E372: Why the Best Venture Investments Look Wrong Early

Summary

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Podcast Summary: "How I Invest with David Weisburd"

Episode: E372 – Why the Best Venture Investments Look Wrong Early
Date: May 19, 2026
Host: David Weisburd
Guest: Maya (former 35 Ventures, now Spice Capital)

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1. Episode Overview

This episode explores the paradox at the heart of venture investing: the greatest venture returns often stem from investments that seem non-consensus or “wrong” in their earliest days. David Weisburd sits down with Maya, Partner at Spice Capital and alumni of 35 Ventures (Kevin Durant’s investment firm), to dissect how narrative momentum, personal conviction, and timing shape long-term venture outcomes. Together, they share tactical insights, war stories, missed investments, and frameworks for recognizing real alpha beneath the noise and herd behavior of Silicon Valley.

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2. Maya’s Entry into Venture: Breaking into the Boys Club [00:00–03:47]

• Untraditional Path: Maya’s venture career began by managing investments for NBA star Kevin Durant at 35 Ventures, leveraging unique access and "outsider" status rather than pedigree or formal finance background.
• Chief of Staff Role: Simultaneously juggled a full-time PwC consulting job and worked nights and weekends on founder pitches for 35V, eventually landing the full-time offer.
• Navigating Perceptions: Worked under a celebrity, which provided networking advantages but also led to being underestimated. Discovered how much perception and signaling drive Silicon Valley decision making.

Notable Quote:

"People underestimate you constantly. People think, 'oh, you're just working for a celebrity, you're not a sophisticated investor.' That was my first impression of the boys club of Silicon Valley—all the kind of signaling that comes into decision making." – Maya [02:59]

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3. The Myth and Reality of Tier 1 “Signal” [03:47–07:52]

• Portfolio Strategy: 35V used a barbell strategy—participating in both established, late-stage winners (Whoop, Robinhood, Coinbase) and high-gut, early-stage bets.
• Challenging Herd Mentality: Maya challenged the notion that if top VCs invest, others must follow, noting that Tier 1s are also optimizing portfolio risk, and often only fight for allocation when a deal is truly hot.
• Pre-Seed Opportunity: Early investments (e.g., Hugging Face) were dismissed or overlooked by mainstream VCs, allowing smaller funds to build conviction before hype and premium valuations.
• Pattern Recognition: Being involved early and through full cycles, Maya honed pattern recognition on founder quality and what real "good" looks like.

Notable Quote:

"If it was really the next OpenAI or Airbnb, that firm would be piling as much money as possible. Nobody else would get a shot." – Maya [05:08]

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4. Learning Conviction: Gut vs. High-IQ Investing [10:10–13:04]

• Early Investor “Whiplash”: Early in her career, Maya admits to chasing market maps and blog post categories—realized that by the time there's a “map,” the alpha is gone.
• No Direct Feedback: Feedback on investments only comes months or years later; truly learning requires mistakes.
• Edge via Unique Perspective: Capital is commoditized; only a differentiated, opinionated thesis gives an investor an edge with founders and within the market.
• “Low IQ” or Common Sense: Maya championed investing based on consumer behavioral trends and gut, noting that financial markets often undervalue this.

Notable Quote:

"The irony is, the less you try, the easier it becomes. The more you're emulating someone else’s strategy, the less edge you have." – Maya [11:20]

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5. Bottoms-Up Common Sense Investments: Real-World Case Studies [13:04–18:51]

• Medical Tourism Payments: Example of backing a company doing payments for cross-border medical procedures—a massive, under-the-radar market driven by common immigrant and influencer behaviors, but lacking public comps or sexy “market maps.”
• Girl Beer: Invested early in a beer brand for women (Girl Beer), which was overlooked by traditionalists. Founder’s creative distribution (Whole Foods pilot) led to outsized viral success and big contracts with major retailers.
• Narrative Whiplash: Trends come and go—and you must invest before narratives and market consensus form.

Notable Quotes:

"All you really need to know... millions of people going, the average spend is $3,000. It's already a venture-scale market—and there's no public comp." – Maya [14:08]
"Everyone will think what you're doing is impossible until it’s inevitable." – Maya [17:27]

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6. Narrative Premiums, Meme Investing, and the Dangers of Consensus [22:27–29:56]

• Cultural Arbitrage: Maya explains how she made her first million in Crocs (stock) by betting on the cyclical comeback of uncool brands—using consumer/cultural insight that predated Wall Street coverage.
• Narrative Premium: When a sector becomes “in flavor” (like healthcare AI in 2024), valuations skyrocket mainly due to narrative, not fundamentals—creating FOMO-driven investing based on social proof.
• Mimetic Behavior: Most VCs engage in “mimetic” investing—copying, trending, and outsourcing opinions to tools like ChatGPT or Twitter.
• Commoditization of AI and the Last Bastion of Alpha: As AI commodifies information and diligence, alpha will increasingly be in “boring and hard” things that can’t be spreadsheeted.

Notable Quotes:

"I kind of made up this thesis called 'cultural arbitrage.' You're arbitraging your knowledge of culture. It's no different than understanding behavior." – Maya [28:16]
"In the world of commoditized AI, where's the alpha going to come from? I like to invest in things that are boring and hard. That is the best definition of alpha I've ever heard." – David Weisburd [34:09]

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7. Taste, Sales, and the Importance of Missionary Founders [35:08–43:11]

• Taste versus Sales: Early-stage alpha is about “taste”—strong, unique point of view and conviction. Late-stage is about sales and allocation access.
• Missionaries Not Mercenaries: Evaluating founder archetypes—missionary (unconditional drive) vs mercenary (conditional, opportunistic). Missionaries get through market cycles and narrative troughs.
• Being There First: True insight and “edge” comes from being early (source of truth) and not relying on recycled, second-hand opinions.

Notable Quotes:

"The way I think about it: early stage venture is all about taste...You need your own point of view...Who are you paying to get a point of view from?" – Maya [35:45]
"They're missionaries, not mercenaries." – Host [41:22]

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8. Narrative Discount, Scarcity, and Capital Efficiency [43:11–50:16]

• Narrative Discount: Beehive (newsletter platform) succeeded despite launching post-creator economy “bust” because founders had to battle for every dollar, driving capital efficiency and sharp execution.
• Category Outcasts: Companies or sectors that fall out of favor can generate outsized returns, as increased scrutiny and capital scarcity force better discipline.

Notable Quotes:

"Whenever you're investing in a company in a sector that's fallen out of favor...you're held to an even higher standard. As a result, the founders...have wildly outperformed on revenue because they have no other option." – Maya [49:47]

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9. Closing Lessons: The Power (and Price) of Independent Thinking [50:16–52:42]

• Mimetic Investing: The industry’s over-focus on narrative and memes leads to missing out on repeatable, first-principles opportunities (e.g., Instacart after Webvan; Chewy after Pets.com).
• Biggest Wish: If Maya could go back, she’d tell her younger self to trust her own gut instead of deferring to more “institutional” or consensus voices—highlighting her pass on Whatnot as an example of lost conviction.

Notable Quotes:

"If you don't have a strong opinion, don't participate. Wait to form an opinion or don’t participate." – Maya [52:27]

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10. Memorable Moments and Quotes

• “It feels almost stupid, or it feels less high IQ, to be investing in consumer trends. That's ‘low IQ’? Actually, it’s the opposite.” – Maya [11:25]
• “When you’re pitching a VC, you’re actually pitching their ChatGPT.” – Maya [33:25]
• “Everything’s hard. Grass is not greener anywhere. Choose your hard.” – Host (quoting Alex Hormozi) [46:51]

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11. Timestamps for Key Segments

• 00:00–03:47 — Maya’s path to venture and early perceptions of silicon valley
• 03:47–07:52 — Lessons on Tier 1 signal, pre-seed opportunity, pattern recognition
• 10:10–13:04 — Gut vs analytical investing, bottoms-up alpha
• 13:04–18:51 — Case studies: medical tourism, Girl Beer
• 22:27–29:56 — Narrative premiums, cultural arbitrage, mimetic risk
• 35:08–43:11 — “Taste”, missionaries in founder DNA, when conviction matters most
• 43:11–50:16 — Narrative discounts, Beehive, capital efficiency under adversity
• 50:16–52:42 — Parting wisdom, trusting your gut, learning from missed investments

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12. Takeaways for Listeners

• Alpha in Venture is Often Counter-consensus: The real outlier returns are found when you invest before the story is obvious, not when the narrative peaks.
• Personal Conviction Trumps Consensus: Outsized winners often go to those who trust firsthand insight, not those who rely on the opinions or market maps of others.
• Narrative Cycles Are Powerful and Dangerous: Both hype (premium) and bust (discount) phases create opportunities, and herd mentality is often a lagging indicator.
• Missionary Founders Win Long-term: “Unconditional love” for the problem and intrinsic drive is a strong predictor of resilience and compounding value creation.

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For emerging VCs, this episode is a playbook on the psychology and strategy behind non-consensus investing—and a reminder that trusting your instincts, especially when unfashionable, is almost always your competitive advantage.

Transcript

[Host (possibly a venture capital podcast host)]

So Maya, you've invested into 72 companies at Spice Capital. You're on your third fund. But before then, you started in 2017 with Kevin Durant on his startup investments. Tell me that story.

[Maya (venture capitalist, former 35 Ventures, now at Spice Capital)]

It was pretty non traditional of a backstory or entry into investing. I had this crazy opportunity to work for 35 Ventures, which was started by Kevin Durant and his agent Rich Kleiman. Rich had the like kind of fortitude and I would say the guts to, you know, when Kevin was working for the warriors to start making relationships with some of these tech founders. And it was a really interesting moment in time where side was like the best networking you could, you could ever go to. There was like billionaire CEOs, tech CEOs,

[Host (possibly a venture capital podcast host)]

Ben Horowitz, Yuri Milner.

[Maya (venture capitalist, former 35 Ventures, now at Spice Capital)]

Yes, exactly. And it was almost like you could run up and down the court and be doing deals. And I think credit to really Kevin and Kevin's agent, they were opportunistic. They took advantage of that. So they were saying yes to meetings. They were like attending all the things. They were speaking at conferences like Kevin and rich were at TechCrunch Disrupt and really putting themselves out there as like open for business in a way that most athletes had not done from an investment perspective. Most of them had done it from an endorsement. And so I got hired to help manage this, you know, deal flow and be almost like a chief of staff. And that's how I weaseled my way into venture capital and just take a step back.

[Host (possibly a venture capital podcast host)]

You make it sound easy, but tell me the story about how you actually got hired.

[Maya (venture capitalist, former 35 Ventures, now at Spice Capital)]

I grew up in South Florida. I really wanted to leave Florida and move to New York. I went to NYU for undergrad. After undergrad I was working as a consultant at PwC. And I had formerly interned for Roc Nation, where I overlapped with some of the folks at what became 35 ventures. And I heard about this opportunity and they were looking for someone to help as a potential chief of staff for Kevin Durant and his investments with the goal of them hiring someone full time down the road. And I heard about so opportunity. I was not even one year into working at PwC, but this was one of those things where you just kind of have to volunteer yourself. And I always worked in and around tech. I was at nyu, I was interning for different founders, including the Venmo founders. I really desperately wanted to be in that world. And I didn't have the background. I didn't go to Stanford. I wasn't studying tech necessarily. And so yeah, I, while I was at PwC I did not tell them, but I agreed to start working with Kevin Brandt and his team at 35 Ventures. I did it while I still had a client at PwC. I was even taking calls from sometimes like the client's office, but I would be like interviewing startups and doing founder pitches. While I was still working at PwC and kind of running two jobs for as long as I could until I finally got with, you know, was able to get the full time offer at 35 and it was the best day ever when I went up to all my PwC bosses and was like, I'm quitting. And they're like, what? How are you? Where are you going? I was like to go work for Kevin Durant. And it was like everyone's jaw dropped and they're like, you know, we can't even say anything like go forth like we release you. That was kind of that Genesis story. And I was always really, I would say just right place, right time. But also I liked kind of being this outsider entering the world of venture capital. And I even liked working under a celebrity where you get all the best access and brand, but it's kind of on you. The celebrities team to and people underestimate you constantly. Right. People think like, oh, you're just working for a celebrity. You're not a sophisticated investor. And I think that was kind of my first impression of the boys club of Silicon Valley. All the kind of signaling that comes into factors, into decision making, perception, how much of investing and fundraising is perception versus reality. And then that's kind of where I got all of my chops. Just working for somebody who is so mainstream in a world where most of Silicon Valley is in bubbles. Right.

[Host (possibly a venture capital podcast host)]

Give me a sense for Kevin Durant's portfolio.

[Maya (venture capitalist, former 35 Ventures, now at Spice Capital)]

At the time we had a great strategy, we did a barbell strategy. We were investors in Whoop, which recently announced a pretty big raise. A $10 billion raise. Yeah. We invested in Whoop, Robinhood, Coinbase and these are all kind of like later stage Whoop, Robinhood, Coinbase, Postmates which got acquired by Uber Rubrik which is went public two years ago. Skydio, if you know the drone company which was like considered kind of non consensus at that time. It was American based drone that's aging pretty well years later. That's also a multi billion dollar company. And then on the early stage we did the Hugging Face Parker Underdog Fantasy where they crossed a billion dollar valuation last year. They're doing hundreds of millions of revenue. That's like a fantasy sports company. And the list goes on. So it's a pretty robust portfolio. Generalists across the board.

[Host (possibly a venture capital podcast host)]

And you alluded to this earlier but this is where you learn that Tier 1 signal isn't all it's hyped up to be. Tell me about that.

[Maya (venture capitalist, former 35 Ventures, now at Spice Capital)]

You and I were talking about this earlier in venture. There's this, there's this belief that when a Tier 1 VC, whether it's a Koia Andreessen benchmark and these are all iconic firms, don't get me wrong, I really respect them, I look up to them, I want to build my firm like them. But there is a signal that if they invest, you have to invest. And I felt that they have a strategy just like other VCs do where they have a certain percentage of companies that will win and then they have a whole portfolio that doesn't make it no VC firm has 100% hit rate. There is this tendency as a new investor or an investor who hasn't had a long track record to just blindly follow what those firms do. And I think I'm very proud of what we did at 35 ventures and what I've continued to do at Space Capital which is have your own guts and have your own conviction because many times you are the exit liquidity. So you're coming into a bridge round. Sure. Xyz Tier one firm let it. But you might be getting access to it. Why are you getting access to it? If it was really the next OpenAI Airbnb that cut that firm would be piling as much money as possible. Nobody else would get a shot. And that is one thing about the tier ones. When something is working, they're fighting for their allocation. Any good investor is. And so there's this, this tendency to over index on tier ones. But I started figuring out that there was actually opportunity kind of coming in before the tier ones and especially as those funds started to get bigger there was this kind of area around what we now call and the name always changes pre seed where you would have a founder who was building something amazing. They were of Tier 1 caliber but the market maybe wasn't ready for their investment. So it would take them a year or two, maybe 18 months, 24 months for the tier ones to take note. And that's where I started finding opportunity while we were working at 35. That's how we were able to invest in some now iconic companies like Hugging Face which when that started that was a very non consensus company building chatbots, that's how they started. And investors in Silicon Valley would say like who's going to talk to a chatbot. That's crazy. And their V1 was a chatbot for teenagers. And like look at the companies now. Everyone is talking to ChatGPT as their therapist today. And so I think just being able to have your own conviction, being able to question why things are being sent to you, taking more of a bottom step approach, those are all skill sets I learned while working at 35. But then I also got to learn what good looks like. Right? So the beauty of a barbell strategy is you invest in good and then you invest in emerging as well. And so when you see good, you get this great pattern recognition of what is a standout multi billion dollar founder. Like what does that team makeup look like? What does it mean to have a monthly call with them? What are their problems at that scale? And when you start investing in early stage, you can start to pattern match over time, right? Like what is, what are some of those attributes that those successful? What are mistakes they made that we can coach our early portfolio to not make? What are lessons we can pass? And so working for the celebrity is the best breeding ground or working for a big brand if possible. Because I always feel like I got the best of many worlds. I got to see what good looks like. I got to see a full venture cycle from the 2017 to today era, from pre seed to multibillion dollar business. And then I also got to see an up and down, right? Like a 2017, 2021, 2022 correction. Post ZIRP was an interesting dynamic to

[Host (possibly a venture capital podcast host)]

watch companies now there was a 13 year bull run from 2008 to 2000, right. The end of 2021. And LPs always asked this question, what was the last market correction that you saw? Or were you investing in 2008? Because until you've gone through a correction, some would argue you haven't really seen the entire life cycle. You're not a fully experienced investor even if you've been investing for 13 years, right? Bull markets are just categorically different from bear markets. I'll double click on something that you said. You said you saw what good looked like. You've made now 150 investments to startups. How long did it take for you to really get a sense for this is a great founder.

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[Maya (venture capitalist, former 35 Ventures, now at Spice Capital)]

howiinvest I think at the beginning I was doing what most early stage investors do, which is they had whiplash and it's because you're reacting. So you're, you're going top down. You're looking at blog posts, you're saying like what is why? You know, what are the YC companies to build in Q4, 2025? And you're looking at that list and searching top down or what are categories we should focus on the irony of tech investing. Forget other categories. But investing in early stage companies is the entire like the alpha is from investing in net new. So there is quite literally no market map. So if you are investing on a market map or a blog post reading tech crunch headlines and trying to go find those companies, you're too late, ironically. And so I think the beginning stages of my career, the first, let's say 15, 1015 companies. It really was 1015 companies because it takes almost 18 months to realize, oh man, I made a mistake.

[Host (possibly a venture capital podcast host)]

There's no direct feedback.

[Maya (venture capitalist, former 35 Ventures, now at Spice Capital)]

There's no direct feedback. It's really. But you know, pretty quickly if you talk to any vc, they know within the third, you know Board meeting or monthly check in, you're like, oh man, I made a mistake.

[Host (possibly a venture capital podcast host)]

This is not what I thought I used to ask. I still, I still ask this diligence question which is what are you not telling me now that you're going to tell me at the first, at the next board?

[Maya (venture capitalist, former 35 Ventures, now at Spice Capital)]

Yes, exactly. Yeah, exactly.

[Host (possibly a venture capital podcast host)]

No one ever answers that the right way. But no, it's a good thought experiment.

[Maya (venture capitalist, former 35 Ventures, now at Spice Capital)]

Of course not. There's no incentive. Right. It's a little bit of that where it just takes some time to learn how to have your own opinions. And the irony of all of it is the less you try, the easier it becomes. The more you're pretending or trying to be like or emulate somebody else's investment strategy, the less of a unique opinion you have and, and the less edge you have. When you're pitching a founder, capital is now a commodity. If you are in something, pursuing something competitive, if you are giving a rehearsed VC take, how are you any different than any other investor? Yeah, the founder should take money from Sequoia. Like why should they take your check? Right? So it is that unique insight that makes somebody remember you that builds the relationship that it is your unique experiences that give you a point of view. And I think leaning into that, it feels almost stupid or it feels less high iq. Right. To be invested. Actually I had an LP say that they're like, oh, so you're doing a lot of gut investing. That's, that's low iq. If someone said that to me and they're like, oh you, you look at a lot of consumer trends, that's low iq. So there's this whole concept in finance of like research and thesis. And I, I do agree you can build a thesis, but you don't build a thesis off of other people's materials. There was an era where you could do top down investing, you could do market map investing. I think information's so commoditized now you actually need to go bottoms up. So you actually need to look at, yeah, you can look at consumer trends and you can look at behaviors and market tailwinds and then come up with an investment thesis around real data as opposed to copy pasting other people's opinion. So that was really the learning for me. It did take me probably 10, 15 companies before I just leaned back into myself.

[Host (possibly a venture capital podcast host)]

Maybe you could distill the difference between this highly analytical, what your investor called high IQ investing versus this bottoms up or low IQ Ms.

[Maya (venture capitalist, former 35 Ventures, now at Spice Capital)]

I'll give an example. There was a, I'm sure all of US have heard of someone that's gone to Turkey for a hair transplant or Korea for skincare treatments. And so there's. There was a company pitching medical tourism payments around medical tourism when they were first starting their conversations. A lot of investors, I mean rightfully so, but felt skeptical, right? They're like, well, there's no public market comp. Who do we point to? Who do we compare you to in our research memo to understand this market? Is it like a ZOC doc or what are you building? And all you really need to know about this idea is that 1.4 million people went to Turkey for, you know, similar in the millions went to Korea. Like they report, the Korea tourism Board reported that hey, there were x millions of people that came here and their visa said for medical procedures, right? And so, and people have been doing this for years. People have been going to. My, my parents would go to India for dental work. Why? I mean they had dental insurance even though they lived here. They would go back to their home country. All immigrants have been doing this. It's really a second order effect of the creator economy. Now you can have a video that come with me to Turkey to get my hair transplant. There's thousands of YouTube videos you can follow. You can see the entire process documented. It creates this comfort. It's just, it's the same way the whole world has globalized. You know, on. On other. In software physical is starting to globalize as well because people can see it. And so all you really need to know is there's millions of people going. The average spend is US$3,000. So it's like a MA. It's already a venture scale market and there's no public market comp. So when a company was pitching me to do payments around medical, like, yeah, this is a no brainer completely. Bottoms up. There's so much demand. And guess what? Because of that, even though there might not have been investor demand, right. There were physician demands off the bat. Like every single physician was like, oh, you allow us to pay take credit card from Americans, of course, because right now an American has to bring $17,000 of cash to Mexico to go do their IVF, which is there's no recourse if something goes wrong. You can't pay by card, you can't do installments. You're legally not supposed to bring that much cash.

[Host (possibly a venture capital podcast host)]

So you're only supposed to bring 10,000.

[Maya (venture capitalist, former 35 Ventures, now at Spice Capital)]

Exactly. And so there's all these things that

[Host (possibly a venture capital podcast host)]

are just from Wolf of Wall Street.

[Maya (venture capitalist, former 35 Ventures, now at Spice Capital)]

Yeah, exactly. Oh my God, great movie. So that's an example. Yeah.

[Host (possibly a venture capital podcast host)]

Said another way. It's. It's common sense.

[Maya (venture capitalist, former 35 Ventures, now at Spice Capital)]

Yeah.

[Host (possibly a venture capital podcast host)]

In other words, there is no market mapping. I made this type of common sense investment roughly five, six years ago in a company called Alto ira, now called Alto. And at the time I was a consumer of pensco ira, which you can invest into startups through their ira.

[Maya (venture capitalist, former 35 Ventures, now at Spice Capital)]

Right.

[Host (possibly a venture capital podcast host)]

Why? Because I didn't want to invest in index. I wanted to invest in things that I'm already exposed to. Previous podcasts I talked about my portfolio Construction, which is 90% venture VC startups, which in my wife talked about. But Alto was making it simpler. And the thesis was very simple, is that if you could bring down the friction and the cost of investing to startups through your ira, more people will do it. There was no market mapping. There was no industry, because the industry was 30, 40 years ago and it cost 500, $600 to make an investment through your IRA because they treated every single investment as idiosyncratic, as one of one.

[Maya (venture capitalist, former 35 Ventures, now at Spice Capital)]

Right.

[Host (possibly a venture capital podcast host)]

Because of that, I think the entire seed round was $2 million. I got like 1.8 million of it. I essentially did the entire seed round and company's gone out to. I think their latest valuation was 325 million. They've done well. They continue to do well. They haven't even had to raise money in a while. And I knew that it worked. When I was at a conference and I was talking to them about the company, they're like, oh, that was an obvious investment. I'm like, yes, yes. If you make a common sense investment, at some point, the high iq, the analytics kind of catch up and said another way. The spreadsheets, the analytics are a lagging indicator to the investment, which always come about because once an industry gets big enough now you have all these cottage industries like the consultants, the PwC, where you worked at making all this market mapping and selling these market maps. But if you want the real alpha, you have to go before there's that data.

[Maya (venture capitalist, former 35 Ventures, now at Spice Capital)]

Correct. And like we had, we had another one like this and it's happening in real time. So we invest in a company called Girl Beer. And it's really as simple as it sounds. It's a beer for women and alcohol is. Or beer is the largest category within alcohol. So it's like, it's a crazy amount, like $115 billion a year of revenue in beer. Okay. In just the US Market. And so this founder was like, there's no, there's a. No beer brand marketed to women. And so she went and did it mass market. And so she went and did it. When, you know, even the way she did the business was so interesting, where she talked to a bunch of men and a lot of people in the industry, they're like, you gotta go bodega to bodega. Like, this is gonna be a slog. And she was like, why would I do that? This is a low margin, high volume business, so let's get volume. So she went straight to Whole Foods and said, give me 15 stores. They were like, okay, we have nothing. Actually, you're right. We have. Our beer aisle is not performing well. We have zero options for women. They like sold through one month's quantity in a weekend. Whole Foods was like, oh, wow, okay, let's keep going. And then before you know it, Walmart came knocking on the door. Like, they'll have almost like their first year of business will be 7 million in revenue. And then now everyone's like, yeah, girl, beer makes total sense. I mean, to, to get that first round of financing done was just like, no. Nobody would take it seriously. Right? Everyone had a complaint. Everyone said, no one's drinking alcohol. Everyone said, alcohol is too hard of a market. And you're right. It's like we. Once it makes sense, it's obvious, right? It's. It feels. Everyone says it's inevitable. It's like I always say in my, with my founders, I'm like, everyone's going to think what you're doing is impossible until it's inevitable. And that's kind of my, my framing of your same point.

[Host (possibly a venture capital podcast host)]

It reminds me of concept. Mark Anderson got me on yeah, Hashtag retardmaxing. It's one word. I'll just call it idiot maxing since we have an institutional LP audience. But the idea is you don't overthink things. If there's a market, there's a female segment of the market that's wants to get beer. You create a product for that female segment. You don't have to think about what's been done the last 20 years, how people are consuming. So another way, all innovation is a new behavior, new product line. So sometimes getting in your head and being too pattern matching, it goes against common sense.

[Maya (venture capitalist, former 35 Ventures, now at Spice Capital)]

And I think there's this other effect with, at least with early stage investing around narrative, which we talked about a bit, where the narrative can really swing in and out of favor on any sector. So maybe right now everyone is talking about better for you in cpg. It's like better for you protein. Now that the response to protein is fiber, like it's this funny pattern that you can follow. But the irony is like, if you wanted to, for example, if you believe in better for you or if you believe that people aren't drinking, which is like a common feedback, you should have invested 10 years ago into Athletic Brewing and all the NA companies, like they're now at billion dollar valuation. So the time to invest in that was 10 years ago. Now you see we're in New York City, people are smoking cigarettes, people are drinking Diet Coke. Like Vice is very much back. Maybe it's a response to culture around, you know, like AI and doomerism and young people feeling some type of way. But even alcohol sales were drifting down and then almost 18 months ago like started ticking back up. And so you want to start investing again into Vice as the trend. The pendulum is swinging. And almost in every single industry there's this, it's a bit of market timing, but being away from it, like stepping back from it and not getting whiplash because you're reading blog posts and being reactive and being calm allows you to see these very clearly, these opportunities. Right. I think investors get especially new investors feel, and I even see it in my group chats with, you know, with all, with people of all levels where they're like, oh my God, so much is happening. The world is changing so quickly. They're so reactive and it's because they've, they're, they don't have their own opinions. Like they're getting thrown around based on the opinion or the tweet of the day.

[Host (possibly a venture capital podcast host)]

Being rooted in investment.

[Maya (venture capitalist, former 35 Ventures, now at Spice Capital)]

Yes.

[Host (possibly a venture capital podcast host)]

So underrated. I use the bitcoin example. If I'd known you and I convinced you to just buy Bitcoin at $10 a Bitcoin. But I didn't really explain to you the thesis you weren't rooted in. It suddenly goes up to $160 a 16x. Then it goes down 20% to 120. What are you going to do?

[Maya (venture capitalist, former 35 Ventures, now at Spice Capital)]

Sell.

[Host (possibly a venture capital podcast host)]

So you're going to sell because you're like, holy shit, I need to lock in this 12x, not realizing if you held for another 10 years, it'd be up another thousand X.

[Maya (venture capitalist, former 35 Ventures, now at Spice Capital)]

Right.

[Host (possibly a venture capital podcast host)]

And it's very underrated, it's very unsexy. It's timely to get rid in the thesis and yet it is so fundamental, especially in liquid strategies. But even in the liquid strategies you have opportunities to continue doubling and triple down and alto. I made several more investments before it became consensus and Honeybook. I was in the series B with Norwest and it was not the most competitive round at the time, now that it's two and a half billion dollar company, I got, I got my fill. And then during COVID there was another round and there was like even more sweeteners doubled. And then I did another investment, then another investment, and now it's consensus and now, you know, it's a two and a half billion dollar company. But it's because I was rooted in that thesis, right? And I knew that because of the thesis you have to constantly reassess your prior. So I learned this from Cliff Asness from AQR. So he built this $130 billion hedge fund. It's probably bigger at this point. And during 2020-2024, value investing was out of favor, right? So this wave that he was running and every day he had to reassess. So he heroically traded, he heroically held, he didn't sell his assets, but every day he would have to reassess his thesis and he would have people come in and pitch him, here's what may be happening, here's why this might be wrong. And what was so difficult about his position is that he had to hold his position in the absence of data that it was wrong. In other words, he wasn't getting data that it was right. He was just systematically every day looking at data and figuring out whether he was wrong or not. And again, it goes back to the sort of thesis having a thesis on something which by the way the opposite of that is chasing a trend, right? Could be extremely useful. So last time we chatted, you talked about this narrative premium. What is that?

[Maya (venture capitalist, former 35 Ventures, now at Spice Capital)]

So it kind of ties back into what we were talking about earlier with Mike Crocs investment and talking about.

[Host (possibly a venture capital podcast host)]

This is how you made your first million dollars.

[Maya (venture capitalist, former 35 Ventures, now at Spice Capital)]

Yes, my first million dollars was made in the shoe company called Crocs.

[Host (possibly a venture capital podcast host)]

Tell me the story.

[Maya (venture capitalist, former 35 Ventures, now at Spice Capital)]

Okay, so the long story short is I was always obsessed with Crocs as a brand growing up in South Florida. When I was growing up, they were the hottest shoe in my middle school. Parents were got me the Walmart one. So, you know, I had this chip on my shoulder like I want to buy myself a pair of Crocs. Finally had a job, bought them, and then by the time I bought them, I was living in New York and they were very much out of style at that point. And so years later, Robin Hood had actually come to present at nyu, which is where I went for undergrad. And they were launching their, they had a beta program, they were going to a bunch of colleges and I was on the waitlist for Robinhood. As soon as I got access to the app, the first stock I bought was Crocs. Because I had this joke with my friends that crocs would make a comeback. As all things in fashion do, they always cycle back.

[Host (possibly a venture capital podcast host)]

And so you put in $20,000.

[Maya (venture capitalist, former 35 Ventures, now at Spice Capital)]

Yeah. Long story short, during the pandemic when crocs was really, you know, oversold, a lot of the companies were oversold. I noticed that LeBron James, Balenciaga, like all, all these kind of culture movers are wearing crocs. It was all work from home. Uh, the company was. Had cleaned up its act, so to speak. They had a domestic factory where they were producing things. So their risk of exposure of, you know, Covid was much lower. And things were booming on the cultural side. So on every magazine, every fashion cover, Balenciaga, you name it, every brand was collabing with Crocs. But nobody on wall street was really paying attention to the company. And so, Yeah, I put $20,000 of my money, pretty much like my whole paycheck, I was living at home at the time, into crocs call options right before earnings because I felt that there would be earnings. I was right.

[Sponsor/Advertisement voice (AlphaSense and Square ads)]

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[Maya (venture capitalist, former 35 Ventures, now at Spice Capital)]

It was a surprise beat for you.

[Host (possibly a venture capital podcast host)]

Also tried to convince your brother, your dad.

[Maya (venture capitalist, former 35 Ventures, now at Spice Capital)]

I tried to convince my dad to put his Roth IRA into Crocs. He's like, you're crazy. And that was my first convict. Like, that was my first conviction bet where nobody else around me would do it. So I was like, I'm just going to do this myself. I know this company. I've been following every single news article of this company for like 10 years. So I probably know it better than a Wall street analyst at this point. And I asked my brother, who was in investment banking at the time, to pull up reports or like, what was the research? And there wasn't any great reports on it. Like, there was no great equ. Equity research. You could check facts at whatever Bloomberg, nothing phenomenal. No deep dive. I was like, I could write this. And so yeah, I did it and it worked. And it was even funny. Like it wasn't just one quarter. Like there were a couple of quarters back to back where they kept having surprise earnings. And then cnbc, all the analysts started picking up. You start seeing coverage of this company, like very widespread coverage. And like, that's when I sold. I'm like, that's when I'm exiting the position. And that was my first. I kind of made up this thesis called cultural arbitrage. So you're arbitraging your knowledge of culture. It's no different than understanding behavior. And I think this translates to VC really well. Because similarly to the equities market, where there's. There are, you know, areas or sectors that get a lot more attention in certain quarters. It's very similar in venture capital, where I think there's almost a narrative of the quarter. We're talking about this. In 2024, there was a JP Morgan healthcare conference and they talked about AI. And like overnight, okay, there was a market map from one of the tier one VCs and a blog post saying healthcare AI is the next thing. Every healthcare AI startup six months before that was raising, you know, their first round at a $10 million valuation. All of a sudden it was a 25, 30, $40 million valuation. So just because the narrative was brought up on LinkedIn and in blog Posts. It wasn't like any meaningful change had happened. Besides, the topic was hot and trending. The valuations 2, 3, 4x, which just shows like, you know, and the companies that have been building had been building two years prior. It was just that it was their time to, to get that narrative premium.

[Host (possibly a venture capital podcast host)]

And I'm sure some people were constantly making a momentum trade, but most of them were not realizing or didn't realize. They were just part of this mimetic behavior.

[Maya (venture capitalist, former 35 Ventures, now at Spice Capital)]

Yes, exactly, exactly. It is memetic behavior. And what was interesting to me is in every single quarter there's some sort of narrative that proliferates in venture capital and 99% of investors, it's like sheep they will, or lemmings they call it, will concentrate in that category. And like right now, probably the narrative is, oh, Claude is going to take over everything. Like, you know, there's memes everywhere saying, I don't want Claude to come for my company, please don't come for my payroll company, please don't come for my fintech company. And then the reality is like, we have a company that we invested in that where the buyer is not only a big investor and owner in Claude, but what they said was, I don't know if I should go into specifics, but anyways, we have a company that is a applied application layer startup. And while everyone's saying that no one's going to buy SaaS anymore, SaaS is dead. It's all about horizontal AI. This is, you know, they have a pilot, we'll edit that. They have a pilot with a Mag 7 company. Essentially, that buyer said, hey, if you go horizontal, we don't want to work with you. We actually want a point solution that works because Claude is great. We almost have to buy it, like from a marketing standpoint, for every single Fortune 500 company, as in like Mag7 company needs to be showing that they're investing in AI. And of course they eventually will be completely AI. First they're tech companies, but in reality, in practice, what people want is point solutions that actually work. And so if you can give me a vertical solution, end to end, that works, I will pay for it. And so that just contradicts, you know, SaaS is dead. And I guarantee right now everyone's saying Claude is going to kill all SaaS. SaaS is dead, blah, blah, blah. One company in the next month, I would not be surprised. Month or two will do 600, $700 billion of revenue as an application layer startup. And I guarantee you every single VC will change their tune. Completely and start doing more of those and then the narrative will be no, no, no. AI actually makes so many advancements. It's not about the horizontal models, it's actually about application layer. That's the next investment opportunity. Right? Like whatever the zeitgeist of the quarter is in 2022 when ChatGPT first came out. And remember I invested in hugging face in a prior job. So I am of this kind of mentality. Anyone that's a hugging face investor believes that the models will over time be commoditized. And you could actually argue this is a bit of a stress but you could argue they already are. They are a public good already. If you think about who's backing these models, they're funded heavily by VCs. The VCs are funded by endowments. There's sovereign funds across the world that are heavily invested in the VC funds that then invest in the models which then give you a free credit t to use compute. And so you could argue some of the models are already commoditized. But let's say you believe that reality. Where does value lie? At the application layer. And I'll never forget that right after ChatGPT came out, all VCs said we don't invest in ChatGPT wrappers. Like that was a strong statement that sounded really good. Like there's no moat here. Yeah, so memeable. There's no moat here. Even I remember like Sequoia had this big presentation, it was on YouTube, like infrastructure, it's all about infrastructure. And literally one year later that Sequoia had that same presentation wasn't just Sequoia. Every single firm, every single tier one saying all value accrues to the application layer. Because Harvey, you know there were all these app cursor, all these applications were taking off and now you see people swinging right back to saying oh cursor, the business model, the unit economics don't make sense, we're out on cursor. And so how can you have be an early stage investor investing in companies with 10, 15 year life cycles and be this wish washy on your opinion. It's kind of going back to your point like you don't have a strong enough bottoms up thesis on the world to withstand. And it just shows like the state of ven capital today where narrative is driving and react. It's all reactionary top down investing. And that's why you see what, what a in any hype cycle you see what happens. It's like all the capital concentrates into the winners because People don't have the guts to make their own decisions. And I joke, it's like you're, when I tell my founders, when you're pitching a vc, you're actually pitching their chat GPT. So like, you might as well just put invisible text in your deck that's convincing the VC because they're not reading it, they're putting into the ChatGPT take. And that's the state of the world we're in and investing, where everyone is just giving us the, the consensus take. And so of course people are getting surprised that all the capital is concentrating in the same companies. Well, if you're putting all your research through your, your opinions, your chatgpt, it's going to tell you what has the most data and what's the most, the loudest, most memeable thesis, and that's what you're going to end up investing in.

[Host (possibly a venture capital podcast host)]

It begs this thought experiment, which is in the world of full AI knowledge and commoditized AI, where's the alpha going to come from? And it reminds me of this dinner. I had a three and a half hour dinner with one of the chairmans of the largest investment banks. It was off, off the record and he said, I like to invest into things that are boring and hard. And I'm like, holy crap, that is the best definition of alpha I've ever heard. And if you start double clicking on that, you think, what is hard? Well, hard is anything that's not. ChatGptable mentioned the crocs, you know, knowing fashion, knowing what your friends are doing. It's certainly differentiated and some would argue hard. You mentioned before we started recording that you hang out with people in Bushwick to figure out what, what their, what the next strand is. I would argue that that's hard. And then two is boring. In this case, it's very boring to invest in a fundamentally good company that not everybody's fucking around. And it's the opposite of boring is exciting or sexy. And what is the most exciting and sexy thing in venture? It's trying to get into these mega rounds where just having access and getting into these rounds itself makes, makes it a quote unquote good investment. Although you would probably argue that in most of these cases, especially in the very large rounds, that that's just made up beta.

[Maya (venture capitalist, former 35 Ventures, now at Spice Capital)]

It is beta. And especially if so much of the dollars are going into it, you're probably getting exposure to it in other ways already. That's just a normal retail investor. The way I frame it is early stage investing. I mean, I love that so boring and hard. And I've definitely done all of those. I mean girl, beer is, it's so hard to do a beer company. You're selling to two buyers because you have a distributor and a retailer. It is, do not recommend anyone jumping into that business. So like investing in those types of companies. Those founders work really, really hard. I, I, they can't even compete. I mean you have to travel around the country, meeting with distributors, people who don't have college degrees. Like you are really all kinds of characters. There's a full stack of people. But you still have to maintain an online presence and brand and pitch vc. So you're kind of wearing a lot of hats. It's very difficult. So yeah, I do agree. Hard and boring. You'll never have competition there. The way I think about it is early stage and it depends but early stage venture to me is all about taste. Now even the tech bros have like memed that word to you know, which, which sucks because it's a very good word. But let's rephrase it as you need to have your own point of view like that. That's really it. Who are you paying to get a point of view from? Right. And then on the late stage it's about sales. So it's access. Sales. Right. So working for someone like Kevin Durant does give you that access because it's reverse pitching.

[Host (possibly a venture capital podcast host)]

100% anthropic. OpenAI SpaceX. None of these companies go out and pitch VCs. They all get pitched.

[Maya (venture capitalist, former 35 Ventures, now at Spice Capital)]

Correct. So one is sales, one is taste. So if you're going to play and I think the biggest challenges happen, or at least when I see my peer group struggling, it's because they're not playing the game they're to be playing. So they're playing the sales game in early stage venture, which means they're concentrating in like really kind of like over hyped deals. Trying to play a sales game where there's no reason for that company to be valued the price. You don't want to be in a bidding war with something just because there's a bidding war. You want to be a bit in a bidding war because it's, it is actually outperforming or actually something amazing.

[Host (possibly a venture capital podcast host)]

It's the other side of that JP Morgan 2024 trade which is yes, two weeks before the conference it was the same exact company. It was valued at 10 million. Now it's valued at 30 million two weeks later. There's more hype around it, but that doesn't make a fundamental different company business. So you're either underpaying or overpaying, depending on when you're investing.

[Maya (venture capitalist, former 35 Ventures, now at Spice Capital)]

Right. 100. That goes back to this narrative premium. Like thinking about where you are in this. If you had to have a chart overlaid being like, where's the narrative on top of this business? And are we at the top of it? Are we at the bottom of it? Are we at the top? And there'll be ups and downs in every company. Right. Like there's times where sectors go. I mean in the public markets, you see it, you'll have companies taking a hit for three years. Everyone writing it off. Google is a great example of that. Right. So many people wrote off Google. I wouldn't bet against Gemini. Right. Like, let's see what happens. And so I think, yeah, on the VC side, there's sales and taste. And taste is really what where there is alpha, where there is edge. And you get the taste, at least in my opinion, from really investing bottoms up, but then investing early. So when you're somebody's first believer, you get this insight. And this is what we like to do. It's very similar to what you said in the beginning with Stanley. His quote of putting 20 was it him Investor, right. Invest and investigate. So it's like you put in that early stage checks, you have street cred for the life of the business. You're taking the risk and then when it's working or actually the second time, I like to invest, I like to do two investments. First is, you know, first money in. And the second time is every single company has this inflection point when something goes wrong. So it's like, I mean in the most tragic of cases, somebody passes away. A co founder passes away. In a more mild case, you know, or co founder split, I'm in a more mild case. It's like the market is reacting. There's a political thing that happens, there's a scandal. There's always something or some technology trend comes, comes and that nobody believes that the business can, you know, weather it. It's like what happened with Salesforce and all the AI, all the AI narrative. And there's always an opportunity to double down when again nobody is believing in the company. It's no longer hot. It had its golden moment. It became a unicorn and people forgot about it.

[Host (possibly a venture capital podcast host)]

Although I'd argue in many ways there you're re underwriting. So yesterday I had an interview with Hans from Notable Capital and he invested into Anthropic, which I'm also an investor in. He invested two weeks after Deep Seek. So if you rewind back to Deep Seek, people are like, holy crap, do the large LLMs have no value?

[Maya (venture capitalist, former 35 Ventures, now at Spice Capital)]

Right?

[Host (possibly a venture capital podcast host)]

And he invested two weeks after that. What does that mean? He had a fundamentally rooted thesis now, including the emergence of deepseek, he and his team had to fundamentally re underwrite. Is anthropic valuable now? Obviously it's become extremely valuable since then, but it wasn't obvious at the time to anyone that didn't do the work there.

[Maya (venture capitalist, former 35 Ventures, now at Spice Capital)]

Yeah, you're right. Hunter and Satya from Homebrew, they told me this a while ago. I always remember. They're like every round you need to ask yourself of a company, are you a buyer or seller? And to your point earlier, I think you are right that even venture, though it's not liquid, there are still a lot of opportunities to continuously re underwrite. And the only way you can actually ask yourself are you a buyer seller? Is 1 if you have enough information on the company, which I would argue you only really get unbiased information if you're there from the beginning. Otherwise you're always getting some, you know, some sales pitch. Some sales pitch, some version of it. And even, even though no matter what, when you're an investor, you're not a founder, so you're still getting some. But that's the closest you can get to source of truth. And I think that's what I realized about myself. I love like, I really, really love being at that source of truth. Like I want to be. I will never pay for something where I don't really understand. I would rather sit it out. And that's like something I feel strongly about as I build my firm. And just my own investment philosophy.

[Host (possibly a venture capital podcast host)]

Is there an opposite of a narrative premium?

[Maya (venture capitalist, former 35 Ventures, now at Spice Capital)]

It's a narrative discount. It's a company that's fallen out of favor in a way.

[Host (possibly a venture capital podcast host)]

An example of that.

[Maya (venture capitalist, former 35 Ventures, now at Spice Capital)]

Yeah, one of our, actually our first, first company that we invested in out of Spice, that was the formation check almost was into a startup called Beehive, which is a creator economy startup. And they're now, you know, they, they are a newsletter platform. They work with some of the biggest publishers in the world. They have raised capital from Lightspeed, nea, you name it. They have tons of celebrities writing newsletters. They do B2B. But anyways, that founder was from Morning Brew, so he was a CTO of Morning Brew.

[Host (possibly a venture capital podcast host)]

Tyler Dank.

[Maya (venture capitalist, former 35 Ventures, now at Spice Capital)]

Yeah, Tyler Dank. He's amazing. Also pretty interesting just to double click on. Like, why did Morning Brew, a newsletter company, have a cto? Well, that's how they scaled so quickly and sold. Like they applied a lot of automation techniques from day one at a time where people weren't applying tech to newsletters and media. So they were ahead of the curve. Took that playbook and said, let's build it for everyone. Let's make this company called Beehive. Great idea. I mean, killer founder. If you guys know Tyler, he's is amazing. If anyone meets him, they're like, this guy is just like the one of the, you know, he's like a tier one, one of one founder.

[Host (possibly a venture capital podcast host)]

Is that something that you ascertain very quickly?

[Maya (venture capitalist, former 35 Ventures, now at Spice Capital)]

It's like they have this unconditional love for what they do as opposed to conditional. So it's just like in love or partnership or anything.

[Host (possibly a venture capital podcast host)]

They're missionaries.

[Maya (venture capitalist, former 35 Ventures, now at Spice Capital)]

They're missionaries. Yeah. 100 and I like the word unconditional because I think in today's world you can, you can build conditionally. And 90 of 99% of pitches I get are. And especially when you're talking to early stage founders, it's like, I'm working at Bain. You know, I'm going to try to raise 3, 4 million dollars if I can raise it. I know this guy Andreessen. If I can get that round done, I'll probably quit my job and start experimenting ideas. I'm like, what? You're taking no risk? Like there's nothing on the line. As opposed to the girl beer founder Tyler. It's like it's, you know from Beehive, it's happening with or without me. If you're not funding this, I'm taking out a credit card loan. Like, that's the kind of level of this is meant to happen. I'm building this unconditionally. Not when every single situation is perfect. You need that because in if you're starting your company that way, there's going to be ups and downs. But you've already trained yourself to build unconditionally as opposed to if you started in a really cushy way when something inevitably doesn't work out your way. I see those founders who got it, who had it really easy off the bat. Struggle in the middle. And the middle is when it's boring. There's no hype. You're no longer the darling, no one cares about you. Like what is driving you to push forward. So you need this. Yeah. Mercenary style. Focus. And you can read that very quickly. Especially for me, working for a celebrity. Actually, the best secret is people are trying to get something from you all the time. Right. Like Everyone is trying to get their only friends with you because they want access to the celebrity or they want money from you. They're always pitching you. There's always an ulterior motion.

[Host (possibly a venture capital podcast host)]

Celebrities are so cynical.

[Maya (venture capitalist, former 35 Ventures, now at Spice Capital)]

They're so cynical, but they're very shrewd because they know, I mean, they're not dumb. They know, hey, this guy's probably ripping me off. But, like, it's okay, it's worth it. Cost of doing business. I'll take the 20% cut. He's definitely ripping me off. Or this girl is definitely ripping me off. But they know, you know, they're not idiots. And so anyways, taking all this back to, like the narrative discount with Beehive specifically, they were building in the creator economy, which year over year has exploded. I mean, we're doing a podcast right now. Like you, we see the value of distribution and content.

[Host (possibly a venture capital podcast host)]

That was my, I guess, unconditional love. And speaking of Beehive, I actually had a newsletter on Beehive. Got to about a thousand subscribers and great platform. Have nothing negative to say, but my heart wasn't in it. And at this point in my career, something that I've learned is all the value and anything you do has to do with compounding. So if my heart wasn't in it, what are downstream consequences of that? I'm not going to do it for 10 years. If I'm not doing it for 10 years, I should quit. So I quit like two months into it.

[Maya (venture capitalist, former 35 Ventures, now at Spice Capital)]

Wow.

[Host (possibly a venture capital podcast host)]

This idea that you shouldn't quit, that quitter quit. You shouldn't be a quitter. You should absolutely quit very quickly in order to make room for other things. What's the other thing? For me, it's this podcast. I do it five times a week. I've now done. This is roughly episode 370. I'm going to be doing this probably for the rest of my life until AI replaces me. It's not even hard for me. And I know that I could build this compound advantage in this specific thing because I love it. I have what you would call this unconditional love.

[Maya (venture capitalist, former 35 Ventures, now at Spice Capital)]

I love it. And you could tell, I mean, that's a, that's a high volume to do five days a week.

[Host (possibly a venture capital podcast host)]

Yeah. It'd be very difficult to push through that. Although, as I know you're a second generation immigrant and first generation immigrant, we kind of thrive in these difficult and impossible things. This kind of grunt work. Yeah, sometimes, by the way, that could be a downfall. A downfall, Correct. Sometimes. Why are you grunting? Why are you grunting on the Newsletter. Oh well, my heart isn't in it. Well, you're going to be losing to the people where their, the heart is in it. They're going to be running circles on them. Just like I run circles around people that just today decided to do a

[Maya (venture capitalist, former 35 Ventures, now at Spice Capital)]

podcast 100 and that's how I really felt when I started my fund. I felt like I had very strong opinions in a way that others didn't and that I could outwork anyone. And at least in my fund one I was really trying to prove my value to the founders and I, it was just that like Immigrant Hustle where I felt so confident and I was like, I will outwork you. Nobody else is going to be staying up this late. VC is supposed to be a cushy job and I'm going to make it really hard.

[Host (possibly a venture capital podcast host)]

It's so interesting because I thought about the downstream consequences of loving what you do in this, this, this intrinsic love for it. And they're oftentimes very tacit and very powerful. So right now in emerging managers you see this extension extinction level event.

[Maya (venture capitalist, former 35 Ventures, now at Spice Capital)]

Yeah.

[Host (possibly a venture capital podcast host)]

So there's roughly 3,000 managers. By some accounts 50 to 75% of them are on their last fund. Which begs the question, why aren't 25 to 50% of the managers on their last one? Now some might just have good traction, might have gotten lucky on some investments, but a lot of them are going to keep on, keep on grinding, keep on hustling. Why it may not even make financial sense. They may be a CMO at a top pre IPO company, make money, they intrinsically love it. And the downstream consequences of that are actually quite powerful. They start to problem solve around what it, what you need to do to stay in this business. There's so many examples of this. I had Eric Bond from Hustle Fund. He created this whole media network. They make millions of dollars because they're fun. They want to keep their fund size small. They want to have a great fund for LPs they build these ancillary businesses. There's other investors that I know that are now doing partnering with people on secondaries. They're offering co Invest to their LPs at discounted terms so that they stay around fund their future funds. But the more love you have for something, the more your ego goes down, the more you go from victim, mindset or passive into problem solving inactive. And it becomes a self fulfilling prophecy where the people that are their heart is in it. Their missionaries, not mercenaries. They're able to figure out things that need to happen in order for them just to keep doing what they're doing.

[Maya (venture capitalist, former 35 Ventures, now at Spice Capital)]

That's a great point. That's a great point. Someone. Brian from Starface. Do you know that company? It's the pimple patch company. I had like the first time I had a call with him, he said this to me. I'll never forget it. And at the time, this was in relation to nothing to do adventure. I was producing like a short film and then he was like, it's always fun to do it your first time when you don't really know what you're getting into. But the real test of like entrepreneurship is will you do it the second time when you know how hard it is but you still choose to double down? I think like, but. But between me starting my fund one and going into fund two when I didn't really have any results and like some of that high wears off, that is. It is the love and it is the creativity that pushes you through. Right?

[Host (possibly a venture capital podcast host)]

Alex Hermozi, two time podcast guest and a mentor of mine. I consume all of his content, which is contrarian for this space. He talks about this concept. Choose your hard right. Everything's hard. Grass is not green anywhere, right? So choose your hard right. It's not about whether something's hard or easy. Everything has competition, everything has friction, especially if it's profitable. But where do you want to slave away? Where do you want to have all the highs and lows? Make sure that's worth it. Goes back to this missionary drive.

[Maya (venture capitalist, former 35 Ventures, now at Spice Capital)]

I love it. I love it. To close the loop on the kind of like narrative premium or narrative discount with, with Beehive, you know, talking about the creator economy, which we have. I have so many thoughts on that whole space. But the interesting thing there was when Beehive was starting, it was right at the end of 2021 and Clubhouse had just imploded. The creator economy, which was this big thesis that many funds co opted quite quickly. There were a couple other startups like Patreon, raised a big round and there were recaps in certain companies. And so there's this whole belief in Silicon Valley all of a sudden that 18 months after the creator economy started, it was over. Clubhouse died. That was the peak of it. It's over and I guess everyone's going to go back to coding. I don't know what their thesis was, but just completely fell out of favor. If you were doing a creator economy deal, you were considered low IQ and you were considered, you know, like you

[Host (possibly a venture capital podcast host)]

didn't get the memo.

[Maya (venture capitalist, former 35 Ventures, now at Spice Capital)]

You didn't get the memo. Like oh, we don't look at those deals anymore. And so when Beehive was raising, that's how they started in that environment. And you know, like the first few rounds were people who didn't believe that, who actually it was a lot of creators actually, I think Scott Galloway participated. So there were all these participants that didn't come from the traditional VC world that all actually made their investing career off of Beehive, including myself. Like, that first investment ended up really appreciating. It was like a pretty fast 10x and for an emerging manager where I was pounding the table around this thesis and talking about how the next gen of consumers is on Robinhood and they're all trying to be influencers and everyone thought that was low iq. But then if you look at how that translates to real life, I mean, decisions are driven off of distribution. Now even people really look over influencers. But influencers are driving trillions of dollars of consumer spending. Not billions, trillions. Okay, it's totally gnarly, but. And creative economy revenue year over year is growing like it was like 100% year over year market, but not 100% year over year. If you track that with VC funding, it's been declining ever since 2021. And so I think that's a great example of narrative discount. Whenever you're investing in a company in a sector that's fallen out of favor, it's similar to what we talked about with loving what you do and being unconditional in your pursuit, where when you've fallen out of favor, you're just not able to raise as much money. So you're not going to get the $10 million seed round, you're going to get a one or two million dollars. And so the irony of that, and it's great for actually early stage investors, is you better be capital efficient because you don't have leeway to mess up. And as soon as you run out of that money and you go back to market, you better have results because your category is out of favor. So you're not getting any handouts, you're not getting the narrative premium. In fact, you're held to an even higher standard. So as an as a result, the founders that start that way, at least in our portfolio, have wildly outperformed on revenue because they have no other, they have no other option.

[Host (possibly a venture capital podcast host)]

They have the right DNA from the start.

[Maya (venture capitalist, former 35 Ventures, now at Spice Capital)]

Yeah, they have the right DNA from the start. They are capital constrained off the bat. And typically when something's out of favor, that is the right time. You should be building, so they have a ton of demand. So they end up building a great business.

[Host (possibly a venture capital podcast host)]

These narratives and these memes are so powerful, they're so intrinsically linked in how Silicon Valley is run that they're invisible and they're almost assumed. Two most famous ones, the two most joked about companies in the dot com boom were webvan and pets.com, webvan became Instacart, not literally, but. But the reincarnation of Webpan versus Instacart, obviously fabulously successful, Great Pets.com, chewy multi billion dollar company. So if you just keep on, if you just focus exclusively on memes, narratives and all these things and doing what you know you're supposed to do and not doing what you know you're not supposed to do, it could lead to whatever the opposite of first principles thinking is. This, this mimetic type of copying you've now you're approaching your 10th year as a VC next year. 150 investments. If you could go back and give yourself one piece of advice before you made your very first investment, what would that be?

[Maya (venture capitalist, former 35 Ventures, now at Spice Capital)]

To trust your gut more. It's an obvious piece of advice, but

[Host (possibly a venture capital podcast host)]

even at that time, or trust your gut today.

[Maya (venture capitalist, former 35 Ventures, now at Spice Capital)]

No, to trust my gut. At that time, one of my biggest misses was whatnot and the reason. And I passed on that in multiple rounds. And I actually looked yesterday at the App Store like the top apps on the App Store just, just to see what was going on. And of course it's all the AI labs. It's like Dunkin Donuts, Monopoly. Like, it's, it's so funny. But then whatnot was, was creeping up on that list and it was a live shopping app. I didn't invest in that because I asked other VCs. I was junior in my career. I was like, hey, Asia is always ahead of the curve on, you know, like consumer in general. They, they have in many different ways, right? They had the super app. They were ahead on kind of like messaging, all these different things. Asia's always behaviorally advanced on digital culture, let's say that. And they're in Asia. Live shopping is a big thing. This is like a reincarnation of QVC for modern era. It totally makes sense. And everyone was like, no, that's not going to work here. It's been tried before. There were a bunch of zombie companies that didn't work. And I really was out, kind of was like, okay, they must know more than me. And the people who had sent me that deal was, it was a. Yeah, anyways, Long story short, I relied too much on other people's opinions thinking when I was young that they knew so much because they had done all this research, not understanding the reality, which is that research was like regurgitated slop pretty much. And I was the recipient of it. And so I made an investment decision off of other people's opinions. And I think that is what I would coach anyone to do. If you don't have a strong opinion, don't participate. Like, wait to form an opinion or don't participate.

[Host (possibly a venture capital podcast host)]

Well, Maya, thanks so much for jumping on. Looking forward to doing this again soon.

[Maya (venture capitalist, former 35 Ventures, now at Spice Capital)]

Yes. Thank you for having me. This has been awesome.