The Exchanges

Q I do want to dive into how this all came together as a business in the competitive landscape, but it probably makes sense. To chat a little bit about how did you distill those respective lessons into renegade strategy?

A We really wanted to answer the question of why does the world need another venture capital firm very, very well before creating our jobs and investing our careers in building Renegade, right? And so I've come more from earlier stage companies as compared to Roseanne, right? And she comes more from growth. And what we're seeing is there were so much help around the venture ecosystem to help companies figure out their product market fit. And when it came to really building out their organizations and building out their teams, This was a defining moment for companies. Everyone sees that capital availability is tremendous. And when we look at, okay, where does that money goes? It goes into team and it goes into marketing. And this idea of how do we build the teams and organizations that scale was really differentiating the companies that would get large amount of funding down the line and would really continue to be outliers. And chatting with Roseanne, she would go and say, these companies are raising hundreds of millions of dollars, and they're still so raw. Yes, they have revenues. The business engine has evolved, but as organizations, they're still so raw. And We really kind of rocked into that notion of there was something changing in the way organizations evolve. And we actually internally, we indeedly call it the teenage years of companies, that there's this very distinct ph…

AI assessment note: “how do we build the teams and organizations that scale was really differentiating”

Q So once you figured out that this is a partnership that you both felt good about, what was it like going into a market?

A So just to kind of put a temporal dimension on it, so that was beginning of 2019. So we hit the market around May of 2019, April, May. On one hand, we're known entities with a known track record and known firms, and gosh, we got so many meetings. Getting a ticket to the dance was very easy, and everyone wanted to talk to us, and we had LPs from prior firms and other relationships. But, you know, I just, the backdrop too of the market, right? Like, funds were coming back to market bigger and faster than they were before, so Actually differentiating between the people who wanted to take a meeting versus people who could actually invest and in your relationships was a lesson that we had to learn on the field and something that we iterated on quite a bit. Some folks spin out having anchors defined. That's not how we approached it. That's not who we were.

AI assessment note: “Getting a ticket to the dance was very easy, and everyone wanted to talk”

Q Once you get to this point where you're interested in a deal, how is a smaller new kids on the block? Do you win deals? Presumably against the competition.

A I think that's where the supercritical stage insight is so valuable. You gotta understand the business, you gotta understand the market, and that's stable stakes, right? So how are you gonna work as a board member, as an advisor? So prior experiences, but then you move to very quickly to, okay, what's top of mind for you? And we explain to them what the supercritical stage is, we explain to them that we have Susan and other resources, and these are the things we've done for companies A, B, and C. And Founders self-select. The ones that really get excited by it and the top of mind that they will need that scaffolding, they lean in. And then the question becomes quickly around, okay, how can we show you how it'd be to work with us? So for example, one thing that we do is option pool calc even before investing. Let's look at your hiring plan. Let's look at the option pool. You have that option pool that you want to create. Do you have the financial and the equity capital to attract all these people? Let's actually kind of help you think about leveling and stuff like that. And then they see the value of what it is to work with us and how this is really accelerating for them. And we also get so much insight. On how it is to work with them and what's important to them, how they're thinking about hiring, what are the more important positions and. If they're thinking about entering a n…

AI assessment note: “Founders self-select. The ones that really get excited by it and the top of mind”

Q What's an example of something that you learned about each other in that process that you didn't know and that you think would be somewhat broadly applicable to sort of partnerships coming together?

A I think the crucial tool that we learned is we're very different people. And Roseanne is a massive extrovert. I am not. Can we make that a powerful combination? And we found, and through the process, we learned exactly how to get the best of each other and how to deal with each other in like a really, really productive way. But we kind of knew that about each other before, and that was getting the tools. But I'll say like, for me, it wasn't the little things. So Roseanne is actually tremendously generous. And one thing that stuck to me We were sharing a hotel room once, and, well, many times we shared hotel rooms, but there was this one time that I saw her leaving a tip for the cleaning person. And, and that stuck to me as just like generosity and principles and things that were not expected as just like really important values. When it comes to, okay, how do we talk about carry? How do we talk about our comp and building the business? Those are conversations that we had, but like also knowing how the person is and the trust and the consistency, you also have what it takes to kind of back up the behavior. So You know, LPs ask us a lot about tension and disagreements, and they're expecting very excited, animated stories. The truth is we have zero. Our biggest disagreement was over one slide in a fundraising deck a long, long time ago. We have a lot of productive conflict. We hav…

AI assessment note: “there was this one time that I saw her leaving a tip for the cleaning person”