Transcript
A (0:00)
Jamie, I've been very excited to chat. Welcome to the podcast.
B (0:04)
Thank you, David. Thank you for having me. Really excited to be here. I listened to you for a long time and so thank you.
A (0:11)
You have, according to Ilya Strybolov's unicorn list, you have 19.2% of your companies end up at the seed stage becoming unicorns. Tell me about your sourcing strategy. How do you go about sourcing such a high quality and high caliber companies?
B (0:27)
The number one signal that we found, because we've regressed a lot of this data and looked at where the companies that we've invested in, where does it come from? And we crunch these numbers all day. The most powerful signal has been the founder referral. So not the peer to peer, not our other competitors in this space. That tends to be about a third of the time, the majority of the time, and the highest signal time and tying it back to the investment process of which companies end up being billion dollar outcomes are when I get a phone call from that 5 out of 5 founder, often they may already be, you know, a multi billion dollar company and they say, hey Jamie, like hey, I just met this kid, he's an El Segundo, you need to go down and meet with him or her like tomorrow. And those are the songest, the strongest signals that we get. And those, those are the ones where my antenna kind of pop up. And there are only a handful of folks that I will kind of listen to in that regard. But thankfully some of them are already in our portfolio. But when they say you need to meet this person, you know, I'm going to see them in the next 24 hours, most likely. Of course there's many other ways that we source, but I think that's the most powerful one.
A (1:45)
Why do you think that founders, specifically unicorn founders, are the best source for deal flow?
B (1:54)
Oftentimes they're already looking at these, at these companies, they might be developing commercial relationships with them. They may have actually already worked for them. Tom Mueller was famously the number one employee at SpaceX. If you, if you count Elon as, you know, zero or two, if you count Elon as number one. So you know how many funds that have been spun out of SpaceX, how many companies that have been spun out of SpaceX? Every single one of these companies or kids or funds has worked for Tom in the past. He knows every single one of them. So if we're talking about aerospace or defense and space defense or where those things meet as a category or just as a, for example, Tom knows these People. So when he calls me and says, hey, Jamie, you know, you gotta meet this kid, he actually knows the company and so says, you know, we, we use this company. We don't use this company. This one's great. This one's pretty mediocre. And this kid who worked for me is the best, one of the best engineers I've ever had.
