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- [00:00]
Eugenio Gonzalez
But it's not going to be the established folks. More often than not, those guys have secured their funding. They're going to go to their existing or previous investors and those guys are set. You want to make sure that you get to know the new founders. Right. So those guys found a wedge, are branding themselves as the go to guys. When you want to talk about Gen C founders, they're referring deals already to VCs. I find myself saying that if you want the job, you need to do the job before. So you do the job before you get the job. And that's how you're going to be able to break into venture.
- [00:39]
Joel Palo Thinkle
Welcome to the Investor, a podcast where I, Joel Palo Thinkle, your host, dives deep into the minds of the world's most influential institutional investors. In each episode, we sit down with an investor to hear about their journeys and how global markets are driving capital allocation. So join us on this journey as we explore these insights. Then we'll, we'll do this live stream. Yeah, maybe you weren't ready for that was not.
- [01:15]
Eugenio Gonzalez
It's all good. Let's.
- [01:17]
Joel Palo Thinkle
Yeah, we'll just do it that way we don't have to do any editing later. That's why ever since I started this, I just tried to save as much time as I can and try not to say something stupid. But if I do, hopefully people look over it. But anyways, Eugenio, thanks for joining the show. Thanks for taking time out. I know there's just a lot of complex stuff going on at home with family and everybody just trying to get back to work. So I appreciate you balancing that and balancing in your schedule. But for the audience here, we've got different people that are working in tech and also breaking into venture capital. A couple people that are emerging managers. So excited to learn a little more about you, your career, how you broke into VC and all the amazing things that Plug and Play is doing. So welcome to the show. On the show again we've got Eugenio Gonzalez from Plug and Play. So happy to have you here. Maybe we can start by just you talking a little bit about your background and how you broke into VC and Plug and Play and we'll just take it from there.
- [02:20]
Eugenio Gonzalez
All right. And thanks for having me, Joel. So yeah, let's start from the very beginning. I guess so. I'm originally from Chile. I'm a recovering lawyer so I spent the first six years of my career working in M and a very, very interesting. Spent a good time working on cross border deals but ultimately realized that I didn't Want to. I was sitting at the wrong side of the table. And we'll get back to that later. Within venture capital. But when you're a lawyer, everything is sort of linear, right? And there's not a ton of upside. The way that venture capital creates for you and where you're able to partner with and invest in amazing entrepreneurs. The downside is limited. You can lose one time your money. The upside is infinite, right? Being a lawyer doesn't provide that sort of optionality. Everything is very linear. Everything is sort of tied to the amount of hours that you spend at the office. The only way to deleverage yourself or to leverage yourself is by employing more people. And that's why a lot of other lawyers hire more lawyers to work more hours for them. Venture capital I think has this unique ability that has two leverages, which is one money. So you can deploy capital in different ventures and by that you can start doing more things and then at the same time technology, which is another lever. Once I realized that I was sitting at the wrong side of the table, I went to MIT where I got my mba. I spent two years in Boston at MIT Sloan realized that I want to be in investing. I want to do something. But I wasn't quite sure what to do with it. Far too old to do investment banking, not quite the right background to do private equity and really fell in love with early stage venture capital. I also realized that in order to break into venture capital you needed to have either operating background or investing background. I had neither. So I charted a little path to be able to break into ventures. So while you're at mit, which great. It's. It's a great brand. Everyone knows the school. You're not able to circumvent the fact that you don't have those two things. If you're not. If you don't have an operating background or investment background, it's a little bit harder to start. So I joined a startup. I think on my second semester I was helping a founder raise capital. We raised 300k from the first institutional investor who ended up hiring me as a summer associate. That founder went on his own way to build his startup. And I really wanted to be on the investment side. So I joined Mass Ventures as a summer associate within a number of deals. Then I went to work that one of their portfolio companies called Spiro, where I spent some time with Adam and the rest of the folks down there, which are an awesome team to get more operating experience. And then I joined Accomplice as a MBA associate. I guess to work a few months alongside Jeff and the rest of the team over there. So after that, the span of two years, I was able to speak the language, if you will. I was able to have that operating background, that investment background, be able to source deals, be able to understand what really mattered in venture capital as you're trying to break into that industry. And then the opportunity to join Plug and Play showed up. And Plug and Play is a really interesting place because it has this unique platform that once you realize what venture capital is about, when your venture capital at the earlier stages is about selling money. And so you need to make sure and as more emerging fund managers approach and then there's more funds that keep basically raising more money and everyone comes in here, you need to have a differentiation. If you're selling money, which is a commodity, how do you make yourself different? Plug and Play has a network of 535 corporate partners. Companies like Panasonic, Nintendo, PepsiCo, Progressive, et cetera. All these big folks come to us because they want innovation, which is another way to say that they want an edge over their competition. And we help them by sourcing the latest and greatest products that are out there. When you're able to match an entrepreneur with one of their people at this corporate partnerships at this large incumbents, you're able to help them in a way that you can shorten their sales cycle, you can lower their cost of acquisition, you can effectively provide them with traction and that turns out to be the milestone that they need to achieve whatever comes next. Right. That is fairly unique. And I don't know any other firm that has the network of corporate partners that we do that has to scale that we do. We have offices in China, Japan, Singapore, Indonesia, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Spain, the uk, South Africa, north of Africa. We have a number of new offices we opened recently, Brazil, offices in Canada now and all across the US that level of scale gives us a very differentiated approach when partnering with early stage entrepreneurs. At Plug and Play, I have the good fortune of leading the FinTech, InsurTech, Enterprise and health teams, our investment team. We're close to 24 folks across seven different locations. We do a number of different investments. Our average check size is roughly 150k and we do a number of different investments. Last year we finished the whole organization with the 210 investments. We commonly get mistaken with acceleration programs. We are not one of those folks. We don't take equity. If you leverage our business development programs, you can't really apply to it. It's an invite only program to be in front of everyone that someone within a specific industry. And Plug and Play has the broadest network of corporate partners by industry. That's pretty much it. So hopefully I was able to cover everything from breaking into what's plug employee.
- [08:47]
Joel Palo Thinkle
No, no. Yeah. And I'll help you guide the discussion. So you know, going back just real quick, for some of the audience here and other people that are trying to break into vc, what do you think some of the attributes were that you had to land that first role at Mass Ventures? Because obviously, you know, really at the interview stage, you have to outperform and in the interview to be the top candidate. So what are some things that helped you? It sounded like you had some operational skills and then I'm assuming MIT give you some of the, gave you some of the academic background as far as, you know, the terminology and the buzzwords. But what do you think really helped you to, you know, get pushed over the fence to land the job offer?
- [09:27]
Eugenio Gonzalez
Yeah.
- [09:27]
Joel Palo Thinkle
Was it, was it deals? Was it memos?
- [09:31]
Eugenio Gonzalez
You need to first understand the really well the type of firm that you're interviewing. Right. And so if you're trying to do, you're approaching someone at the growth equity stage and you're just networking with early stage entrepreneurs, that's never going to be a good fit. And so you're just wasting each other's time. Once you realize that you bring something interesting to the table, you have a good network in a school, you're hustling because you're going to all the events, you become their like eyes and ears on the ground and you have a differentiated deal flow than what they have, then it becomes interesting. More often than not, I find myself talking to folks that are thinking about breaking into ventures and trying to create decks and pieces. But when you realize that you're spending on this less time than the average person within venture, what is it that you're going to teach them? Right. So you're showing them that you can do the job eventually or a piece of it. But you're probably not going to have a much more differentiated approach or a more nuanced vision of a specific sector than the folks that do this full time. So you either go really deep, really specialize in something or you bring something to the table that they don't have and that's why they want to bring you in.
- [10:54]
Joel Palo Thinkle
Yeah. So what are some things that people that are not in VC can do to do that? I guess it's, you know, obviously to your point, right. Like the deck or the memo that needs to be super targeted to what the fund is looking for. Right. But you know, I'm sure you've hired a lot of people and looked at talent. What are some things that have really been a value add that was different? Did somebody come up with some type of. Yeah, really cool financial model? I've seen people be super creative where, you know, now you can build these cool analytics and notion tables. Like I've, I saw something recently from a candidate where they actually mapped out a market. But it was cool. It was like a dynamic website where you can like move sliders back and forth. So that was really creative. But you know, what have you seen as far as just hires that don't come from the traditional background of doing the MBA or coming from a banking or PE background. You know, maybe some trends that you've seen as far as just like great candidates.
- [11:56]
Eugenio Gonzalez
I would say that great candidates stand out because of the consistency that they bring to the table. I keep saying the same thing and not everyone listen. The few folks that listen for some reason keep getting VC jobs which is there. It's impossible for someone to get to know you if you don't tell them what you do. And unless you're writing about it, unless you are branding yourself with those deals, unless you're known in that space, it's very difficult to stand out from again, someone else within the industry that's doing this full time. So if I'm a VC and I have to pick between someone that has been two years in the industry, that has already developed a network that works in the Valley, or someone that's fresh out of school, doesn't have the background, then that candidate is obviously a disadvantage. But the beauty of early stage venture capital at least is that you don't have to have a specific background as long as you show to the rest of the folks that you are the right person because you have that specific background, because you're an expert in that field, because you've written extensively about it, because the founders are contacting you. So let me give you an example. I was in the phone recently with two folks fresh out of Yale. They're about to graduate. But these guys have built a good pipeline of Gen C startups and that's the niche that they're tackling. A newsletter, they religiously send it out every week. So there's consistency. They write about a theme or a topic about a specific target that I think it's overlooked by some VCs and it's obviously going to be the future like we don't invest in the company's that are going to be working for or to better say it, I guess we invest in the founders that are going to be working and building the companies of the future. Right. And those guys are sometimes fresh out of school, but it's not going to be the established folks. More often than not those guys have secured their funding, they're going to go to their existing or previous investors and those guys are set. You want to make sure that you get to know the new founders. Right. So those guys found a wedge, are branding themselves as the go to guys. When you want to talk about Gen C founders, they're referring deals already to VCs there. I find myself saying that if you want the job, you need to do the job before. So you do the job before you get the job and that's how you're going to be able to break into venture.
- [14:30]
Joel Palo Thinkle
Yeah, yeah. And a lot of those things you can do without going to Yale, right? You can create a newsletter, you can go to, you know, where do the VCs go? They go to the startup events, right? So you can go to the startup, startup events. You can do your own research and build that proprietary. I know proprietary is such a overused buzzword as well, so I'm kind of.
- [14:52]
Eugenio Gonzalez
Let'S call it a proprietary network, right? Like the fact that you're known within that space, the fact that you can immediately talk to an investor and say, hey, they're looking into enterprise, fintech or health. Oh, here's five companies that you need to look at that. I spoke with the founders last week. These guys are amazing. I hear that they're just, they just got into Y Combinator, like that kind of ability to, to you know, put the dots together and like make everything work easy for them while you're making someone's life easier and then they can see the value of bringing you in, then it's easier to break into that.
- [15:27]
Joel Palo Thinkle
I mean there was a person that has a like 1500 person community based on a certain sector and this person just raised a fund and I'm like, okay, that makes sense. Because they have the, they have the meetups and they have community already and they have a new, you know, I don't know if they have. So I mean it's just, you know, when you see it you're like, okay, you know who else would probably do that? Because they already, they already have all the people at the events, so they have that community. Right? So I think just. And you don't need to have an MBA or go to Yale or Harvard to do that. You know, I mean you could really just do that. As long as you have the Internet, you can do that, you know, so I think that's.
- [16:06]
Eugenio Gonzalez
But people fail on the consistency side, right? Like they didn't wake up to that 15,000 people within fintech community. Like he started building that organically and started meeting and adding value and getting to know entrepreneurs and connecting entrepreneurs to different VCs and he grew that network and now he has his own fund. You don't need to join a firm to break into venture. You can raise your own fund. Right. There's so much capital out there, especially for emerging fund managers that I think it's easy to get started with a micro fund now more than ever.
- [16:37]
Joel Palo Thinkle
Yeah, yeah. You know, when you think about it, when you look at the data, most of the emerging fund managers, their LPs are angels, you know, and that's why I posted recently that, you know, the, you know, the angel investor is also investing in funds because it's almost essentially an index of different, different deals. You know, you can either invest in the S&P 500 or invest in Tesla directly. And if there is a fund, if you're interested in fintech and you don't want to kind of like, you know, deal by deal, try to source them on your own because you don't have the infrastructure or the team, the fund is kind of a great way to meet people, to get the connectivity. And then also if there's co investment rights, you can kind of get both. Right. You can invest in the S&P 500 but then also invest in Tesla as well. Right. So I think there's kind of some interesting optionality with doing both and so that's interesting. What else have you seen as far as talented candidates?
- [17:36]
Eugenio Gonzalez
I don't know. I feel like people often are so focused on breaking into venture that they forget that it is also very important to be a culture fit. And what I mean by that is you really want to get to know the people that you'll be working with. Because this job is 24 7. Like your portfolio doesn't sleep. The requests from everyone keep coming. I wake up texting with founders. I go to bed thinking about decks and fundraising and doing that kind of stuff. So if you're not in it, you don't love the people that you work with it or on it, you're just going to have such a bad time that I think why focus so much on breaking into venture only to like all Right. You got into a fund and then oh my God, this people suck. Or like they're backing deals I have no interest in. Their values are not aligned with me. We do completely different things. Like I only like I appreciate this founders and not this other guys that these guys are backing. So like people don't spend enough time getting to know the other folks that they're going to be working with and you're going to be working with them a lot of hours. So I would say that that's where I would suggest spending some time on.
- [18:48]
Joel Palo Thinkle
Yeah, no, and I mean I would say venture in addition is also a lifestyle. So it's not a 9 to 5 job. And I think if you truly enjoy what you're doing, you're okay. Just responding to an email at. At 6pm 7pm the challenge I think is also having a family that's supportive as well and having that work life harmony as Jeff Bezos says. Right. So we're living in a world where that just kind of blends together and as long as you can kind of balance that with the lifestyle because it is demanding, especially at a firm like Plug and Play, that's global, you probably support founders all over the world. So it's super demanding and interactive where you're kind of supporting them. So it's not for the people that are looking for a 9 to 5, I would say. Right. I mean, but it's really part of your lifestyle. You know, let's double click a little more on just the legal industry. And I think there's other cascading trends with like the great resignation. Right. People are quitting their jobs, they want to do what's interesting to them. Obviously you wanted to do something that was, that was exciting and meaningful to you. But you know, the legal professionals that are, that are kind of not happy or overwhelmed, you know, what do you see them pivoting to? Do you see them pivoting to like joining a big company or maybe joining a venture fund as like their compliance officer? I guess. What have you kind of seen with like that career? And I have some cousins that are in the legal space too, so I can share what they've done too.
- [20:17]
Eugenio Gonzalez
Yeah. I don't know. To be honest, I feel like everyone that started as a lawyer, most of my friends are no longer lawyers. They've been in the service industry. It's a tough one. Yeah, it's a, it's a very sure way to create wealth. But it's a very linear path, as I said.
- [20:34]
Joel Palo Thinkle
Yeah.
- [20:35]
Eugenio Gonzalez
After you've seen that Amount of effort being put into something that doesn't, no matter how many hours you put into it, Whether it's a $200 billion transaction or a 200k deal, the amount of upside is the same. Most of the people that I went to law school with are becoming founders and they're starting their own ventures, whether it's on, I don't know, restaurant side of things, or they're building their own startups, technology startups. That's funny enough. That's why I'm seeing. But, yeah, I don't know. Legal professionals are. Yeah, they're well paid, but somewhat exploited, I guess. And it's a interesting industry where not a lot of change happens. If you've seen what happened with Atrium. Yes. And just in Khan's take on building a new law firm from the ground up based on technology that didn't go so well, there's a few reasons why professional services don't really scale and why the lawyers don't want to have bots combing through their contracts. And you want to be sure that you're paying attention to the minutiae because that's what you're paying for and that's where your liability comes from.
- [21:49]
Joel Palo Thinkle
Yeah, no, it's really helpful. I mean, look, I don't think it's just the legal industry. It's every industry. I mean, I worked in, I was in tech and then I pivoted into product management first. And it's the same thing. It's a, you know, at some point you hit a ceiling as far as the income you make. I would say, and this is me just going on a limb, but I would say product management, the hours are definitely probably better than the law industry because, you know, most people get done at 6pm Maybe you have a release or something you have to work on that might take you into the weekend, but the lifestyle is pretty good as a product manager and you can move up and be a director of product ahead of product, but at some point there's a maximum salary that even the biggest, hottest fintech firms will pay. And then that could be kind of frustrating. And then what happens, right? You try to do side gigs, right? People are trying to do side hustles where maybe they teach somewhere or they launch maybe an app that generates revenue on the side. But again, you're balancing that with the limited amount of hours in the day. So you're selling your time for money, but there's only a limited amount of time and there's a ceiling for like, what that hourly rate could be. So when you model that out, it's a finite number, which could be not as attractive to a lot of people. But what are some other trends that you're seeing just with friends that are not in the legal space, that work in tech? I mean, you have all these founders and friends that are working at big companies. Are you seeing people, especially with the pandemic and with the great resignation, are you seeing a lot of people just leave their jobs and try to build something or build a blog or a coaching business or something like that?
- [23:31]
Eugenio Gonzalez
I think that now more than ever, with so much capital on the sidelines and just waiting to deploy so much dry powder, it's never been a better time to actually become a founder. I get why venture capital is sexy in a way, but I don't understand why people don't want to become founders themselves. Most of the folks I see that are living big tech or any other sort of job are becoming like if you've had a few years of experience of working on a firm or a company and you know how things work, what doesn't work, what the needs are, why those companies, like no organization is perfect by any means. But if you think that you can tackle something, that you have a unique idea that you can now building a product, a technology product that's never been easier, hosting it on aws, easier than ever, like launching startups, I would say that a lot of people are doing it. Instead of becoming someone else's employee, why not be your own boss and have so much equity and stake in it that you can actually create meaningful generational wealth for you and your family? That's the kind of thing that I'm seeing a lot of people are, are doing it, which I think it's interesting. I don't know how it's going to end. I think everyone likes to be an entrepreneur when, when it's, you know, 2021 and there's so much capital going to this year, we don't know March of 2020, everyone was very happy about being an employee and knowing where your next paycheck is going to come from.
- [25:05]
Joel Palo Thinkle
Yeah.
- [25:06]
Eugenio Gonzalez
So we have that sort of thing where over the past 10 years, I think the market has been very generous, the money printing has been very generous as well. And in a bull run, everyone wants to be an entrepreneur in a bear market. TBD. Sure.
- [25:21]
Joel Palo Thinkle
I mean, look, I mean in 2020, in the peak of the pandemic, I mean, there's so many exits. Right. Because of the printing of the money and then just the opportunity that was there with the markets, even though there was a pandemic. So I think it did stimulate people doing things more virtually, being more lean. And some people are just not ever going to go back to the office. So that provides opportunity for people to build more businesses. Just completely remote. Remote first. Have you seen any founders that came in as an entry point into plug and Play? That started out as a side hustle, because I think a lot of these businesses too, you could launch an app or a platform slowly and probably use your income to fund it in the beginning and bootstrap it. So I don't know if you've ever seen that or any success stories.
- [26:11]
Eugenio Gonzalez
I don't think I have, actually. And the reason I think it's fairly common within venture capital is you don't want to see someone that is half.
- [26:20]
Joel Palo Thinkle
In, half out, halfway in. Yep.
- [26:22]
Eugenio Gonzalez
You're either all in or you're all out. And we don't back founders or like, have a side gig. And they're not like, we do this full time. We expect the founders to be doing it full time at some point. I think it's more of a friends and family round where you're like, hey, I want to raise maybe a few hundred K to figure out if I can launch this and do it full time and if we get traction, I'll leave my job. But at the stage where we're coming in and investing, ideally, founders already have a product and we can actually give them unfair advantage through the network of our partners. But I don't. To your point, I don't really see a lot of those folks.
- [27:09]
Joel Palo Thinkle
Yeah, one of my favorite stories, I think it was the founder of Okta. There's a blog about this, but he, he put together a pitch deck for his wife and pretty much. And it was a really thoughtful pitch deck, though, because he modeled out like, hey, you know what? I think he worked at Salesforce, but he's like, look, here's what I think. I think I can build this business. And as we know, I think Okta is like, I think Okta had a massive exit, but they, they have Okta Ventures now as well. So Okta actually has a corporate vc, but I think what he did initially was he was like, look, these are my options. You know, like, the economy is really bad, so I'm either going to get laid off, but if I start this company, maybe the company doesn't work out. I can still go to Salesforce and work at a big company because I do have those transferable skills. But, you know, There's a really unique opportunity. So I think also weighing out the outcomes, I think, to be honest, in some instances it's just as risky to work for a company because you could get laid off and things could happen, you know, and I don't know if this is super provocative, but it could be just as risky to start a business and, and go through the uncertainty of that versus being at a company where they are having layoffs and there's uncertainty as well. So I think if you're in that situation and you have some type of unique solution to a problem, then there's some product market fit. I think the risk at the end of the day makes sense. And I was always afraid of getting laid off at some point, even when I was at big companies. So that was something that I always thought about too. So I'm not sure what other people think, but that was just, you know, looking back, I'm like, look, it's just as risky, you know, the markets, people, people, you know, change, organizations change, there's reorgs. So that's definitely a trend that I've seen. So, you know, switching gears, I'd love to dive a little deeper into, into your thesis, you know, kind of what you, what you look for in founders, the founders that, that do get accepted into your program. Because it sounds like it's invite only. What are some things that you look for in founders? Obviously you do have a thesis and a sector focus, but do you mind sharing a little bit of that and kind of how you look into the sourcing process?
- [29:29]
Eugenio Gonzalez
Sure. So when it comes to assessing founders, a few of the traits that we look for are do they have a unique take on one of the markets that we're pretty knowledgeable of. So we work very closely with our corporate partners. That gives us a unique ability to understand what the trends are in the market, and we leverage those insights to make better investment decisions. But unique founders have this insight into a market and how it's either going to change or evolve. And we like being told that we're wrong, especially when there's a big shift in the market. But we love founders, repeated founders that have this ability to explain to you why you're wrong. And more importantly, I think that this is something that gets overlooked is as a founder, you need to be very skilled at selling. Whether it's that you're selling to customers, you're selling to investors so that they'll invest in you, or that you're selling your company to employees, selling the dream of why they should join you. That is some of the things that we look for. So that unique insight, the repeated experience of being a founder and then that unique ability to sell.
- [30:51]
Joel Palo Thinkle
Yeah. Similar to the founder of Okta and also Marc Benioff. A lot of those founders that have, you know, launch very successful cloud businesses have been in industry for a long time, you know, and you talk about that as well. Have you seen a lot of the entrepreneurs coming in become like very seasoned technologists that have that huge industry experience? Because I feel like that ties also into what you're saying as well, really knowing the market.
- [31:16]
Eugenio Gonzalez
Yeah, it's always. Well when you're, when you have that season experience. Right. It's easy to miss on first time founders. We make sure that we're not that we put our biases in check when it comes to dealing with folks that have not had that previous exit or a successful exit, but we do want to see that someone has the ability to materialize any other things that we said. If you're good at selling, which is the skill set that I recommend, especially if you want to break into venture, you also want to be good at selling because you're going to be on the phone a lot, you're going to be competing for deals and you want to make sure that you're selling your firm appropriately to win those deals. The founders are able to materialize the next round of funding because they're able to sell properly to investors. The founders that have the ability to sell their company, meaning that they can attract the best talent that's out there. The founders that are able to sell to customers and attract the recurring dollars or the money that really matters, which is not from VCs, is actually from customers. That, that I think is no matter where at what state you are, you need to work on it. And if you don't have the ability to do all three of those, quickly identify where your gaps are and bring in someone that complements that skill set.
- [32:37]
Joel Palo Thinkle
Yeah, no, that's helpful. It looks like a question popped up here. Farooq, you want to ask that question?
- [32:47]
Eugenio Gonzalez
Sure.
- [32:48]
C
Hi.
- [32:49]
D
Thanks for being on here and sharing your experiences. I just wanted to maybe pose a question with regards to your MBA experience in terms of how it helped you get into a VC role and were you involved in the VC startup clubs or did the curriculum have technical details about venture capital or any sort of modeling related nuance for really early stage companies where sort of multiples don't really apply, you know, have to be applied very, you know, on a deal by deal basis?
- [33:17]
Joel Palo Thinkle
Yeah.
- [33:18]
Eugenio Gonzalez
Yeah, happy to. Thanks for that question. So at the MBA level, I think it gives you the ability, not a particular skill set that you won't be able to learn anywhere or even on YouTube, but the ability to pause and think critically about what you want to do in the future and then spend some time getting to develop a network in an area that you don't have. So the way that I leveraged the MBA program was to be able to work with a startup, to be able to get in front of other investors. Obviously took all the venture capital classes that I could take, funny enough. The best one, I would say that was not entirely related to venture capital, but was taught by an executive in residence at General Catalyst who had sold his company previously. I was a class in sales, and that was a pretty interesting one as you start leveraging all these things that we just talked about. But you get to develop an interesting network through the program. Fortunately, at mit, we had the good fortune of seeing a great deal of speakers. We saw Jeff Fagnan from Accomplice come in, and I approached him after a class, and I said, hey, we'd love to work with you if. If there's anything that I can do at the firm. And I just. He put me in touch with Sarah Downey. There was. We used to be an operating partner. Those kind of opportunities happen because you're there. We had. I joined the clubs, I think, as I said before, I'm originally from Chile. Latins don't really pay too much attention to clubs. To my detriment. I realized that Americans tend to pay a lot of attention to clubs. So I joined fairly late to the game to all the different clubs. Did join the VCP club. I was a VP of something. I organized a few tours of different firms to, again, broaden your network, get to know the different players. Most of them, once you're doing them, those tours, it's great, but it's not. I've never seen someone getting like, oh, here's your resume. Please hire me. And they're like, yeah, on the spot, you got the job. Rarely happens, if not ever, but it's a great way for you to start developing that network. And I think that the one takeaway is I zeroed in on the one industry that I wanted to break into, and I stopped hedging anything else. I didn't go into consulting. I didn't want to go into big tech. I knew exactly when I wanted to go and what I needed to do to get there. And I did four internships at the program, whereas the majority of the folks would just have a summer internship. I had worked at a startup before I joined a venture firm, then I joined another startup before I joined another venture firm. So I did four internships by the time the two years had passed. And that ties back to what I said, that you can stop, you can think about what you need to do and then you have the time to do it.
- [36:23]
Joel Palo Thinkle
Yeah, no, it's helpful. Guys. Feel free to chime in if you have questions. I'll try to call it out. I'd love to dive in a little deeper, Eugenio, on just the trends that you're seeing in intro tech and some of the other sectors that you're focusing on, maybe at a macro level. And what are you seeing the companies doing that are innovating the most in Intro Tech?
- [36:47]
Eugenio Gonzalez
Wow, that's funny because Insurtech is such a broad concept. It is where I sit, but from the outside it feels fairly narrow just as a sector within fintech. So I'll start with what I like about it. So the first thing is insurance is a huge industry. So it's $5.8 trillion in gross written premiums a year and it touches everything that we do, right? So from the moment that we buy our first car or that we rent our apartments, buy a home, when you have kids, first job, everything that we do is touched by insurance. So there is so much to do or so many things that need there's room for improvement. If you look at the NPS score of the insurance companies, it is pretty bad across most of the lines of business. I think healthcare or health insurance has the lowest one, which is like 19% on an NPS score. That gives you a sense of how much room for improvement is within the industry, given that it's so important. As we established before, there's a ton of innovation happening at every single point across the whole value chain of insurance across different stages as risk evolves and new things happen. Like you have Covid, there's a ton of things happening within healthcare. When you see that there's a huge massive shift of how people are working from home, then homeowners insurance or renters insurance gets a lot more interesting how just lives are changing. That definitely affects the whole insurance industry. Leveraging new sources of data, we're seeing with climate change how much of an impact it has on the severity and frequency of different events. So you went from having a drought in California to then having storms and high heat in north of Canada, record heat that hadn't been recorded in 100 years to then, floods everywhere, hurricanes devastating cities, that kind of thing is creating a massive shift on the property and casualty industry. When you look at what is happening with COVID what happened with fertility rates, mortality rates, people within a recession, people tend to have less kids. How is that impacting life insurance companies? How that's impacting asset managers which are part of life insurance companies. With interest rates being so low and now the Fed wanting to raise interest rates, how that affects the whole ecosystem of money is also very interesting. So again to us, and I can ramble about this for hours, the whole insurance ecosystem is so broad and changing so rapidly. That's always an interesting place to start investing and keep investing in.
- [39:39]
Joel Palo Thinkle
Yeah, I think also just new types of businesses. Right. So I mean on demand, you know, cloud kitchens, I mean there's, there's food safety. I mean there's new businesses that I think have opened with the pandemic that all probably need some type of product that wasn't there before. So I think that also has a gap and maybe something that isn't there yet. I mean there's a business that I saw recently where people are just on demand delivering stuff to try out, whether it's in the clothing industry or retail. And those products all need to be insured. So I think it also opens up new creative ways of providing some type of policy for that software. I mean, have you seen anything. Are there innovations in just policy generation being more dynamic using data? Cause that could probably be something that. Cause the legacy way is obviously you do a credit score and you answer some questions. But you know, I'm wondering if there's opportunities to be able to, to issue policies more dynamically with maybe people's social profile or anything like that. I guess the tech enablement of some of the legacy workflows, I can imagine a lot of that is getting automated.
- [40:52]
Eugenio Gonzalez
Yeah, there's a lot of discussion whether or not you can leverage social profiles to better on the right people. I don't know. I think that there's a huge wave to your point on how to provide embedded insurance solutions. So if you're a delivery person, how you protect or cover that risk, if you are buying something online, if you're returning it, that is a huge cost on the E commerce platform. How do you protect yourself against that? To the point that people are just basically allowing folks to keep the products that they purchased, which is kind of crazy, it's creating so much waste. But then there's a new form of risk that's evolving there that needs to be protected for that downside or hedged against. So yeah, interesting. There's no shortage of new things that are happening in the industry and new products that are being catered and tailored to the needs of how different risk sets are evolving. But we see a lot of one area that we love investing in is new products because as you mentioned, with new platforms, with new ways of doing things, whether it's dark kitchens, cloud kitchens, whether it's the gig economy, whether it's the creator economy, we love making sure that everyone is sort of protected from the risks that they have in their day to day. And that is an opportunity to build new insurance products.
- [42:18]
Joel Palo Thinkle
Yeah. Another thing I'm thinking about, when you think about products and climate change, you know, there could probably be a lot of interesting sensors that can give real time data and because a lot of times when data comes in, it's a data feed. Right. So it's ingested overnight because there's so much data. But if you've got sensors that are kind of dynamically tracking different, you know, different characteristics that can give you kind of more real time data as well, you know, to kind of give a policy in real time. But, but thanks for correcting that. So it sounds like the terminology is embedded insurance. So that's kind of inte it into the workflows more seamlessly. So that's good to be aware of that. So I appreciate that. And then it looks like Wendy's got a question. And Wendy, feel free to chime in, but you're looking for just some advice on building a better investment thesis. So Wendy's actually at Wharton right now and she's in the process of kind of just building her thesis. So any tips that she should. I think the consistency one was a really good thing. So I think possibly publishing some content around a certain sector and just getting that out I think is one thing. But any other tips you have as far as just the thought process and the mental models on building an investment thesis?
- [43:35]
Eugenio Gonzalez
Yeah, I would say first and foremost congrats on your mba, Wendy. Amazing school being at Wharton, I would say, to add to what you just said, Joel, spend a lot of time in a specific niche or zone where you can actually build a differentiated knowledge in that space and to get to know the entrepreneurs in that space. Otherwise, as I said before, you're never going to out compete someone that's already in that industry doing this full time. It's super hard to develop that level of knowledge if you're not actually spending more time in it. But once you Pick a niche, and you actually get to talk to a lot of folks in that niche. You can actually become an expert more so than the rest of the people that are traditionally spending time in the venture industry.
- [44:25]
Joel Palo Thinkle
Yeah, that was really helpful. Great. Any other questions, guys? All right, well, feel free to chime in if you guys have any questions while they're thinking of maybe their last one or two questions. I always ask this, Eugenio, any, any life advice that you have to share. You shared a lot of really helpful nuggets, but anything that you want to pass on to us, maybe from a mentor or friend or family member, doesn't have to be about getting into vc, you know? So any, any piece of wisdom that, that you maybe share with your, your friends and family?
- [44:58]
Eugenio Gonzalez
No, I, I, I would say that I think, like, mentors are important, but I feel like people put way too much weight on them. It's just there's so much information available, so many good opportunities to learn from. YouTube is arguably the best school that's out there, and people wait. I don't like the concept of waiting to break into venture, to becoming a vc. Back to what we spoke before, you can actually start doing it. You can start angel investing in crowdfunding platforms. You can start doing your own things before even breaking into a firm. What I would hate is for people to miss out on their opportunity of being an investor and creating that level of wealth and have the leverage that we spoke about and having an impact on all of these because they're waiting for mentors because they told them not to do stuff or first you needed to get a job. What I've learned is you don't need to, you shouldn't wait on something to actually go do it. And back to what we said before, do the job before you get the job. Don't wait on someone to give you an opportunity to do the job before you can become a vc.
- [46:12]
Joel Palo Thinkle
Yeah, no, that's super helpful advice, and that's also what helped me. It looks like. You got a question? You got a second for maybe one more question, Eugenio?
- [46:20]
Eugenio Gonzalez
Yeah, sure thing.
- [46:21]
Joel Palo Thinkle
Great. So, Manveer, you want to shout out your, your question here?
- [46:25]
C
Yeah, I can share it out loud. Hi, good afternoon. Thank you for your time. My question is to touch base on something you mentioned a little bit earlier in the conversation in regards to doing the job. For someone that's trying to come in at the analyst level, what would you say are some things they can do to showcase that they're doing the job? Obviously, it'll be different from someone at the partner or principal level. So what are some the key examples that someone could do at the analyst level to showcase that they're trying to do that before applying for a position?
- [46:58]
Eugenio Gonzalez
So at the analyst level, I don't expect people to come in and know more than there are other folks at the firm, but I do expect to see a level of passion and interest and ideally a level of insight that is uncommon. So what I mean by this is I can pretty much teach everyone to do the job that we do. What I can never teach to someone is to wake up on a Saturday morning and listen to a podcast about investing. Or are you spending your evenings reading about this? Are you following the right people on Twitter? Can we have a conversation out of the blue that's interesting and nuanced about this sector because you've spent hours reading about it, or you're listening to the latest podcast, or you got excited because you found out an interesting substack of this very niche market segment that you're passionate about? That's the kind of thing that I think makes an analyst stand out from the crowd, even though you might not have the background, even though you might not have the necessary experience. But I would say one of the most prominent analysts that we just hired is a guy that comes from a cooking background. He was a chef. We love his passion for getting to learn more and more about it. I don't have to tell him to do things. He's already out competing the rest of his analyst class because he wakes up every day thinking about this. He has the sourcing record for companies. He's doing everything where you're not able to measure him on, like, oh, he went to Yale, he went to this school. But he's outperforming everyone on the amount of passion that he's putting, the amount of companies that he's sourcing, the amount of insights, the amount of presentations, the amount of things that he's doing to the point that I feel like he's going to burn out soon. So that's one of the things that we try to protect him from. But again, I can't teach him that. That's what he brings to the table, and that's the kind of thing that we love hiring for.
- [48:59]
C
Got it. Thank you for that clarification. And just one brief follow up. Was that apparent? Was his passion apparent in the resume or was it apparent in the interview process?
- [49:10]
Eugenio Gonzalez
Good question. It's only in the interview process. There's a few ways that you can highlight it. Obviously, and we took a deliberate approach of interviewing someone that apparently didn't come from a venture background, but he had shown in his resume that he had enough entrepreneurial spirit that we could actually have an interesting conversation. And then when you talk to him, he exudes this energy that he wants to do more and that he's passionate about it and that he's eager to meet more entrepreneurs, that he wants to learn more about this space, that if he's not knowledgeable about something that he'll go and spend hours research. It didn't come from, as I said, comes from a had a chef experience and cooking background. Is now doing presentations and trends, presentations on distributed insurance, for instance.
- [50:02]
C
Thank you.
- [50:03]
Eugenio Gonzalez
Sure.
- [50:04]
Joel Palo Thinkle
Well, this is great. Thanks so much, Eugenio. And what's the best way for people to get a hold of you?
- [50:11]
Eugenio Gonzalez
LinkedIn, LinkedIn, Twitter. And my email is eugenionptc.com so feel free to send me an email. Great.
- [50:20]
Joel Palo Thinkle
All right. Well, hey, thanks so much, Eugenio. I'll let you get back to it. And excited to collaborate.
- [50:29]
Eugenio Gonzalez
Sam.