← How I Invest with David Weisburd
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- [00:00]
David
So you spent three and a half years at the Cornell Endowment. How does that experience at Cornell affect you as an investor today?
- [00:08]
Mike
Three and a half years @ the Cornell Endowment. It's part of allocating north of a billion dollars to investment managers across strategies, mostly private equity venture. The privilege of doing that is you get to really see world class investment talent and more importantly, world class investment firms. What do those returns look like, how do they operate their firms, what do they look for in the investment talent? How do they develop that talent, how do they articulate strategies, how do they develop LP relationships? And I think as we continue to have conversation today, common theme throughout my entire career is really understanding where's the bar for talent? And getting that very early in my career was something that was a very unique opportunity. That's certainly one piece of it. And the other piece is really understanding fundamentally how to manage risk, how to build portfolios, how to think about long term investing.
- [00:54]
David
We've talked about this concept of what good looks like, what is world class, how many funds did it take you at Cornell to see before you knew this is what excellence was?
- [01:04]
Mike
I started covering everything but private equity and venture. So I got to do public equity asset class, I got to do credit asset classes, fixed income. I spent some time in our private credit book, our distressed debt book. It took probably 18 months to really understand and follow what was a great investment manager, what made them great, and whether or not you had a view that they were going to endure. And I think a common theme was they took risk early in the firm's life cycle and were right. You see that in a lot of tier one names. They were early in a theme and they were correct on that theme. And then they built on that and continued to grow and invest in the firm over a long period of time. So within 18 months you kind of could get a sense after seeing managers already in our portfolio manager managers that we were considering putting in the portfolio managers that we did put in the portfolio, what separated the people that were maybe top quartile and the people that really were top decile that we were trying to down, select and back.
- [02:04]
David
Give me an example of a fund that was early and was right. What did that look like?
- [02:09]
Mike
One of my biggest points of pride is we were a very large backer of a, a fund called Bain Capital Life Sciences. And you've heard the Bain Capital name, but the Life Sciences strategy that Adam Koppel was running was a newer one for Bain. And I found him before he had even decided to go back and rejoin and was thinking about starting this up. But he was very early to this idea that you could do a range of strategies using private equity all the way to kind of growth stage venture to distress and turnaround in some of the public markets. And understanding how that crossover strategy across it could really deliver outsized returns per unit of risk. Some of those early funds have done exceptionally well, especially that first fund. And I think you've started to see how people can play life sciences a little more tactically. And being early, doing that at a scale that was really interesting. Being nimble, building a great team. I think this is one of those where I always talk about how Adam has done an exceptional job hiring unicorns on his investment team. People that went to Harvard Medical School and were practicing physicians for 10 years and then went to Wharton for business school and then worked at Bain on the consulting side for a couple years and then came over. Now they're doing private equity deals. You're looking for these unique investment talents to execute a unique investment strategy. That's really a great example that I always think about. I'm really proud of.
- [03:26]
David
They were early. They pioneered the style of investing and they built their brand by being early by doing these types of deals. And then they cemented their competitive advantage and their moat through talent acquisition and scaling from that side.
- [03:39]
Mike
Exactly. Here's Arkon 1. Here's our strategy. Strategy was unique, timed really well from what was going on in the biotech markets at the time. They built a really deep bench of exceptional engineering talent. And then the most important part that you can't fake is they did what they said they were going to do. They executed the strategy they said they were going to execute. They did it thoughtfully. They exceeded expectations and that earned them the right to raise the next fund and the next fund and the next fund be bigger than that and bigger than that. And it's that consistent ability to set expectations and exceed them. Any founder that's going to be great really needs to do that. It's really no different for any investment manager. Just have a view on a market or if you're a VC or an investor, have a view on a theme or a strategy and then set expectations and exceed those consistently. That's really what we were looking to do. And I think what Adam and the team over there and Jeff did really well.
- [04:25]
David
The answer of how do you compete with incumbent? The answer is you go after a different part of the market. You have to carve out the market in such a way and if you do a good job, that TAM of that market will itself compound and you'll now be the incumbent. From a $3 billion asset class to a $70 billion asset class like Dial Capital. Dial started. They had to educate everybody on GP secondaries, why they worked, why they were not zero sum, what value they could provide. And then over time, as that asset class grew, their AUM grew with it. And you have to pick the right market because if you're just number one in a small market never grows. You're just, you just have a small phone.
- [05:01]
Mike
Yeah, I think, I think the way, you know, we, the way we think about this for founders is similar to how people can think about building investment firms that they want to be generational, where you want someone leading that who is presenting something that is kind of on the surface wildly ambitious or maybe borderline and same sounding, but in parallel. The person themselves is wildly credible and is substantive and can unpack their ideas so you don't actually end up underwriting the idea. It's about the marriage between the idea's ambition and the credibility of the person pitching it. You come back to this example of Adam and Bain. Adam was an exceptionally credible human being. He was head of strategy at Biogen. Before that he actually ran a hedge fund strategy at Bain Capital. I forget what he did earlier in his career, but you knew what he was presenting was highly credible. And it was different enough that you said, okay, this is different from a credible person. He's got an insight. This is a thing we can talk more about, but I often like to say that our inception stage investing that we're doing, it also is not too different than the manager selection I was doing at the Cornell Endowment because you're betting on people and you didn't understand their motivations. And managing a fund and selecting investments is a dynamic process in the same way that going long and building a huge generational company is a dynamic process. So what you want to take is a sufficient degree of risk. But know that the person that's, that's kind of piloting the airplane has a ton of credibility and they might see something. They have an insight that is really unique.
- [06:26]
David
Going back to Cornell, you invested into the first seed fund for Sequoia. You were in other first time funds that grew up to be fourth, fifth time funds. What are some characteristics that you found in those managers that maybe you couldn't see for 18 months that said this is going to be a top decile perennial performer.
- [06:46]
Mike
The, the common theme is has this person consistently won throughout their career? When you're doing Venture, right. Power law, asset class, high uncertainty. Early on, you're kind of looking for people that have a history of exercising great judgment in the face of uncertainty. And that's true for most investment strategies, but especially for ventures. So when you saw a GP who previously had successes, significant successes that you could attribute to who they were as a person and how they approach their work on a day to day, you know, day to day, and they were taking that experience and porting it over to something totally different that hadn't been done before. We'd love to see that, right? Adam ran a hedge fund successfully. He then was head of strategy at a successful public biochick company. And then he ran a hybrid venture, private equity, you know, liquid market, private fund strategy, not even a hedge fund. So you're saying, okay, this is a person who understands, like, has a lot of mental plasticity, has done the first principles thinking, and said, this is a place where I think we can have edge based on my first principles judgment. Let's go run that strategy. And we loved seeing those kinds of people. And when you found them, you know, that's really where we liked to lean in. You hear this concept of edge. What's your edge? How do you articulate what your edge is? The way we think about edge is, you know, we're not smarter, we don't try to be smarter. But what we do say is edge is the risk we're willing to take that most others aren't. Edge is not a free lunch. Edge is informed perspective on a risk, which means maybe it's a little less risky for us. Edge is the ability to tilt the odds, which means on an adjusted basis is a little less risky for us. So understanding step one, what is the risk I'm taking? And step two, am I uniquely situated to reduce that risk relative to the competition? The output of that is your edge. And that is very much how we think about it. And we'll talk about also in hard tech and how that all plays in. But that's where you talk about sector specialists. It's another way of thinking about why a sector specialist maybe has an edge. You talk about certain generalists. Why do they maybe have an edge?
- [08:50]
Sponsor/Ad Voice
Right?
- [08:51]
Mike
What risks are they willing to take that others are not, and why? And can they articulate why they're comfortable taking that risk? That's really kind of what you're looking for when you're backing managers, is what we look for when we select companies. It's what we look for when we bring on investment Tap really isolating that risk and, and understanding why we're uniquely.
- [09:07]
David
Situated to take it specifically in a venture asset class. While you were at Cornell, did you find that the, the managers with the most alpha had more volatility in their strategy, meaning that some funds would be 12x, some would be 2x.
- [09:18]
Mike
If you're going to outperform over the long term in venture, you have to be comfortable playing like understanding and investing through the cycles. We did a lot of work on this. Historically, I've looked at venture data, fund performance data all the way back to like the 80s where we had access to some of that. And you just saw very clearly if you step out of the market, you tend to underperform. If you consistently invest through market cycles as an lp, as an institutional lp, you will capture the risk premia that venture offers and do it in a diversified way. Now at the fund level, I think that's a little bit different. I think you have platform funds that maybe will have a heavy reserve that kind of dampens some of that volatility, right? So now they're exploiting unique access through pro rata that they get by exercising the early stage stuff. You have other smaller specialist funds that are probably going to be higher volatility because they may have fewer reserves so they can't buy down risk later. Or maybe they're focused in one area. So you're getting not just the, hopefully the selection alpha, but also the beta of the sector. But if you think about it in levels, there's the portfolio level where if you invest through vintage years and it's not just hey funds, the years are started, it's also the investment year exposure. This is a thing we would spend a lot of time on is it's not about vintage year exposure for the fund, it's actually about the investment dollars going into the ground within that fund that we had to do a look through on to try to get diversification across vintage years, which is very important. But beyond that, I think if you want to have a top decile fund, there's got to be some volatility. That volatility can either be from a sector beta exposure and you're trying to time the sector beta. It can be from a concentrated portfolio that you believe somebody has an edge in picking or it can be, you know, a very small fund, for example, that that is able to kind of have a high TPPI on a small dollar number. You can get volatility in a lot of different ways and it has different shapes whether it's, you know, high beta Volatility if it's, if you have a no reserve strategy that's going to have more expo, more volatility to it. So I think if you want top decile, you do need concentration, you do need to have more volatility in the strategies in a form of kind of concentration and, or kind of no reserves. But I think most LPs at the portfolio level, they really want top quartile. At the portfolio level they want to have quartile managers as a significant chunk of the portfolio and then they will kind of blend in. Some of these top decile potential strategies that are fairly clear to see they tend to either be concentration or sector specific. That's generally what we would see on the LP side.
- [11:47]
David
To compare it to public markets, the top quartile funds, they're kind of the 1 beta exposure and then you have these idiosyncratic risks where if they hit, you might hit a 10x and you go in these sector specialists. So the assets themselves are almost two different asset classes.
- [12:01]
Mike
That's a great way to say it David, is you have hey, how do I get my consistent dollars deployed into a top quartile strategy for the asset class knowing that it's going to ebb and flow kind of with capital flows. But it's almost like how do I add a little bit more risk at a high information ratio to that first quartile portfolio to try to drive myself up to be top 20%, top 25% where I think we can kind of pick or run a systematic strategy to add positive exposure on the venture side.
- [12:28]
David
So today you run a solo GP fund called Also Capital. What kind of companies are you looking to invest into at Also Capital?
- [12:35]
Mike
Yeah, I would, I would go one upstream and say what kind of founders are we really looking to, to invest in? And I've, I've really articulated it as it's a type of founder that somebody would follow into a burning building. And it's a really good archetype for someone who kind of has the courage to do something and think quickly, act quickly, people will follow them. They're magnetic, they're a leader. It all starts with that. We invest at inception. A lot of times they're investing just like no deck in a person. Sometimes we know them, sometimes we get to know them. We do this predominantly in hard tech, which for us is aerospace, defense, robotics, advanced manufacturing, communications, energy, mobility, things that are systems that are systems engineering risks at their core. And we want to back those companies and help them build really great early teams and capitalize with the best possible partners that are out there for the business. And we think those things are really hard sectors to build in. It's really unique talent that it takes to build them. But if you have the right leader and the right market and you do that really well at building the early team, these things can compound for quite a long time. And that's where you see the SpaceX is the Andrews, even the Nvidia, that's a hardware company, you know, at their core. And they've done a lot more software stuff. It's because specialist talent is the core, but the talent follows leadership. So for us, at the core of it, and as I think about also over many, many years, the thing that can't change is the type of person you're looking to back. And it really is that person that you would follow into a burning building.
- [13:57]
David
These founders that you're backing at inception that are going into these burning buildings, are you also looking to taper that with some form of realism?
- [14:06]
Mike
So I haven't shared this publicly, but I do share it privately with friends. So this will be the first place that I'll, that I'll share publicly how we, this, this idea we have. So we have this idea of starting a totally separate fund that would just back amateur pilots. And you'd say, why? Why do you want to back an amateur pilot? What's so interesting about an amateur. An amateur pilot is actually the best characterization of a founder who is risk seeking. Calm under pressure does not take extreme risks that would put their own life at risk. They want to do things, they're disciplined, they want to learn.
- [14:42]
David
Right.
- [14:43]
Mike
And they are magnetic in the way they do it. Because flying can be, you know, a group activity. It's not always by yourself and that person is always calibrating. They want to push risk. Right? Flying in a plane is risky. Amateur piloting is risky. But if you are disciplined and you are cool under pressure and you can kind of be responsive to things that may happen that are unexpected, that is the archetype of the best founders, right? That is what the best founders do exceptionally well is they push risk. They do it in a measured way, but they're also able to adapt to unforeseen circumstances. They're able to be reactive and make smart decisions under pressure, exercise sound judgment. You don't want people that are taking insane risks. Right? I want a founder that's going to take a smart risk that they feel they can manage, that has the discipline to do it consistently, take smart risks and stack those over time. Right? You start to, you go, you learn, you go to pilot school, then you get instrument rated that there's ways you can keep stacking more risk as you continue to learn and grow. And I think the same analogy holds for founders that we're trying to back.
- [15:53]
David
I'm wondering if these founders have to even be risk taking or if they have to be. Have to have the ability to go against the herd. So a lot of these great companies are built on first principles thinking that goes away from consensus views on what should or should not be possible. Blake Shoals a good example on this. Nothing that he's created, at least in the first few years, defied physics. None of it was even not something created before with the Concorde. But he was able to go against conventional wisdom and he had the ability to be ridiculed and to sustain this kind of outside criticism that I think is extremely difficult for human beings to have because of the way that we've been evolutionary wired to kind of be these social cohesion creatures, make everybody like us so that we don't get kicked out of the tribe. So I wonder whether it's really.
- [16:44]
Mike
What.
- [16:45]
David
Might seem risky to somebody that's really focused on other people's opinions may actually be not very risky and just might be the right, the quote unquote right answer.
- [16:55]
Mike
We talk a lot about one of our big pieces of diligence as a hard tech investor is, you know, does this violate the laws of physics? And a lot of times it starts there.
- [17:01]
David
That's a hard one to overcome.
- [17:03]
Mike
It's a hard one to overcome. So. Or is it just too many miracles to be able to get to the end seat? But if you take a step back, entrepreneurship in its purest form is about coordinating resources and creating more value than it costs you to acquire those resources. Right? So if you take a super non consensus view on a thing, right. It could just make it harder to acquire those resources, which means the upside needs to be significantly greater to compensate for how hard it was to get those resources. All of these things are kind of, you can calibrate all of these things, which is if I want to be first person who's going to build a department store on Mars, right. Like how many things have to go right to be able to be the first one to do that, that feels very, very hard. If you take something like Blake's doing with, with Boom, which is incredibly ambitious, but can be broken down into a series of steps that can be followed and milestones that can be de risked over a series of time Over a period of time. I think it's about the judgment of the entrepreneur and the ability to kind of bob and weave through the company journey to convince other people to continue to give resources. And resources are certainly, you know, cash and be customer attention. But it should also be engineering talent with boom, which is incredibly ambitious but can be broken down into a series of steps that can be followed and milestones that can be de risked over a period of time. I think it's about the judgment of the entrepreneur and the ability to bob and weave through the company journey to convince other people to continue to give resources. And resources are certainly cash can be, you know, customer attention, but it should also be engineering talent, you know, business talent, operations talent. All of those people are giving their time. And that is actually the scarcest resource for any of these things that people want to build that are truly ambitious is the time of talented people and the opportunity cost of that time. So for us that ends up being where we spend a disproportionate amount of our effort in trying to understand what why you as the founder think you can take incredibly talented people and get them to give you their time. Most of our best founders have like clear answers to that that are either insight based or more often relationship based of their own reputation and their own credibility. To come back to this idea of extreme credibility within a niche, another way.
- [19:32]
David
To look at it is these founders. If they're going into a non consensus bet, they have to have both very high IQ and very high eq. They need very high IQ in terms of coming up with first principles, thinking and looking at a space with different lens, with physics backed versus consensus backed. And then they need to have very high EQ because they need to have this era of inevitability that they could communicate both to early hires and also to to venture investors. I would argue that if you could raise, take it to extreme, if you could raise $100 million seed round, you could convince the talent to join. But then you could also say if you hire 10 of the top 20 engineers at SpaceX, you would have no issues raising the $100 million seed round. So I think it's potato, potato, but I think that ability to both be super high iq, be contrarian, but also be able to break things down and make it very obvious why you're going to succeed. I think it's extremely small subset of people that have these kind of concentric circle of skills.
- [20:25]
Mike
I wholeheartedly agree.
- [20:27]
David
And when you find them, is it typically one person, is it like The Steve Jobs and Wozniak combo. Double click on that.
- [20:32]
Mike
We, we've backed a range of folks I think about Varda. They had nine or ten full time people when we wrote our first check at Inception. But there's another robotics company that was a single 19 year old who was coming to the US for the first time that we wrote their first check. So it's kind of a range. We are primarily looking for early signs of leadership, self awareness, discipline, long term vision, ambition, kind of these softer things that can show through least often with words, most often with actions and track record and timing and really understanding who is this person, where are they in their life? Why is this the thing that they're going to go do? And we talk a lot about this heuristic of, you know, people in the, in the prime of their career with the risk appetite to go do something truly generational. And that window of people is incredibly narrow.
- [21:25]
David
Give me some tells of these individuals that are able to demonstrate their ambition behaviorally versus saying I'm ambitious, I'm going to do whatever it takes to become successful. I'm sure that 10 out of 10 people will say that. But what's a leading indicator of someone that you think could be extremely successful?
- [21:45]
Mike
So I'll break it up. I think there's track record elements and by the way, it has nothing to do with age. It really just has to do with finding early examples of the founder's DNA where they consistently pursued excellence, competitiveness at ideally the highest levels and increasing levels of, of competition in whatever it was. It can be Formula sae, it can be Math Olympiad, it could be a science fair, it could be athletics, it doesn't really matter. It's really matter. It's about. It's very hard to teach the competitive gene. It's very hard to teach discipline to somebody who's now, you know, 25 years old starting a company. Most times you can see the shoots of that in their track record. If you're willing to ask those kinds of questions as an investor, a lot of founders that take calls with us, one of the things we often hear is like this is not like a founder call that we do with most other VCs that ask us about our business and our traction. I said, well you're the pilot. I want to come back to that reference here. You're the pilot of this plane. I want to know what's going on in the pilot's head because I can't be there every day coaching you through. I need to know who's in there making decisions and that's those decisions will compound when it comes to. So that's, you know, pre our engagement, you know, post our engagement. Language is really important, how people engage, how they make you feel. I think some of these things may sound soft, but humans are very complex beings. Like biology is very complex. But when you get enough reps of seeing these companies and you've been in a couple outliers and you can kind of recall what you saw and at the early days of an outlier and then kind of track it through, your gut is often a very good indicator that somebody is sufficiently ambitious and you can tell how confident they are in what they're selling. You can tell by how clearly they can identify and isolate the risks. You can tell by how they kind of quantify what that risk is. You can tell when you ask questions like why do you think this company will fail? And the more it aligns with your own intuition around that and the more sensitive, self aware and humble they are as a founder to be able to say those are the risks. That actually tends to correlate a lot with ambition because they're going in eyes wide open and still talking about taking the big swing. So it means they know the risk they're going to take. Especially for hardware businesses where it's hard to like pivot these things and just like white knuckle your way through it, it's really important to have that clarity of thought super early in the company and then have that person be able to bring you as the investor along with them on the journey and make you feel like you're part of it.
- [24:08]
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- [24:25]
David
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- [25:07]
David
I think a lot of people intuitively grasp what it means to be very disciplined. Everybody's had to go to school, turn in homework. A lot of people grasp this idea of chip on their shoulder. That's why so much of Silicon Valley is immigrant or second generation immigrant. Tell me about competitiveness. What exactly does that mean? And is this lack of competitiveness and is competitiveness a necessary factor for the power law outcome?
- [25:31]
Mike
Yeah, when we talk about kind of what we want our companies to be, how we, how we think about the culture within the companies we're trying to back and the founders, it's, it's two piece, two parts that are equally important. We want founders and teams that have fun first and foremost, but also play to win. So startups are hard. I ran it. You know, we didn't talk a ton about my background, but I ran a hard tech business for seven years, took it from inception to Series B, hired 30 people, built a 25,000 square foot pilot plant, kind of through all the ups and downs, managed it through Covid. If you're not having fun, it's very hard to do your best work. It is hard to attract great talent. It is hard to present well in front of customers. It is hard to raise capital. It's amazing how often that just shows through. But one can over index on fun and just kind of have too much fun. And the way that is, you focus on playing to win. It's not just about fun, it's about having fun. But understanding the goal we're playing towards is not. We want to change the world. I think that's fine. That changing the world is an output of having fun and playing to win consistently over a long period of time. But playing to win is, hey, this project is due Friday. I know it's Tuesday. Get it done on Friday and make sure you get it done on Friday. Why Friday? Well, because Friday allows us, if we get it done by there, we can move to the next thing next week. It's that little bit of competitiveness. Hey, we need to beat this other company for this customer because we just want to win. We want to create a culture of winning and we're going to do it in a fun way that makes people want to keep coming back to work and staying until midnight and coming in on a Saturday or Sunday. That's a culture thing. But making sure that you kind of have both of those is critically important. And the competitiveness comes in, in the play to win part, but doing it in a way that is like healthy and values aligned I think is really important for longevity of these businesses. I think anyone that has a short term mindset on we need to win in a zero sum way, in the short term, in the long term, that creates toxic culture that can create challenges in the business over time. So really building that strong foundation at bottom up that focuses on the fun part, but also how do you win and being competitive against your competitors.
- [27:37]
David
I wonder if this play to win could be reframed as this sense of urgency. I was listening to podcasts about Elon Musk and he always creates these crazy senses of urgency. So when he's at Tesla, he'll say every day in 10 years from now, we're going to be at 100 million revenue or we're going to have 10 million revenue every day. So every day that we delay that we're losing 10 million in revenue. So he has a way to basically bring the future forward and make that urgency today.
- [28:06]
Mike
Yeah, I think of urgency as a necessary precondition to winning big in the long term. But urgency without direction and urgency without consideration for whether we're right is not enough. That's actually a recipe for burnout. Consistent urgency with no clear direction is a recipe for burnout. Understanding that what matters is winning. What matters is revenue. What matters is enterprise value growth. What matters is delivering products on time or ahead of schedule. Those are versions of winning. You know, what matters is, you know, taking the late night interview to hire the engineer and you, you get them from your next competitor company. Those are clear quantitative measurements of victory. So while urgency is definitely the precondition for long term big wins, there's this.
- [28:53]
David
Meme in Silicon Valley that burnout is not an effect of working too hard, it's an effect of working too hard for a long time with no progress. To what extent do you believe that to be true?
- [29:03]
Mike
I, I totally agree with it. I wrote a post about this, you know, maybe six months ago or something like that, or how to find your next job and what you're looking for in your next job. Three, three things that I highlighted in that, in that post. And, you know, one was you're seeking agency, the ability to make decisions. Number two, you want to have your work, you want to understand how your work directly translates to economic outcomes for the company. And number three, you ideally want it to be something you're excited to tell your mom about, whatever it is that you're working on. And if you have those three and you're doing those consistently, that's a great place to be. But if any one of those three either don't exist in it, you know the context of finding your next job. If you don't have any one of those three, you know, keep looking. But I think in a company, if you lose any one of those three, it can be very easy to get burnt out when you're working hours and you don't know how your work is connecting to the economics of the company. You know, you're no longer proud to tell your mom about what you're doing or you lose agency and you kind of just become a cog. The longer you can preserve those three things for your company internally, the faster you're going to compound as business.
- [30:10]
David
One of the things that Wall street or the financial world completely underestimates is what I call the sixth gear. When you're going after something that has serious consequences for the world, like populating Mars, your brain and your body goes into six gear. It unlocks another sense of drive that you can't see in a spreadsheet. I can't show you in Excel and show you, this is the sixth gear, this is the drive. But it very much affects the productivity and the output of the company. The sense of mission is something that I think Wall street and people in finance kind of look down upon and think it's naive, but it is a direct line of sight to a higher returning asset from a purely asset allocation standpoint.
- [30:51]
Mike
Yeah. And I think the way that most often shows through would be through, you know, better employee retention. Right. It would be through high recruitment success rates. It would be through, you know, faster delivery timelines. And all these things are, these are things that have outputs that investors understand. Right. Fast in between.
- [31:09]
David
So maybe it is in the spreadsheets.
- [31:10]
Mike
Yeah, talent. Yeah, it's in the spreadsheets.
- [31:12]
David
The second order effects are in there.
- [31:13]
Mike
The second order effects. This is a really interesting thread that you pull on with that though, because I think a lot of people understand the language in that second order effect. But the people that can truly drive alpha are the ones that understand the individual independent variables that are predictive of those more well understood, legible views of success. So if one, if you can walk the floor of a factory in El Segundo and get a feel for whether or not this is a convex or concave type culture in terms of where it's going in six months, you could start betting today on that business confidently. Because you know how these Variables are, are correlated, you know what the correlations look like. So the more time you spend in any area, look at the people who will tell you have they've been doing it for 30, 40 years, they can go walk a factory floor or they can go to an office and they can just kind of get a feel on what the direction of this company is six or 12 months down the line because they kind of know where to look.
- [32:08]
David
Talk about AI. AI is obviously affecting everything. How specifically is AI affecting the hard tech space? Is it more prominent, is it less prominent?
- [32:18]
Mike
Really three ways. First one is AI certainly accelerating the potential the design cycles for a lot of hardware. I think that's really an interesting one that will accrue significant benefits to existing players that have kind of platforms that work and then they're doing their rev twos, their rev threes, if they could do that faster, makes it harder for net new incumbents to kind of come in and be able to out design them. That's one I think. The second is things that are like AI driven control systems. You see this a lot in robotics where you can have extremely general general purpose robotics, which would be the dream. I think that is the intersection of hardware and software where AI is kind of having an effect on the potential surface area of applicability and robotics. The third is edge use cases. So if you think like edge IoT sensors, where you can have edge running AI locally on edge devices that can get much greater information, you know, predictive intelligence with much lower power than you could have had before versus, you know, five years ago with what you had to do and like kind of stream the data straight to the cloud. If you can do AI at the edge now all of a sudden the predictive capabilities that you have for remote deployed Systems and Edge IoT, the ability to do responsiveness all gets, you know, goes kind of parabolic, if you will, from a capability standpoint. Where does AI meet the hardware to this point? But that's where we've traditionally where we've started to see it really play out.
- [33:45]
David
And you have this unenviable challenge of finding startups in the hard tech space before they really break out. What are those leading indicators that you're looking that might signal to you that this might be the next Anduril or SpaceX.
- [34:00]
Mike
It always starts with do I think this founder can be the next Palmer Lucky or Trey Stevens to use Anduril or the next Elon. And I think that's always the archetype of, you know, that's an example do.
- [34:11]
David
You think just to push back on that, do you think Palmer Lucky could have pivoted to another industry and been that successful? Obviously he started a successful billion dollar company before, but do you not think that the industry was really pulling him towards that? Do you think a combination? Or do you think there's just those special founders that could succeed in anything?
- [34:29]
Mike
I think there are special founders who are talent magnets. And to come back to this idea of founders following founders into a burning building, you can bet there were tons of founders that, you know, tons of people that worked with Potter, worked with Trey, work with Brian at Macrim, at Cheese and or ill, or, you know, work with Elon that followed them, whatever they were doing. And why did they do that? Well, because they trust that founder's judgment that this is a good problem, well timed, that investors will fund this business, that they want to go on this very challenging journey with them. It's an engineering challenge that has a, that is very hard, but has a very clearly defined scope. I think a lot of these big companies started out that way. Even rockets, right? You took SpaceX in the early days. Rockets were not new, right? It was, hey, we're going to make them commercial. It was a big challenge. But Elon was an inspirational leader to do that and have people come work for him to go after that problem, have a culture that pushed the envelope from an engineering perspective, which was naturally magnetic to the best people early on that wanted to go take that risk with him for us to your question, how do we identify people early? We want to understand who's following you, why are they following you? What is your edge in getting those people to follow you? Right? How do you articulate what that is? And it could be a track record. It could be, I worked on this. And then you can reference that, you can kind of through the network try to understand, like how real is that? And then you pair it with, hey, are we building some small component and then we don't know what we're doing after that? Or is this company more about this person who has a vision for 10 or 15 years from now that is baked into what is almost an ideology at its core. It's an, the business is an idea. And anybody who works at this company is bought into that idea and has a worldview that they think is unique and they're excited to talk about and they convince others to believe in that over time. And that worldview monetizes through selling spacecraft or nuclear reactors or all these other kinds of things. But you have to Kind of have that person at the top that can unfairly aggregate talent in an area that they have a unique perspective. And if you have those two things, then we can take that risk with them. But it's amazing how rare it is to find somebody that has a truly unique point of view paired with. I'll come back to this idea of like insane credibility from a track record standpoint.
- [36:35]
David
Said another way, the customer in the first stages of a hard tech startup is the engineer. There's a story, there's a Stanford professor and he said, there's a small company called SpaceX and they've recruited five of my top 10 engineers. And Elon set up a meeting with him and very early in the meeting, the professor figured out that Elon's trying to figure out who the other five top engineers are that, that went to SpaceX. So I think this, this ability to, to attract these top engineers is something again and also doesn't show up in the spreadsheets until, until a few years out. If you're a Palmer, lucky, you're Trey Stevens, you're Elon Musk. It's easy, it's quote unquote easy to attract the, that talent today. What about before they were brand names? What are some leading indicators of that?
- [37:20]
Mike
Yeah, I think I would say it's never easy to attract talent, but it's very easy. It's much easier when you've got people that you've worked with before that really love you. They find you to be inspirational in a leader. So that's part of it. If you're still 18 years old and maybe you don't have 10 years at a SpaceX that you could draw on people that you worked with in real commercial products. I think there are still evidence of leadership capabilities in people that if given enough time and patience, will show themselves in the form of a company, if that's what that person wants to build. So, you know, was this person captain of the soccer team? Was this the person that people always came to when they had a problem? Can you ask them about some of that? You know, where did they grow up? Was, was the, was it an entrepreneurial family? What did they learn from their parents that might have been entrepreneurs about doing this? What was it like, you know, who was, what did their uncle do when they were growing up and did they really live this idea that it is about people? And have they learned that being a great founder is really about being a great, you know, servant leader in many ways? You know, you're, you're, you're managing in some cases like heavy egos. If people are very talented, you're managing investors, you're managing customers, you're managing the vision of the business. And doing all of that means you are serving many masters as CEO. You are not the boss. You have many bosses. Those there can be micro causes of that. Whether it's in athletics, it can be in. I used the term, I used Math Olympiad before. You know, you can, you can talk about that. What is the competitive or debate. Right. I think there's archetypes of founders that were former debaters that are really wonder like amazing at articulating vision and making arguments. There are these little things early in one's in one's life that can be highly predictive of the potential to build a great team. But make no mistake, it is hard for an 18 year old kid to go recruit a 35 year old senior engineer from SpaceX. Like that may just not be it. So it's about okay, you have that potential but what's the problem? You're doing how much capital is it going to take? How do you scope it, how do you de risk it, how do you phase the milestones? That's a lot of where we end up spending a lot of our time. Like what's the right come back to where we started on risk management, you know, portfolio construction. How do you structure this in a way so these companies can build momentum at the right speed and not build too much momentum too fast and they blow up, but set it in a way where they can build momentum over time consistently at the right speed for them.
- [39:38]
David
Let's say you are that 18 year old. Would you advise them to go work at a hard tech startup and build those coalitions and build that team or should they white knuckle their way through the first couple years? Because one of the things that I worry about for that 18 year old is to quote Vinod Koso, this 0 billion versus $0 million startup which is in the first year you could set up your startup in such a way that it could never be a unicorn, it could never be world class. How do you think about that? And have you seen people kind of up level their team after having a weak team from the start?
- [40:10]
Mike
I think it's very hard to change team culture after the first five people. But I don't think there's only one culture that builds a generational company. If I use hard tech companies like I'm sitting here at Varda, I think we went, you know, clean sheet to recovered capsule in three years. That doesn't happen with people who've never done this before. It just doesn't. There's risks that this team didn't have to take because they'd done them before. There's experience, there's trust built that allows people to just move faster, get it right the first time. So for this company, that team dynamic was right. To achieve a fast milestone for a different business, let's use a software business where a lot of the moat will be from iterative development and learning over time what the customer needs. And the faster development cycles you can have, the sooner you might be able to get to a durable moat that could favor, you know, that may not. That you may not need as much experience building spacecraft, for example. You just need to have a motor that can go really fast. So I have this example, this framework I use of kind of like RPMs and gears. Right. You can back high RPM founders that maybe aren't kicking it into gear. So they'll spin. They got a lot of energy, but they may not quite go as far as somebody who spins at 3000 RPMs in a higher gear. Right. But it's more expensive, like it's. It's more energy to be in higher gear and do some of that. So you think about aa, right? This team came in super high gear and, you know, high rpm, so they went real far, real fast. We have other companies that maybe are kind of still in learning mode iterating, so lower gear, but still high rpm. So they're moving. They're just not moving nearly as far, but they're not spending as much money. They're not in as, as high a gear, not as high a burn to be able to get that learning.
- [42:05]
David
Tell this further. Explain what it means to be high RPM and high gear.
- [42:10]
Mike
Yeah. So high gear would be, you know, we're burning a lot of capital, right. We're spending a lot of money, which means the stakes are higher to be right, especially per unit time. If I have high rpm, it means I'm iterating quickly and I'm evolving quickly. So if I'm iterating, like, it becomes important. If you have a high gear high burn that you're right. And you're much more likely to be right if you have a little more experience and you're building in a space where the experience is directly valuable. Right. It's not. You know, building a space capsule is not a mystery. People have done it before, but you want to do it right. So there's high burn, but you got to build it Right. But it's not a mystery. If you're doing a software business or a consumer app. Like you can't have high burn for that because you just kind of got to iterate and navigate the idea maze and through the uncertainty. So you want to have fast iteration cycles, but you want to keep burn low until you figure it out and then you kick it into gear and maintain high rpm.
- [43:02]
David
Right.
- [43:03]
Mike
A lot of hard tech companies end up high gear high RPM early on. And the ones that get it right, they go really far, far. The ones that struggle are either low RPM high gear or low gear high rpm. So they're just not really going that far and they get behind.
- [43:19]
David
Said another way in software you want to get product market fit. So you talk to customers, you figure out the right product, then you raise a bunch of money and you just copy paste. You go from one salesperson to salesperson. There's no technical invention that needs to be made to get from 1 million to 100 million. Then there's just a sense for how big the market is and and other competitive forces in hard tech, why is it different? Give me a specific example.
- [43:45]
Mike
Yeah, in hard tech these things are not mysteries. It's hey, we've got a company, K2 Space. They're doing some very innovative stuff. Integrating components and subsystems that have been built in house, building an entire supply chain. But they are building satellite bus. People know how to build satellite buses. They know what to use satellite buses for. They know what they could do if they had more power or a bigger bus or could get more to mid earth orbit meal faster. That stuff's not a mystery. What's hard is the execution, raising the capital, articulating the long term, hiring the specialty expertise across systems engineering and thermal management and software and avionics and ops and biz, biz, dev and government and doing all of that in advance of revenue.
- [44:27]
Sponsor/Ad Voice
Right.
- [44:27]
Mike
That's a hard problem to solve. But the idea is if you can bring talent and capital together and time the market right. And have a unique insight on why you should bring the talent capital together to go after this market. It's hard to replicate that. Right. So it becomes high gear big bet. The caliber of founder it takes to do that type of a company has to be exceptionally large, exceptionally high. Right. That's why Blake building to use Blake and boom. Right. I mean he was successful, he had successes before. High caliber founder to be able to take that kind of a swing. Not everybody can take that kind of a high gear swing. So that's what's unique about this is there's not as much mystery in some of these. Sometimes they'll iterate on the business model a little bit and try to figure out exactly where we're going to get paid and how much we're going to get paid and on what time frame. But most often we're not taking a bunch of science risk on, you know, can we make a fusion magnet work in this timeframe?
- [45:20]
David
You've been venture since 2016, roughly nine years ago. What is one single piece of advice, timeless advice that you wish you knew when you started that would have either accelerated your career or helped you avoid mistakes.
- [45:40]
Mike
You don't have to be in every great deal. You just have to be in a handful of really good ones and own a lot of them. I think early on there's a lot of chasing, there's a lot of, you know, need to see this, like, how do I see this? Like, I want to see that. Over time I've kind of learned like be a long term partner to founders and do things that are useful to the great people in your network. And with time you will have a right to see great people and write them early checks that are meaningful. That's really what this game is about is the daily behaviors need to be magnetic to great people and then you need to structure your capital and your approach and your strategy in a way that you can bet meaningfully on those people when those opportunities arise. The best opportunities we had in one way were serendipitous, but the serendipity was definitely correlated with the day to day activities of how we were spending time with people, what we were being naturally curious, being helpful to people and staying in touch and then those things coming around, staying top of mind through social awareness, other kinds of things that make people think of you. Those things all kind of add together to say, hey look, you don't need to chase every deal because you can build a reputation as someone who chases. And that's not how you get into great deals at great prices and get invited to participate with really awesome investors. How you do that is if you're disciplined, brand has signal, you do independent work with rigor and you bet on your people and you're really betting on the quality of your network. I think that was a realization for me years ago. I said our network is what it is. I think it's going to continue to get better and better. But let's bet on the people, let them pull us up. I think that realization really gave me clarity of mind for how we perform over the long term and just let it compound over a long period of time.
- [47:29]
David
Same thing could be a really good thing or a bad thing, depending on how you label it. Chasing deals. I understand that there's a negative connotation to that, that you're literally chasing a deal, but what does that even mean? How do you know that you're chasing a deal?
- [47:41]
Mike
You know, there's a thing. It's a, hey, have you heard of this company? Okay, should I go find out?
- [47:45]
David
They're doing a round, they have this. They have the lead investor try to get it.
- [47:47]
Mike
They have this thing, they're doing the round, they have this thing. Or like, this person's starting a thing, it's like, okay, so should I go try to get in touch with them, find out what they're doing? And it's not that in a vacuum, it's that ideally, in venture, you're kind of as disciplined and systematic as you can be. So if you're willing to do that one time, you should be willing to do that lots of times. And if you do that as a recurring behavior, it can take up a lot of your energy. And the output of that most often tends to be, you know, you pay a more full, you know, high price. Uh, you have more kind of, you're really looking more at an auction, which makes it harder for you to really have good information. You don't have the time most likely to get to know the founder. And if your model is to my point of, like, we underwrite founders, like, really wanting to understand them and their track record, like, it's really hard to do that. Well, if your 40% of your book is in deals that you're chasing, instead of having 80% of your book in deals where you're getting to know people and then coming back to the risk you're willing to take. Like, maybe we take a risk where, like, the initial TAM is not clear or not obviously large, but we're betting the founder has enough ambition to go expand it. Right. Maybe we're taking the risk that, like, there's two other companies that people would say are kind of competitive to this, but we think this founder is compelling enough that the team they're going to build is going to make them viable and we'll take that risk alongside them and get paid well when we're right. I think that is how we think about where we're most comfortable. And it's also a function of how we're set up. Right. Solo GP it's me and One full time analyst. That's it. We're resource constrained, which means we have to be disciplined in the box that we kind of look for and how we play our game.
- [49:26]
David
In an infinite resources of capital and time, you might chase deals, but given that you have both finite capital, you need to chase alpha in finite time. You have to focus on the deals that you have the highest likelihood of winning.
- [49:36]
Mike
That's right. But I think there's also a second piece, David, where I think success in venture is, is, is very, it's reflexive to a degree. Right. How many great venture firms do you get to know as like venture firm X? They were the first investor in Y. And anybody who's building something that is like adjacent to Y will call venture investor X. Right. The more deals you do, the more you average your signal towards the average performance of those deals. The fewer deals you do, the more your signal is the average of the good performers that you have in your portfolio. So it's interesting, this is interesting dissonance because the math says do a lot of deals, but the math also says a few number of companies like an Elon drive all the returns. Right. And Anduril. Right, that. So what behavior gets you exposure to an Elon? What behavior gets you exposure to an Andil? It's probably being more disciplined on the volume of stuff that you're doing. So your brand has signal because the best people want signal to solve what problem? Hiring great engineers, raising great following capital to go after significantly ambitious problems. So we've kind of chosen to say like we know the math, we get what the math would say in terms of like invest in a lot of deals. But we also know that the math says a couple companies matter. And when you unpack the founders of those couple companies, most times you wouldn't have access to them unless you were in a network of people that had a density of outliers. So we've chosen to say how do we optimize to be in a network of that has a high density of outliers and ride with those people. We'll go as far as they'll take us.
- [51:12]
David
I have somewhat of a paradoxical belief. A lot of people think that it's unknowable at precede. I call complete bullshit. And here's why. Some of the best portfolios of all time, two of the best funds ever were not funds. They were David Sacks's angel portfolio and Mark Andreessen's angel portfolio. Why? Because they knew these people, therefore they weren't knowable. Maybe you could say, well, maybe you had to work with them for five years and therefore it's not very scalable, but it is knowable. That doesn't mean that every investment that you make, you have a 90% chance of success. It might be 10% versus 2% or it might be 7% versus 2%. But there is a significant edge on doing the work and knowing the people that I think a lot of people dismiss as some, some kind of playing the lottery. And I think that's, that's an unsophisticated and lazy view on market.
- [51:54]
Mike
That's right. I think it's also what work you do, David.
- [51:56]
David
Right.
- [51:56]
Mike
I think if it's, hey, we did the work on the market and we read the Bain report and the McKinsey report is like if you're reading a Bain or McKinsey report at Precede, you've already lost.
- [52:05]
David
Right.
- [52:06]
Mike
But did you do the work on the person to understand like, what motivated them, like, what story, what you know, who, who wronged them or who inspires them and really understand how you tell that story? We've got to a founder whose like motivation is to retire his mom who came to the US From Eastern Europe and was a doctor there and had to go to med school again in the US to get a degree. And like his dad passed when he was younger and like the mom raised the, like the him and the sister. And it's like this amazing story that you realize, like, what's the fuel to keep going? Like, that's actually a scarce resource. Right? There's the fuel to keep going. If you can identify that really early. Like, these are the types of things you're trying to find in founders that can go the distance.
- [52:47]
David
As society becomes richer and the bottom floor keeps on going up and now everybody's well fed, everybody has good schooling, everybody has good healthcare. That edge becomes even more important because what is going to fuel that that founder to stay up and spend 18 hours a day if they have all their basic needs taken? You need that chip on the shoulder. You need that ultimate purpose that's kind of pulling them away from their comfort. Yeah, Mike, this has been absolute masterclass in deep tech and nerding out on how to find the next Elon Musk, the next Palmer Lucky, the next Trey Stevens. Thanks so much for jumping on the podcast. Look forward to continuing conversation live.
- [53:22]
Mike
Thanks for having me, David.
- [53:23]
David
That's it for today's episode of How I Invest. If this conversation gave you new insights or ideas, do me a quick favor. Share with one person in your network who'd find it valuable or leave a short review wherever you listen. This helps more investors discover the show and keeps us bringing you these conversations week after week. Thank you for your continued support.