Tag: garuda ventures

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2024 Year in Review

2024

Undeniably, one of the most insightful books I read this year has been Setting the Table by Danny Meyer. Someone I’ve been a long time fan of. If you’re no stranger to this humble blog, you’ll notice his cameos throughout previous pieces I’ve written. I am also remarkably late to the game. The book came out in 2008. And to this day, is as timeless as it was over a decade and a half back. Thank you, Rishi and Arpan for gifting me a copy.

That book has led to blogposts like this and this. To finally cold email him (yay, he replied! Danny, if you’re reading this, thank you for making my day, hell, and a good portion of my year!). New ways on how I support GPs. More intentional ways to hire. Inspired me to take on two more writing projects and a new podcast series in 2025 (don’t worry, Superclusters isn’t going anywhere, but expanding). And I’m sure it’s only the tip of the iceberg.

And as one last fanboy moment for Danny, there’s a line he has on page 220. A line the late and great Stanley Marcus of Neiman Marcus fame once told him. “The road to success is paved with mistakes well handled.” A line I haven’t stopped thinking about since I read it.

There’s a saying in the entrepreneurial world that it takes between 10 and 15 miracles for a startup to succeed. Each miracle is a trial by fire. A right of passage. A test of character. I’ve always believed that the job of an investor is not to be helpful all the time, or share celebrations on social media, or facilitate just connections. Despite having done many of the above myself, those are all, in my mind, table stakes. Rather, the job of an investor is to be there for at least one of those critical points of failure and to be extremely valuable. To help an entrepreneur handle their mistake well, to borrow Stanley Marcus’ line.

In another episode earlier this year, Jaclyn Freeman Hester shared one of the best soundbites ever said on Superclusters.

“If I hire someone, I don’t really want to hire right out of school. I want to hire someone with a little bit of professional experience. And I want someone who’s been yelled at.”

While it makes for a great clickbait title, the lesson extends further. One only gets yelled at by making a mistake. One learns not by making mistakes, but the public embarrassment of that mistake. If someone learn of the negative aftermath of a mistake, one won’t get the feedback mechanism necessary to grow from that experience. To analogize it to elementary math, if my afterschool teacher didn’t slap me with a ruler every time I got 9+8 wrong, it would have taken me a lot longer to learn that lesson. If no one catches you accidentally making an inconsistent calculation on the balance sheet, you may never learn from that mistake.

All that to say, someone who’s been yelled at made the mistake, received the feedback mechanism to improve, and learned to handle it better next time.

So, in my long preamble, and not to bury the lead, 2025 will be the year of big mistakes. Maybe. Hopefully, well handled. 2024 was the year of laying the groundwork. A lot of which were made explicit via this blog. I’m not saying I haven’t made any mistakes. Yes, I’ve left the toilet seat up. I should have asked for more concrete examples during certain podcast interviews. Almost forgot to file my annual tax extension. Forgot to mention a sponsor at an event (luckily my co-host had my back). Made the rookie intern mistake at work. Twice. Different things, but nevertheless twice. But those mistakes will be small compared to the ones I’ll make next year.

Nevertheless, here are the hallmarks of 2024!

2024’s Most Popular

  1. Timeless Content for the Weary Investor — Our society spends quite a bit of time focusing on results, outputs, and success. All of which are lagging indicators of the blood, sweat and tears people put in. So instead, earlier this year, I thought it’d be interesting to compile a list of content that some of the most successful investors (LPs and VCs alike) consume. What goes in their information diet? What are the inputs? Some results may surprise!
  2. The Science of Selling – Early DPI Benchmarks — With the economy outside of AI hitting a standstill and hitting record low numbers in terms of liquidity, I’ve found a constant stream of new readers via this blogpost. Many of which I imagine to be fiduciaries and capital allocators. I do hope that one day there is more content on selling and exiting positions in a liquidity-constrained environment though. Although, I may just put out a blogpost on secondaries in the new year, inspired by a number of conversations I’ve had this year already.
  3. How to Break into VC in 2024 — It may be obvious by now that there’s no one set path to get into venture. I’ve worked with colleagues who ranged in majors from history to food science to economics to computer engineering. Additionally, those who have been a founder, a banker, a consultant, a product manager, an artist, an athlete, an actress, a public relations specialist, and the list goes on. But if you were looking for the closest thing to a silver bullet, maybe this essay would be a great place to start.
  4. Five Tactical Lessons After Hosting 100+ Fireside Chats — Surprisingly, this has stayed as a perennial blogpost. I realize even now looking back, how much I’ve learned since, but nevertheless a good starting point for those who want to interview others.
  5. The Non-Obvious Emerging LP Playbook — The first blogpost I wrote on the topic of being an LP. Still my longest one to date. Since then, I’ve learned an LP comes by many a name. Capital allocator. Asset owner. And more specifically, the difference between multi-family offices and single family offices. Family businesses. Access versus asset class LPs. And more.
  6. Non-obvious Hiring Questions I’ve Fallen in Love with — I’ve been lucky enough to spend quite a bit of time around talent magnets this year. And in the surplus of applications, they’re forced to quickly differentiate signal from noise. And these are some of the questions I’ve heard them use. And well, have also used myself when hiring these past two years.

All-Time Most Popular

This list hasn’t changed much this year. One can say I have yet to outdo myself. Which may be true. I admittedly, also haven’t shared these blogposts much on Twitter. In fact, over 70% of this year’s posts never touched LinkedIn or Twitter. When in the past, I invested a bit more time in expanding to new audiences. For any essay that did go a little viral this year, it was because of you, my readers. So thank you!

  1. The Science of Selling – Early DPI Benchmarks
  2. The Non-Obvious Emerging LP Playbook
  3. 10 Letters of Thanks to 10 People who Changed my Life
  4. 99 Pieces of Unsolicited, (Possibly) Ungooglable Startup Advice
  5. Five Tactical Lessons After Hosting 100+ Fireside Chats

2024’s Most Memorable

This year was the year of LP content. Also, the year where I stopped using as many headers in my blogposts. Interestingly enough. It wasn’t any conscious decision, but at some point I just slowed my pace down. Excluding this blogpost and a few others. I wonder if I’ll use less next year.

So, to share them chronologically, here are some of my personal favorites:

  1. The Proliferation of LP Podcasts — I wrote this back in March at the beginning of Season 2 of Superclusters, and I still stand by this today. At the beginning of every content adoption curve, the question is: WHERE can I find this content? But as the content becomes fully adopted, in this case around being a capital allocator, the question will become: WHO do I want to / choose to listen to?
  2. From Demo Day to First Meeting: My Demo Day Checklist — There are times we have to make fast decisions when faced with a volume of options. Going to Demo Days and choosing who to follow up with is just one of such cases. I’m happy this year I’ve codified that practice when going to VC accelerator Demo Days. And I imagine it’s only a matter of time, before we’re faced with the volume of YC Demo Days, but for funds.
  3. The Power Law of Questions — As I’ve grown as an LP, I find myself being a lot more intentional with questions I ask fund managers. This blogpost serves as a record of questions I found myself asking quite often this year.
  4. Emerging Manager Products versus Features — In the startup world, the concept of products and features have become quite prevalent. One is a standalone business. The other is more of a subclause than a clause, incapable of being a product offering in of and itself. As I spend time thinking about an asset class, where the simplest, and likely, most facetious way of describing it, is we sell money, this blogpost serves as “value-adds” that deserve their own fund versus ones that should be built within a larger shop.
  5. Shoe Shopping — One of my posts where the title almost has nothing to do with the blogpost itself. But an observation of what differentiates VC funds beyond what they pitch the public.
  6. ! > ? > , > . — Another one of those blogposts where it’s hard to guess what it’s about from the title itself. Likely my worst essay title to date. Or best? A product of my gripe that most people don’t know how to ask for feedback. And good news! Some readers of this blog have reached out since asking for more directed feedback.
  7. Three E’s of Fund Discipline — A lot of GPs focus on entry discipline. A lot of LPs in 2024 focus on exit discipline. Both are equally as important, but both often forget about the third kind of fund discipline. Executional discipline. I give examples of each in this essay, which hopefully can help as a reminder for what is needed out of a great fund manager. A separate job description from just being a good investor. In fact, you can be the latter without ever needing to raise or manage your own fund, and still make the Midas List.

With that, 2024 comes to a close. See you all in the new year!

Photo by Eyestetix Studio on Unsplash

If you want to check out the past few years, you’ll find them encased in amber here:

Stay up to date with the weekly cup of cognitive adventures inside venture capital and startups, as well as cataloging the history of tomorrow through the bookmarks of yesterday!

The views expressed on this blogpost are for informational purposes only. None of the views expressed herein constitute legal, investment, business, or tax advice. Any allusions or references to funds or companies are for illustrative purposes only, and should not be relied upon as investment recommendations. Consult a professional investment advisor prior to making any investment decisions.

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Overwhelming and Underwhelming — When to Know You Are Just “Whelming”

fireworks, light, night

One of my favorite sections in Danny Meyer’s Setting the Table (H/T to Rishi and Arpan from Garuda who not only gifted me that book, but also one of the nicest bookmarks I own today) is when he talks about whelmers.

“I ask our managers to weigh one other critical factor as they handicap the prospect. Do they believe the candidate has the capacity to become one of the top three performers on our team in his or her job category? If people cannot ever develop into one of our top three cooks, servers, managers, or maître d’s, why would we hire them? How will they help us improve and become champions? It’s pretty easy to spot an overwhelmingly strong candidate or even an underwhelmingly weak candidate. It’s the ‘whelming’ candidate you must avoid at all costs, because that’s the one who can and will do your organization the most long-lasting harm. Overwhelmers earn you ravers. Underwhelmers either leave on their own or are terminated. Whelmers, sadly, are like a stubborn stain you can’t get out of the carpet. They infuse an organization and its with mediocrity; they’re comfortable, and so they never leave; and, frustratingly, they never do anything that rises to the level of getting them promoted or sinks to the level of getting them fired. And because you either can’t or don’t fire them, you and they conspire to send a dangerous message to your staff and guests and ‘average’ is acceptable.”

In an industry where everyone is incredible — in many ways, you can’t, or at least it’s really hard to, be a GP without being overwhelming in your past in one way or another… INcredible becomes credible. So, it’s quite hard when you have a limited sample size to know who is incredible among the already incredible.

Almost everyone today is overqualified for the job, compared to the 1970s, 80s, and 90s, when most were underqualified.

So, unless you’ve been an LP, how do you know if you’re overwhelming versus just whelming?

  1. LPs who have seen at least 200 funds in the last 2-4 years tell you you’re the “only” one who is pursuing this strategy
    • They have large enough of a sample size to make an assessment. While not perfect, it’s enough to be in rarified air.
  2. You’ve been to the major LP/GP conferences (i.e. RAISE, Bridge, All Raise, SuperReturn / SuperVenture, Upfront Summit, Milken, EMC Summit, etc.) and have seen how other GPs pitch where you personally have a sample size of at least 100.
    • Even better, if you’ve been to the Demo Days or showcases for Coolwater, Recast, VC Lab, just to name a few, and you’ve seen other GP’s pitches
    • Do note what GPs say on podcasts are usually (in my experience) what they pitch to LPs.
  3. You can cold email LPs and they’ll respond.
    • LPs are notoriously closed off to cold emails. As an institution that makes only 1-3 new investments per year in an asset class, it doesn’t make sense for them to keep the doors open as much as venture investors do for founders. And even then, a lot of VCs are also averse to cold emails. That said, if you’re a GP that consistently gets meetings booked from cold emails, you might have something special.
    • More often than not, admittedly, this is due to a strong brand, either via media, personal brand, strong returns, or word of mouth.
    • Important to note that you’re never as good as they say you are, but you’re also never as bad as they say you are.
  4. When you are THE first call exited founders ($100M+ exits) make when they’re brainstorming their next company
    • Them needing a sparring partner on their next career move also counts.
    • You getting invited to whatever large event they host next does not. Including birthday parties, weddings, etc. As much as it feels good to me, you’re not overwhelming. If it puts things into perspective, I get invited to these, and I know I’m not an “overwhelming” venture investor.
    • Also if you’re the fifth person they call, you’re just “whelming.”
  5. You are cited by other investors and founders alike as the source material of an ideology or a framework.
  6. Different founders (or people in general) reach out to you consistently on topics that is not fundraising/them pitching you. In fact, they may never reach out to you on fundraising because you’re known for excellence in other areas.
  7. The best talent in the world want to work with you and they’ll find any way to do so. They’ll say things like, “What if we worked together on a small project first together?” or “How about this together?” The same world-class talent will not only prioritize your goals but also not forsake their own. ‘Cause frankly, the world’s best have their own pursuits and they are transparent and honest about it. Beware of people whose goal you don’t know and those that “give up” their dreams for yours.
  8. You have a memory like a steel trap. You quote books, passages, movies, lessons, anecdotes, stories, history, podcasts, presidential speeches from back in the day, and music in ways most people cannot fathom but make complete sense. You quote in ways where people wonder if you have photographic memory or a chip in your brain, but you actually don’t.
    • This is more or less intellectually “overwhelming”, although overwhelming may not be the right terminology. But someone who is profusely well-read and cultured in a diverse amount of material. Think Da Vinci. Or maybe a modern-day equivalent, Patrick Collison, David Senra, or Ben and David on Acquired.

The one thing I won’t include on this list, while undeniably “overwhelming,” is intuition. People with phenomenal intuition are just different. Overwhelmingly different. But in the world of venture, the word intuition is often overused and has lost its true meaning. Many investors who bet well in hindsight attribute luck to intuition. And hell, the reason I’m not including it in the above list, is that many investors think they’re heavily intuitive, which in my experience usually means:

  1. They hate math. Spreadsheets and the like. In fact, they’re likely just to be bad at it.
  2. They hate diligence. The homework that’s actually required to be a great investor.
  3. If they’re pre-economic success, they’re often spinning a tale to us. Or worse, lying to themselves.
  4. If they’re post-economic success, there’s a good chance they have hindsight bias.

That said, there are a rare few number of times where I meet someone (often not an investor) and they’re able to deduce the person I am with a glance with very little other context. To me, that feels like magic. Something that very few have. But at the same time, I do believe can be trained.

Photo by Jeffrey Hamilton on Unsplash

Stay up to date with the weekly cup of cognitive adventures inside venture capital and startups, as well as cataloging the history of tomorrow through the bookmarks of yesterday!

The views expressed on this blogpost are for informational purposes only. None of the views expressed herein constitute legal, investment, business, or tax advice. Any allusions or references to funds or companies are for illustrative purposes only, and should not be relied upon as investment recommendations. Consult a professional investment advisor prior to making any investment decisions.

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The Cure to the Loneliness Epidemic

lonely, alone

This past weekend, in my endless doom-scrolling, I stumbled across one of Olivia Moore’s amazing threads.

The most provocative part was when she posed the question: If you need an app to make friends, is that a negative signal?

The solution, in her words, “the long term winner here is likely to be… interest-graph social networks.” Furthermore, “platforms that give people an ‘excuse’ to gather, either IRL or digitally” are immensely powerful. Where friendship is a byproduct of usage but not the main or sole purpose of being on these platforms.

I agree that dual-purposed social networks and platforms are a wonderful solution, but, and I may be biased, I don’t think it’s the only solution.

As a former power user of networking or friend apps like Shapr and Lunchclub (yes, I used an app to make friends), I’ve made some great friends via both of those platforms. But at the same time, I was an early user for both. Both had yet to be widely adopted at the time.

For Lunchclub, I was using it at a time when everything was in-person, and you only had the option to meet people on Fridays at 2PM or 5PM at either Sightglass Coffee on 7th Street or Caffe Centro in South Park in SF. The latter unfortunately closed recently. And that was it. There were no other options. I had often joked with friends that as you were meeting your friend match that week at Sightglass, you would be sitting next to the person you would match with next week AND the person sitting five feet over would be who you matched with last week. It was a tight community, even if it was an unintentionally designed community. A group of hackers, early adopters, investors, and people just doing cool things.

Then, as Lunchclub pursued scale, quality declined. And as Olivia shares in her thread above, bad actors ruined the experience altogether. The same was true for Shapr. For Clubhouse. Just to name a few.

But dating apps nailed it. They’ve reached widespread adoption. Olivia postulates it’s because they offer data points and filters that you can’t find anywhere else. For instance, who’s single. She’s right. But there’s another reason. These apps promote interest in others. Or amplifying inherent motivation to be on said apps.

Let me elaborate.

Be interesting and interested

I’ve written about the above line before. Here. And here. And likely a few other places that’s escaping my memory at the time of writing this piece.

The thing is most platforms promote being interesting. The heavy profile customizations. The ability to share your own thoughts. Platforms that incentivize you to go from a consumer to a creator. A lot of it is about me. Look at me. Look at how cool I am. How cool my life is. The strive for perfection.

How can I ever be like the person I’m following? My life is nowhere near as awesome as her/his is. Most social platforms prop users up as a point of comparison.

All that to say, there are a lot of apps that help you be interesting, but not enough that help you be interested. The latter takes work. There’s a line that Mark Suster recently shared on a podcast, and I love it! Citing the late Zig Ziglar (which by the way, is an awesome name), Mark shared, “People don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care.”

I want to underscore that line one more time.

“People don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care.”

It’s why I love my buddy Rishi’s recent piece on how to build and maintain meaningful relationships.

Source: Rishi Taparia’s Building Relationships Through Research

In Rishi’s essay, he shares that there are three levels to doing your homework — each deeper than the last — and show that you care:

  1. Level 1 – The Basics: LinkedIn, Common Connections, Google, and Company Website
  2. Level 2 – Digging in: Social Media
  3. Level 3 – Going Deep: Podcasts, Writing, YouTube et. al

The purpose isn’t to be all-encompassing, but to show that you care for the human sitting across from you. It’s the intention that matters.

The late David Rockefeller built prolific Rolodexes to show that he cared. In fact, it’s cited that his handwritten notes on others stood five feet tall and accounted for 100,000 people. Alan Fleischmann once wrote in reference to David Rockefeller that, “If you were so fortunate to be a fly on the wall for any of his countless meetings and interactions, you would hear him inquire about the smallest details of his guest’s life, from a child’s ballet recital to a parent’s recent health concern. Rockefeller’s interactions were said to be ‘transformational, never transactional.'”

And it’s also the small things that matter.

In closing

The reason why I think Lunchclub was so popular in the beginning is in two parts:

  1. The platform reduced the friction — the back-and-forths — of scheduling. They gave you two times, and you either made it or you didn’t.
  2. The platform’s early users were innately curious individuals. When I was invited on the platform, my friend pitched it as, “I’ve learned so much from the people I met.” And my friend was and is already one of the foremost subject-matter experts in her field. The same was true when I began using the platform. People spent more time asking questions than talking about themselves. In fact, in many conversations, it’d be a battle of who can delay talking about themselves more than the other.

People were simply interested. There was no agenda. And no agenda was the best agenda. No one was trying to peddle anything to you. No one was trying to ask you for money or intros. People were the ends in and of themselves, and not a means to an end.

All in all, while there are incredible platforms that help you build friendships through interest and hobby alignment, I do believe there is room for a friend app for the curious. Or at least to help you be a really good friend.

So if you’re building something there, ring me up. That said, no matter how great technology is, with AI and all, every great relationship still needs that human touch. AI and platforms and apps might be able to get you 90% of the way there. But if you don’t complete that last 10% trek, 90% is still incomplete. For those of you reading who are American football fans, running the ball 90 yards from one endzone is still an incomplete. It’s still not a touchdown. You need to run the full 100.

If there’s anything to take away from this blogpost, it’s to be both interesting AND interested. Emphasis on the latter.

And in case you’re curious as to how I approach caring, these might be helpful starting points:

Photo by Lukas Rychvalsky on Unsplash

Stay up to date with the weekly cup of cognitive adventures inside venture capital and startups, as well as cataloging the history of tomorrow through the bookmarks of yesterday!

The views expressed on this blogpost are for informational purposes only. None of the views expressed herein constitute legal, investment, business, or tax advice. Any allusions or references to funds or companies are for illustrative purposes only, and should not be relied upon as investment recommendations. Consult a professional investment advisor prior to making any investment decisions.

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