front of a computer screen for 15 hours a day. It's a very lonely job and it's a very stressful job. People in venture complained that the feedback loops were too long. I agree the feedback loops and hedge funds are too tight. I think you can convince yourself, you're a good investor or convince yourself, you're a bad investor too quickly in hedge funds. If you look at hedge funds and default, they tend to have a shorter duration of life than a legacy private equity firm or a legacy venture capital firm because it's just very hard to outperform in public markets for extended periods of time. That I was in the Bay Area and I want to learn more about tech just 'cause this was my backyard and I kept reading about it. I started cold emailing VCs, angel investors, founders, just anybody I could read about online and Silicon Valley is a nice place. People are pretty receptive to cold emails. I got a few meetings with individuals and I just learned more about tech and I wanted to find the way to immerse myself in the ecosystem and I just spent more time with individuals. I wasn't really getting anywhere. So I was like, if I want to do this for a living, I can't be one foot in one foot out. I need to just immerse myself into this entirely. So I decided to mind on my hedge fund and focus on that. And the hedge fund did well. Everybody produced multiples on their investment. And then I tried to get a job at one of the big venture capital firms. And I ultimately got a couple of interviews. And I remember I looked back on this in cringe, but one of the first guys who ever took a meeting with me, I reconnected with recently. This guy named David Crane, he runs Google Ventures. I shot him a cold email and he responded. And he was probably the most senior person who responded and he asked me to come in for a meeting. I wore a suit and tie. I walked into the office. It was my first time walking into like a venture capital from a good and I felt like a salesman. Everybody was wearing jeans, T-shirt, baseball caps, sneakers. Just based on the way I dressed, I knew I blew it on the initial meeting. But he was kind. He gave me some pointers. He gave me feedback. And I met a few other people as well. But the consistent feedback was, "Hey, listen, your background's not that relevant to venture capital, but you should consider starting a company instead." And over time, I just learned that there actually is no relevant background to venture capital. So mother, there's no relevant background to starting art gallery, apparently. And everybody suggested I should start a company. And I think that's terrible advice to give anybody. You should never advise anybody to start a company. I should start it on their own or not start one at all. But I ended up taking that advice. And I started a company and I funneled everything I had left over for my hedge fund into that company. And this is in mid 2014 when Marketplace lending was a popular sector. Yeah, sure. I think companies like Lending Club and Unprosper and I thought that sector was going to be the next big thing. The rate of capital going into it, the rate of growth of those companies. And I thought that if that sector were to reach its full potential, there would need to be a liquid secondary market for it. Because of those loans that have maturity periods and those maturity periods scaled anywhere from three years to five years to seven years. And banks trade debt like a liquid asset class all the time. So why one of the individuals trading on these platforms will have the same access to liquidity. So I wanted to build an exchange that allowed that investors to have that same level of liquidity. I still funded this company with everything I made previously. And I built out a team and went to the regulatory framework of setting up an exchange. And then 14 months in when I had a product that I was actually ready to raise external financing for. That sector had completely collapsed. I think Sequoia started writing prosper down to zero and blending Club, but plummeted like 85% from its peak IPO price. And I had spent my entire net worth building a supplemental product to a collapse industry. Pretty much everything I made on my hedge fund, I lost on that company and ended up in debt. And that was kind of my first reality check in life when I realized that I'm actually not a genius and I could lose money. And maybe I should have just gone to college. Why did I put myself through all of this? But thankfully, one of the venture capital firms that I hitched that company to was a firm called core innovation capital. The founding partner of that firm is a guy named Ariane Schupt. This one of the kindest people I've ever met in my life is just a good guy. Core's focus is investing in Fintech that provides upward mobility for the emerging middle classes. Some somewhat impact in nature, but very much focused on returns. And when I went down the company, I ended up reaching out to him and he gave me a job. So I ended up ultimately getting my venture capital job, flat broke. And when I ended up in all this debt, I needed a way to restructure it. And that was probably the worst moment of my life was sitting in the waiting room of a bankruptcy lawyer's office trying to figure out what type of bankruptcy I need to file. And then a big chapter 13, which is not a write-off of debt, but a restructuring for five years. And thankfully, things worked out. And I wept it all off within two years. It was a nice comeback. What was the headspace like at that time? It's awful. There's nothing pleasant about that experience. In hindsight, losing your net worth is a lesson better learned at 24 years old than 54 years old. So I'm grateful for that. But the learning there is, if you're going to start a startup company, raise other people's money into it, send your own money. I remember once when I was explaining this institutional LPs in the early days, it was something I was very embarrassed about. And I was trying to figure out how to talk about it. Jerry Yang was one of my LPs, so I spoke to about it. And then he said, "Nine you about it." He's like, "I loved it." And I was like, "Why did you love it?" He goes, "You should wear that as an entrepreneurial badge of honor." Any founder in the world with a failed company would have been in that same exact position had they put their own money up for a company. That's true entrepreneurship. You put everything you had into something because you believed in it. And when it didn't work, you had to start from scratch. Venture capital is you put everything somebody else has into whatever you believe in. And if it doesn't work out, then you get a job at Apple or Google. That was actually a really interesting way to phrase it for me. Not that I don't think there's various tiers of entrepreneurship, but the Google Constable wearing is a badge of honor. It's like, yeah, you lost your own money on something that you know, typically most people just lose other people's money on. Looking back on it, that was cool. That was the epitome of my resilience journey. I got knocked as hard on my ass as I possibly could have and was humbled as much as somebody possibly could have been and had to start completely from scratch once again. And then I ended up with an entry-level job at a small venture capital firm. That's where I met my partner today, Alex David Ophaz. He was a partner of coronavasion capital. Within a few months of being a core, it became pretty obvious to me that Fintech series A impact-ish investing wasn't what I wanted to spend my career doing even though I have a ton of respect for Ariana and the mission that that firm is on. And they've actually done phenomenally well with returns. They actually let the seed round to ripple. I ultimately wanted to figure out how to become a generalist seed stage investor. And the reason I focused on seed stage was because that was the only place where I thought I could access enough capital to the point where I mattered. Any later stage, there's no amount of capital that I thought I could access that would actually make me a relevant conversation as places. So that's why seed was the obvious starting point for me. And then I needed to find the way to build track record that didn't involve working at a firm for a decade until I got series-check writing ability or raising my own fund because who would give me a fund at that point in life? And that's what I went into that angelist. What's behind the name? Abstract. Couple things. One, the definition of abstract is existing in concept but not reality. And that's pretty synonymous with seed stage companies. And two, I wanted the name to show up places quickly. And remember back then, I spent all my days on crunch base and crunch base had things alphabetically listed. And I realized my firm started with an A. It would be at the top of the list on everything. So I wanted a firm that started with A. And then I wanted a word that was easy to remember. But didn't sound like any other venture capital firm. And then, you know, both the word abstract. And then I found the definition for abstract. And I'm like, this actually just seems like a perfect name for a seed stage venture capital firm. If you were to describe the nature of whatever chip you have on your shoulder from early to mid-20s through to today, how has it changed? And how would you describe it? I think the number one thing that's changed is in the early days I just want to be accepted as an outsider. And I think that's happened because I actually think Silicon Valley is a very special place. If you prove that to earn your seed at the table, no one actually cares about anything else. You're at this seat for a reason and we'll leave it at that. So I think that's no longer a chip. At any instance of the firm's history, it was the early days where like they don't know what they're doing. They're just following other people. I'll start leading deals. And then we started leading deals. And it's like, okay, they only know what to do at seed. They have no idea what to do at later stage. And they might be right. We're still early in doing some early side later stage things. But at any point in any type of business, when there's other people who have a right to be there, and they see you as someone who doesn't have a right to be there, you're going to get a lot of shade thrown your way. I encourage my founders not to focus on competition. I try not to focus on competition. I just try to focus on doing what we can as best as we possibly can. And I think everything we have done historically has proven that we can do what we think we can do, what we said we can do, what we said we will do. And I think we can continue that pace. Say a couple adjectives each about your parents. I should just describe them. My mom is really tough, but also the most loving mom in the world. And my dad is totally soft, really soft-hearted guy, but very strict about having direction in life. My dad's number one thing was like, as long as you're working hard and you're good at something, and you know how to create something out of it, you'll be successful at it. My brother, he started a company as well, a vertical SaaS company that sells into the automotive industry. Which when we moved to the Bay Area, as the industry, my dad got into, he ended up working at car dealerships and then working his way up until eventually became a partner of a franchise group that primarily deals in luxury exotic cars. And my brother worked with him for a little bit and learned a little bit about that industry. And he bootstrapped a vertical SaaS business and that he just recently sold for a little less than 30 million bucks. But the cool thing about it was he went to ISE and raised less than $600,000 for the company and then just ran it with him and his co-founder and no employees. And they got it to just shy of six million of ARR, but highly, highly profitable. Besides two employees and some hosting fees and some data licenses, there was no expenses to the business whatsoever. But there are certain founders like him and other people in our portfolio that I point to. How much you could actually do with just $600,000 or $1,000,000? But the reason I pointed to him is we were raised the exact same way. We think about things differently, but for two immigrant parents, having kids that have both built things. My brother sold the company for 30 million bucks. I've a venture capital firm that's just shy of $2,000,000 in AUM today. With very humble beginnings, whatever they did, instilled something in us, instilled some sort of a chip in a shoulder in us. But the smartest thing that they had done, which I really give credit to my mom for. And I didn't have the specific to Iranian immigrants or other types of immigrants, but my mom was way more focused on us being in the best neighborhoods growing up versus the best house. And she thought being exposed to what is possible is better than to have a nice house or a big house in an in a place where you're a big fish and a little pond. We were the tiniest fish in the biggest pond and the neighborhood that we'd grown up in. So I had friends whose fathers were the CEO of Visa or the CEO of Blue Shield and lived in these extravagant homes. So I knew these things existed. I knew the path to that wasn't just being a doctor lawyer. And there was other things there. So I think the best thing that my parents did for me and my brother was exposing us to that. What else outside of heart and investing gets most of your attention? Emily, I have a wife and three kids. My wife is pretty involved in my business. I actually met my wife at a holiday party. When I first met her, she was the director of marketing and communications at Bessimer. During our relationship, she became the head of marketing communications at Spark Capital. And now she's sort of freelancers and keeps herself busy by making sure we don't screw those things up at abstract. She oversaw our entire rebrand. She's very big on founder experience and aesthetic of the brand and the firm that we built. But I met her when I just turned 26 years old. So really, she was there at the founding days of abstract. It was really special about her, her meeting somebody like her was that I love what I do. I love talking about it. And because she worked in the industry herself for six or seven years, she understands the significance of something that I might be excited about. She understands the significance of something that I might be upset about. She appreciates what I do. She views it as a family business. She's very involved. She's friends with everybody. She's close with my partner. Then she actually cares about what I do. And she's always been my biggest cheerleader since day one. March 2020 came around. And we were engaged. And we ended having the postpone our wedding because every venue was closer to the next two years. And we saw a lot of our friends traveling the world and really enjoying their COVID experience. We basically decided whether we're going to do that or whether we were just going to start having kids. And so we did start having kids. And our first daughter, Lily, was born in October of 2020. So during COVID, we actually had two kids and raised two funds. So we were very productive during COVID. And people say if we were able to do all of that during COVID, we'll get through anything. So basically in two years, we lived in one house together and had two kids together. And I ran my business from the house for two years. It was a great experience. And honestly, we didn't even argue once throughout it. So that's when it kind of became that it was just a made-to-be relationship. And then we ended up getting married in the back yard of our current home. When we were pregnant with our second child, we just had third in December, who's now almost six months old. Family art and investment. Family art investing. I have no time for anything else. If you think about the entire process now of this little world, you've constructed around yourself to have this incredible high throughput, high expansive frame of reference to use of its term. And all the things you're doing, 30 pitch meetings a week, if you had to zone in on the single thing that gives you the most energy over and over again, what is it? It's the companies that I decided to invest in when I decided to invest in them that moment. You meet all these companies. It's like you meet a company like, okay, okay, okay, hey, hey, this is cool. This is really interesting. And then you start peeling back some layers and you just get more and more excited about it. And then you have to win. You pull out every single stop, you clear your calendar to whatever you need to do to earn your slot on that Founders' Cap table and to earn their trust as their partner. There have been windows of time where we went two months, three months, that investing in a single company. And at those three month periods, I'm like, what happened? I know there was good companies. Did we just not see any of them? Did we pass on ones that were obviously good? And I just feel like I had three months where I just wasted time. We achieved nothing of value in the last 90 days. How do we prevent that from happening again? Are we not seeing enough companies? I find a lot of excitement and enthusiasm. And then also, outside of family-related things, obviously watching my kids talk or speak or catch a ball or draw something that trumps everything. But relating into business when a company invests and really starts to work, that's always really exciting. When you see the stars start to align for one of your companies, and you can be there to fuel the fire in any way you possibly can and be the pick crew to that Formula One driver. I think those things are really special. The only part of the ecosystem I haven't asked about is the LP side. What have you learned matters to LP's? And a similar set of sensibilities of how you structure things to find, pick, and win the best LP's as well in the process that you run to do so. We're very fortunate. We have an incredibly high quality LP base that consists of blue chip endowments and foundations and very impressive founders of generational companies, either them directly or through their foundations as well. Great hospitals. Just great organizations to make money for, candidly. And then some other more traditional down-the-fair-way guys who are just good because they've done this for a very, very long time when they're good mentors because they've been LP's and other funds for 20 to 30 years. We're very fortunate to have the LP base that we do have. And then we also have Titans of industry as well, as I mentioned earlier. I think there's two types of LPs you meet probably more than that, but all narrowed down into two. There's the ones with imagination and the ones with that imagination. There are certain LPs who have built portfolios of amazing venture capital firms and they had invested in them before they were amazing venture capital firms. And they were fund one commitments to people who might necessarily have checked all the boxes of traditional venture capital firm. And I think by and large, those people have done dramatically better than the LPs who may be less imaginative and tend to only back managers who spun out from other platforms. I think that's the easy manager to back. It's okay, cool. This person's been a venture capitalist for 10 years. You can look at their historical track record and pretty much underwrite what their future track record is going to be. Arguably their future track record won't be as good as their historical track record because the deals they were able to access those platform funds might not be deals that they have the ability to access or win in the future. Paul Avalent, it's a great example of this. She used to be a Bowden and now she's a Rockefeller. She was a day one LP that chase Coleman. I think she was very early to Josh Kushner. She was my first institutional LP. Bowden, small endowment, but I actually think there's stories that show that it's actually one of the best performing endowments in the world, relative to its scale and stand, Ruck and Miller famously chairs their IC. Oftentimes you'll see that the managers she's in are mega managers today, but she was with them since day one. I think like anything, there's a risk reward profile. You take more risk with somebody that the reward potential is higher. If you take less risk with somebody, the reward is lower. So looking for individuals, especially if you have a more non-petigread background like I had, that are going to be more interested in manager strategy fit versus what is your track record and why should I care. And then in terms of what you need to do to make yourself appealing to LPs, there's multiple tiers of LPs. There is the highest tier of LP they can access any fund they want and they're already an amazing venture capital firms. And then there is LPs that don't get into those deals and are looking for more exposure to other types of companies. We fortunately have an LP base that is heavily concentrated in the best firms in the world. And then they added abstract to their roster. And that actually ended up being very beneficial for us because those are a lot of institutions that hadn't added a manager to their platform in a while because they already have the best managers and getting abstract added to that roster was a signal to the market that pay attention to this fund. And I think what we had brought to the table was something that they were already bought into. And it was that these multi-stage platform brands will continue to dominate. And they're going to continue to get double digit ownership and the best companies in the world early. Their funds will get bigger and bigger and as LPs your exposure to those companies will be less and less but you still will have exposure to the greatest companies. And I think what we brought to the table was definitive proof that we're accessing the same quality of company, granted less ownership but granted dramatically more relative ownership. When they look at our fund, if there's overlapping companies in our fund with any other fund they have on their portfolio, 94% of the time they have orders of magnitude more look through ownership to that company through our fund and they would throw it one of the others. What if we not talked about in the world of VC investing that you think is important and entree you? One thing I tend to talk about somewhat frequently, which I'm trying to figure out whether or not it's a feature or a bug is the scale of the companies that are staying private. And it's a one hand feeds the other type of thing because as these mega funds and you know all of them scale, they can only scale because the size of the companies that are staying private are scaling. If you have a $5 billion, $8 billion, $10 billion, $12 billion venture capital firm, you need places where you can write $500 million to $1 billion checks. You now have that in a way that you didn't have 10 years ago and you probably have about a dozen maybe 15 places you can write checks that large and venture capital today. Those companies fan the flame that allow these VC funds to get larger and larger and they break the narrative that venture doesn't scale because venture actually does scale. If you can write building dollar checks and the companies that are still growing, the companies in venture that are the largest are still outpacing the growth of any of their public company comps. So they still do have venture scale growth, but they're still private companies. The one thing that's interesting to think about from that perspective is what that actually means for an LP and what it means for early managers. I think it actually benefits us in a way that it might not benefit the later stage guys, but one thing that's an unintended consequence of this is it maintains hyper productivity in these companies. I always joke that that early liquidity was the bug and not the feature of crypto. People got rich too quickly and they stopped building things in this latest swath of these companies that can absorb 500 billion to one billion dollar checks. The reason the productivity of these companies is comparable to an early stage startup companies because there's been no early liquidity. You have people still grinding and working and the liquidity is coming via these 1% to 5% tender offers, which is more than enough to give people a down payment on the house, but not enough to give people $40 million for cash and generational wealth. And the restrictions on secondary have gotten really, really tight. You can make an argument that excess liquidity early is a killer of productivity. And is there a way to throttle that? And it's, yeah, you keep your company's private. You keep people satisfied with liquidity. I think that's very good from a company building perspective. I think it's problematic from a venture returns perspective. I mean, no LP is interested in getting liquidity in 3 to 5% installments. So I do think there needs to be a solution to that. There is just seemingly a new swath of continuation vehicles popping up in Silicon Valley. So it seems like there'll be ways for people to get large sums of liquidity and the venture managers get to maintain their basis and their position in these companies. So I think it'll all net itself out, but I don't think the end result is ultimately these companies are all just going to go public. I think they've all found a hack, which is your top 100 performers today. If you give them all instant liquidity on their position tomorrow, 92 of them probably might not be your top performers tomorrow. If you want these companies to continue running circles around their public counterparts, it's not like winning a lottery. What was it then since Google, something like over 100 people made over $100 million, 92 of them were never heard of again. And then the other eight ended up becoming BCs who wanted to make more money than that. So I think that's the risk you run into with that liquidity is people in these lottos and these companies are so large right now. that that is the type of liquidity that the early higher isn't senior management of those companies will experience. It's a really interesting way to think about it. I feel like we've covered a tremendous amount of information and gotten so much of your life. It's so interesting how all the pieces fit together and how you're tendency for approaching a new situation or problem near each other. You've got this method that's clearly emerged. So thank you so much for the time. When I do this, I ask the same traditional closing question of everybody. What is the kindest thing that anyone's ever done for you? On a business standpoint, it was probably Aryan shoot giving me that job at Coronavision Capital. I actually look at that one single point in my life that had I not landed a job at Adventure Capital firm when I was flat broke with nothing to my name or what I've ended up. What I've just gotten a job somewhere. There is a million scenarios that I can point to where I wouldn't have ended up where I am today. So I could point a lot of things to that guy giving me a job when no one else in the world would have at that point. So that's probably the kindest things someone's ever done for me in business. Kind of seeing anything as everything in my personal life is my wife just being the perfect wife. She truly is the embodiment of everything you need to succeed in life. Incredible. Thanks so much for your time. Thank you. If you enjoyed this episode, visit join Colossus.com where you'll find every episode of this podcast complete with hand-edited transcripts. 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