Footwork

“You know, in a strange way, I really like the constraint of our fund size. I actually think it forces us to make better decisions. And I think there's a laziness and a lack of great decision making that can come from having a bigger fund in the same way that i…”

“We don't think that the foundational model investments that, for example, they're raising hundreds of millions of dollars in a seed make any sense. They don't make sense for sure for our firm, but we don't think they actually make much sense for the big funds …”

“I've always been a sort of traction, early signs of product market fit first investor. Then people, and then market.”

“At Footwork we do, we only lead rounds, we only do early stage we lead seeds and A's. So we've made 11 investments so far. We've done five series A's and six seeds. I think our average initial check is about four and a half million, and the range has been two …”

“I weight market third on the three that you asked me about because I just think it's the hardest one to assess and predict for myself, and I think when you look at the investments you just described and some of the very great ones, that was true for those inve…”

“And so I have been sucked in and seduced by founders that can tell a great story, that are great in a handful of one hour sessions and in person for the first time, who feel like they're magnets for talent, who know their business inside and out, it seems, and…”

“And I've gone back to try to study this, like, if I'm thinking about it that evening, if I'm reaching out to people to sort of suss it out better, and you know, I'm just researching on my own about it, you know, hours after the first meeting, there's something…”

“One of us has to be a four. One of us has to be strongly supportive to make an investment. And the other cannot be a one strongly unsupportive.”

“We actually don't even do attribution at the firm. We've never talked about which are Mike's investments versus my investments.”

“Well, look, we actually, for the first year after we invest, both go to all the board meetings together.”

“We had about four hundred and fifty million of commitments for a hundred and fifty million dollar fund. And we ended up raising one hundred and seventy five million”

“We don't have a single LP who's more than 20% of our fund and I think in general we thought we don't want one, two, three LPs having the majority of our fund and having therefore outsized control in our thinking or our decision making in some way.”

“We wanted some diversity, and I think we have about 15 institutional LPs, we have six university endowments you know, I think Three other foundations. So we're a little bit weighted towards endowments and foundations, but we have a bunch of fund of funds, and …”

“We had two slides in our fund one fundraising deck, which actually, sadly, we barely got to present. We only had it properly designed in February of, and by then we already had the whole fund committed.”

“We had LPs who did, I don't know, 30, 40 references that we heard about on, on us each.”

“The single metric that we're focused on there is, are we spending more than 50% of our time on meeting new companies and sourcing new investments? I firmly believe you have to spend the majority of your time on those things. To be able to find the next great o…”

“When you only make a handful of investments every year, when each one really matters to you because you're leading those rounds, you can deliver that type of really personalized support, and that's So much of why we've built this firm.”

“I have to believe in my bones when we make an investment decision that this is something I really want to spend time on. Perhaps it used to be much more just about the capital and the economics, and now it's about both that and time.”

“I think it was doing our pro-rata In companies that quickly raised another round at a huge step up from where we first invested. Fundamentally, there was very little de-risked, and we saw this happen where a company had raised a series A from us, and two month…”

“Our total fund size is about a hundred and seventy five million, right? We think we'll make about 20 investments out of that fund, an average check of four to five million dollars, so let's call it sort of 80 to a hundred million dollars on initial investments…”

“We perhaps add one or two equal general partners to our group. Who are re-founders and co-owners of the firm with Mike and me”

“It's always a question, not just what you've done as far as dollars invested, but why someone likes a deal. It really speaks to us about what makes this manager different, how they think of a deal, how they think of the space. It's in those kinds of questions …”

“That culminated in our decision last fall to go build Footwork together, to start to speak to limited partners, and then in January of 2021, Mike left Stitch Fix, and in April we closed our first fund with one hundred and seventy five million in commitments an…”

“And so the way we work organically is one of us will take the board seat and the other one will be a board observer.”

“When you're a small firm, you can't do everything in today's ecosystem. And so you have to decide where you want to spend time. And so the principle behind being a thesis driven specialist is finding swim lanes where we go deep in certain areas where we look a…”

“And with Via, the product had launched just over a year ago. The business is already at hundreds of customers, millions in annual recurring revenue. It's barely spent any capital and it's in a space of SMS based marketing and customer support in this mobile co…”

“And so when we will expand our partnership one day, we hope to bring in folks at the same equal level and to give them the platform of our firm as a result.”

“On a good day, I think venture firms on their best day Our golf teams, like individuals shooting their best score, their lowest score, and adding them up at the end. We really think about our team and our approach more like a basketball team or a soccer team, …”

“We felt very fortunate to be in a position in early March of being, call it, two X oversubscribed our target.”

“Most of the LPs we did not meet in person during this process”

“Our approach ended up being a bit different where we said, this is the fund that we want to raise. And ideally we'd want to do it and be one and done on, on a close so that we can figure out what all the different puzzle pieces of LP construction look like and…”