Phin Barnes
Co-Founder & Managing Partner, The General Partnership. On 2 shows, 4 appearances. The Shows tab opens the full record on each.
investorfounderoperator@phineasb ↗LinkedIn ↗thegp.com ↗
He co-founded The General Partnership, an early-stage venture capital firm that combines equity investment with embedded operational support. Before founding TheGP, he spent over a decade as a partner at First Round Capital, leading investments in companies such as Notion, Blue Apron, and Clover Health.
2shows
4appearances
47statements
2resolved
2supported
0contradicted
100%fully supported
33said about them ↓ Everything Phin Barnes said on any show that made the record, most notable first. Each card names its show and opens the statement there.
Barnes: Great Founders Need Help, But Not From VCs
“Every great founder needs help. They just don't need it from VCs.”
Barnes: Traditional VC Fee and Carry Model Fails for Platform Services
“Then the fee and carry model doesn't work because those services show up as a cost center on the statement, the cash flow statement of the VC firm itself.”
Barnes: VCs Losing Deals to Mega Funds Have a Product Problem
“And so when I hear people say that, I think you have a product problem. And if you can't convince a founder that partnering with you is what's best for their business in the face of your competition, You need to do something different.”
Barnes: Traditional VC Technical Diligence Is an Ineffective Game of Telephone
“The traditional process of understanding what a founder is doing technically is as a VC, that's not technical. You sit in that room, you do your best to understand, you reach out to someone who is technical, you provide some bastardized description of what tha…”
Phin Barnes: Saying startup ideas don't matter drives me crazy
“I think recently when I hear people say ideas don't matter, it just drives me crazy. Like the idea is the most valuable thing you have when you start, and the best ones are the result of a tremendous amount of work and effort, experience, insight. They're uniq…”
Phin Barnes: VC Pattern Recognition Is Just Intellectual Laziness
“I think pattern recognition is another name for intellectual laziness, right?”
Barnes: TheGP Earns Equity for Operator Services Instead of Fee Funding
“And we can do that because our business model means that, that, that work is a revenue center for the firm rather than a cost center, because we are in equity for doing that work.”
Barnes: Capital Efficiency Matters Far More Than Theoretical TAM for Early VCs
“I think for early stage investors, It matters much less that there's a billion dollar opportunity in a market. There's a TAM that, you know, you can back your way into that suggests that there's, you know, tens of billions to be captured and you can rationaliz…”
Barnes: Founder Value Creation Is a Multiplication Problem, Not Addition
“And I think in that case, the quality of that founder, the value they will create is a multiplication problem, not an addition problem. And so if you have a zero anywhere in a multiplication problem, the value is zero.”
Phin Barnes: Entry Price Matters Even in Outlier Investments Like Uber
“The basic math is even if you invest in Uber at a five million dollar post versus a fifteen million dollar post, the return that you generate is three X, like the basic math still holds. And so while it's an Epic investment, if you invested in a fifteen millio…”
Phin Barnes: Startups With Early Diversity Debt Rarely Achieve Diversity at Scale
“I think that burden quickly becomes untenable for the vast majority of people, and it becomes unlikely that that company will ever achieve diversity between 10 people and a hundred or 200 or 500 people”
Phin Barnes: Retaining Underrepresented Talent Is Exponentially Harder Than Recruiting Them
“At the same time, retaining them, because of the DNA of those businesses, because of the cultures that have been established, is a whole nother challenge, which is exponentially harder than recruiting them in the first place.”
Phin Barnes: Most Top Venture Outcomes Next Decade Will Have Diverse Founders
“For me, when I think about the next 10 years and the five to seven massive venture outcomes, right, so these are the Facebooks, the Ubers, the Airbnbs of the venture industry, my belief is that of those five to seven, somewhere between four and seven of them a…”
Barnes: Professionals Should Seek Work-Life Integration Over Work-Life Balance
“Work-life balance, I think is not the right model. Like, I think you want a life that you're proud of. I think you want work that you're proud of that weaves into your dinner conversations with your family”
Barnes: TheGP Will Intentionally Limit Fund and Portfolio Scaling
“Our goal is not to scale. Our goal is to maximize quality of service delivery and impact on a smaller number of super high quality companies.”
Barnes: Raising Too Much Early Capital Creates Adverse Cultural Effects
“And I think there's adverse effects in terms of the culture at the business, if you raise too much”
Barnes: Analyzing Initial Market Size Causes Investors to Miss Market-Expanding Founders
“When you get stuck thinking through that and working through the hundred reasons why owning the black car market isn't worth it, then you miss That Travis would figure out UberX.”
Barnes: Warby Parker Succeeded on Supply Chain and D2C, Not Design
“The first time we met Warby Parker, Those guys didn't have design sense. You know, Dave dresses pretty well now, but he didn't then. And like, there was no like style person on that team, but the truth is that the glasses had to look good, but that wasn't the …”
Barnes: Scaling in Venture Capital Has Eroded the Industry's Product
“I mean, I think there's been this push to scale and I think it's eroded the product of venture. Broadly.”
First Round Capital does not use deal attribution or partner portfolios
“We don't have an attribution model, and so when we make an investment, it's a first-round company. I don't have my portfolio, and over time, Todd won't have his, and so on.”
Phin Barnes: VCs Have Little Control Over Long-Term Financial Outcomes
“The challenge with that measure is as an investor, I think you have very little control over that success metric.”
Phin Barnes: Top VC Returns Come From Market Creation, Not Pattern Matching
“The largest outcomes in venture capital come from new markets that are created by entrepreneurs, not entrepreneurs matching patterns and capturing markets that already exist.”
Phin Barnes: High Capital Velocity Lowers Startup Quality and Venture Returns
“When you think about what it takes to get funded as the velocity of capital increases, what it takes to raise money. Decreases. So not only do you have increasing prices due to increased supply, but you also have a lowering of quality due to the increase in ve…”
The other half of the tape: Phin Barnes's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 32 times in 7 episodes across the shows. 1 statement on the record names them. every mention, with the transcript →
Who brings them up most Harry Stebbings 22Josh Kopelman 5Anjney Midha 4Leo Polovets 1
Statements about Phin Barnes, by other people (1)
Polovets uses post-meeting surveys to gather founder feedback on pitch meetings
“I actually got this idea from Finn at first round where he started sending a survey to founders he met with to basically ask them what they thought of the meeting. So I've been doing that for the last year or two, and it's a really short survey.”
Every mention by year
tap a year for its mentions
20VC 32
2019 24 mentions in 3 episodes 8 per episode
- 20VC: First Round's Josh Kopelman on Why Price Is Both An Art and A Science, Why Ownership Must Be Built on First Check and The Negative Consequences of Attribution in Venture
- 20VC: What Makes The Best Venture Firms Today So Special, The 3 Structural Impediments That Face Venture Today and Why The Debate on AR vs VR is BS with Anjney Midha, Founder & CEO @ Ubiquity6
- 20VC: BoxGroup's David Tisch on Whether Concentrated Investing At Seed Works, Do Founders Really Want Direct Feedback and Is It Good For Them & Why Consumer Social Is Interesting Again
- every mention in 2019, scene by scene →
2018 5 mentions in 3 episodes 2 per episode
- 20VC: Why Entrepreneurs Should Let Everyone Rip Apart Their Business Idea, How To Construct Frameworks for Success & Why You Should Not Always Test Your MVP with Afton Vechery, Founder & CEO @ Modern Fertility
- 20VC: Why Founders Should Not Always Be Raising, How To Build Relationships with VCs In A Condensed Timeframe, Why The Founder To VC Relationship Is Not Like A Marriage with Dave Vasen, Founder & CEO @ Brightwheel
- 20VC: Why Warm Intros Are Mostly Dumb, Why Ownership is Built On First Check and 4 Crucial Elements To Make Cold Inbound Attractive with Leo Polovets, General Partner @ Susa Ventures
- every mention in 2018, scene by scene →
One line per show, most statements first. The link opens Phin's full record on that show: the calibration, argument clarity, speaking style and every statement made there.
| Show | Role there | Eps | Statements | Record | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 20VCLEDGER | Co-Founder & Managing Partner, The General Partnership | 3 | 45 | 100% 2/2 | full record on 20VC → |
 MADLEDGER | Co-Founder & Managing Partner, The General Partnership | 1 | 2 | — | full record on the MAD Podcast → |