The Exchanges

Q And is Kitchen Bowl your first syndicate raise?

A No, I've done, I've done, uh, five syndicates now, and, um, I'm learning a lot. You know, it's a, it's a new tool. It's a new platform. Um, and I'm trying to think about, you know, partly I'm doing it because I want to, I want to see how it works. Um, uh, for full disclosure, I am an investor in AngelList. And, um, so for me, I'm not sure I think there's some really great benefits. Uh, for one thing, it's, uh, it's a bit of, uh, marketing, quite frankly. I have several thousand followers on AngelList, so if I put a deal up, uh, then people at least take notice of what this company is and what they do. Absolutely. And that can be very good for the company. The other thing that was interesting in this last deal that I hadn't necessarily expected, but refers to a point I made earlier, is that Several VCs saw that we were doing the syndicate, contacted the company and said, when you're doing your next round, we'd be interested in talking to you. So it actually made, you put them on the radar screen for future rounds of funding, which I thought was a nice benefit too.

AI assessment note: “No, I've done, I've done, uh, five syndicates now”

Q And once invested in the startup, what, what's your role? How active are you, and what services can VCs in general bring to a startup?

A Yeah, I think, in general, VCs overvalue their role, and their value add, and, um, but having said that, I think the entrepreneur often makes the mistake of assuming all VCs are the same. Um, you know, very clearly, Rolodex is important, and making introductions, whether it's for, uh, sales, whether it's for hiring, whether it's for M&A, whether it's for mentoring, whether it's for advisory boards, what have you, is important. Opening doors is important. And that's clearly something the VC can do. But the VC or the entrepreneur or the investor, this is a relationship. And I don't think That most entrepreneurs spend enough time, uh, if you really, really are looking for value add, look for someone you can confide in, someone you can talk to, someone you can bounce ideas off of. Being a CEO can be a pretty lonely place, and so I hope the value add that I can provide is to be that person that they can call at any time, even if it's just like, I'm just kind of struggling with this idea, or this moment, or this Direction. Can you talk about it? And I hope, I hope I can do that for them. And then finally, I think living in Seattle, I live between Seattle and San Francisco, but living in Seattle, I think hopefully I can offer them a geography advantage knowing both what's happening competitively here, but also if they want to meet the companies up here or meet people up here, I can he…

AI assessment note: “I hope the value add that I can provide is to be that person”

Q And once invested in the startup, what, what's your role? How active are you, and what services can VCs in general bring to a startup?

A Yeah, I think, in general, VCs overvalue their role, and their value add, and, um, but having said that, I think the entrepreneur often makes the mistake of assuming all VCs are the same. Um, you know, very clearly, Rolodex is important, and making introductions, whether it's for, uh, sales, whether it's for hiring, whether it's for M&A, whether it's for mentoring, whether it's for advisory boards, what have you, is important. Opening doors is important. And that's clearly something the VC can do. But the VC or the entrepreneur or the investor, this is a relationship. And I don't think That most entrepreneurs spend enough time, uh, if you really, really are looking for value add, look for someone you can confide in, someone you can talk to, someone you can bounce ideas off of. Being a CEO can be a pretty lonely place, and so I hope the value add that I can provide is to be that person that they can call at any time, even if it's just like, I'm just kind of struggling with this idea, or this moment, or this Direction. Can you talk about it? And I hope, I hope I can do that for them. And then finally, I think living in Seattle, I live between Seattle and San Francisco, but living in Seattle, I think hopefully I can offer them a geography advantage knowing both what's happening competitively here, but also if they want to meet the companies up here or meet people up here, I can he…

AI assessment note: “making introductions, whether it's for, uh, sales, whether it's for hiring”

Q And what would you say was your most valuable takeaway from working at Microsoft?

A Gosh, I mean, I, it was such a special time. I loved, back then, it really taught me about hiring people that are way smarter than yourself. It taught me about tenacity. It taught me about, um, the possibilities. Like, we believe, we drink the cooler. It was such a great time. We truly thought we're changing the world. And when you can get that combination of Energetic forces around Bill's statement then was, uh, PC on every desk, and that was our mission, and he's such an unbelievable leader, truly one of the smartest people I've ever been around. Um, for me it was, it was getting up every day, so super psyched about what we were working on, feeling that we were, uh, working on something bigger than ourselves, and that's, that's hard to find.

AI assessment note: “it really taught me about hiring people that are way smarter than yourself.”

Q Absolutely. And, and then moving on to angel list syndicates. Recently, you have started your own angel list syndicate, which, um, leads me to ask, how do you feel this is going to change the funding environment? And does it present a challenge to the more traditional VC model?

A Gosh, the world is changing so rapidly and so quickly. It absolutely is changing, and it's, I mean, you can see the numbers. I don't, I don't have the exact numbers to tell me, but there used to be close to 3000 major venture funds, and today that's in the hundreds. It's certainly below a thousand. And partly, it's because the sources of investment dollars have become much broader, whether it's international, whether it's angels, whether it's crowdsource, as AngelList is, whether it's hedge funds, right? The laws have changed around this. So it's pretty exciting from that perspective, and it should be, I mean, the big bet is it should be a great boom to entrepreneurialism and start-ups. Uh, but it absolutely is changing, uh, the way the ventures folks are approaching these things. Often, in fact, I was just having this conversation yesterday. AngelList raised money, right?

AI assessment note: “it absolutely is changing, uh, the way the ventures folks are approaching these things.”

Q And what would you say was your most valuable takeaway from working at Microsoft?

A Gosh, I mean, I, it was such a special time. I loved, back then, it really taught me about hiring people that are way smarter than yourself. It taught me about tenacity. It taught me about, um, the possibilities. Like, we believe, we drink the cooler. It was such a great time. We truly thought we're changing the world. And when you can get that combination of Energetic forces around Bill's statement then was, uh, PC on every desk, and that was our mission, and he's such an unbelievable leader, truly one of the smartest people I've ever been around. Um, for me it was, it was getting up every day, so super psyched about what we were working on, feeling that we were, uh, working on something bigger than ourselves, and that's, that's hard to find.

AI assessment note: “it really taught me about hiring people that are way smarter than yourself”