Lara Banks of Makena Capital Management joins Nick to discuss How AI Reshapes LP Allocation Strategy, The Convergence of Venture and Buyout, and Permanent Shifts to Liquidity. In this episode we cover:
- Underwriting New Funds and Long-Term Partnerships
- Criteria for Investment and Deal Breakers
- Persistence in Venture and Brand Building
- CO-Investments and Prepared Minds
- Alignment and Strategy Drift
- AI Market and Investment Opportunities
- Secondaries as a Permanent Shift in Liquidity
- Value Concentration and Allocation Strategies
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The host of The Full Ratchet is Nick Moran of New Stack Ventures, a venture capital firm committed to investing in founders outside of the Bay Area.
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0:18
Lara banks joins us today from Menlo Park. She’s the Managing Director and Head of private equity at McKenna Capital Management, a global investment firm managing multi asset and private equity portfolios for leading endowments, foundations, family offices and sovereign wealth funds. Before McKenna, Laura worked at GE Energy financial services. Laura, welcome to the show.
0:41
Thanks, Nick for having me. I’m really excited to chat more. Yeah, it’s a
0:45
pleasure to have you. Can you talk about your backstory and your path to becoming an investor?
0:49
Yeah, it was kind of a meandering path. I kind of had a very diverse set of careers in terms of what I’ve done in investing. I started as a more of a quant and a prop shop investing in power and really playing more locational spreads. It’s like an arbitrage shop. And as much as much as I loved getting to know what was a kind of new market, I wanted to do something bigger picture and not be kind of in the weeds and coding all day. And so I moved to business school and went to GE Capital, and I was able to spend more time on the energy investing side, which I really enjoyed. I have a passion for climate and environment, and then got this great opportunity to come out to the West Coast and to join McKenna capital back in 2012 and I’ve been here for 13 years, and I’ve worked across a number of parts of the portfolio, and now lead our private equity and venture
1:44
portfolios perfect, and tell us more about the thesis at McKenna.
1:49
So McKenna got its roots from Stanford endowment, and the idea back then was to bring the endowment model to smaller endowments foundations, and to be able to have the power of larger pools of capital, and what that meant for the types of investments that you could you could access. Since then, we’ve grown to about 20 billion of assets under management, and we had a pretty, I think, unique structure, and probably early to this evergreen structure for privates. In 2017 we made the building blocks of the endowment investable, most notably private equity and venture capital, that people could go A La Carte and so they could invest just in venture, just in buyout, or target the asset allocation that they wanted across the different parts of the portfolio. Yeah. How does
2:36
that work? Structurally? How can you allow you know, folks to piecemeal, kind of add what they want in a fund structure. Yeah.
2:47
So how it works is that there is a built up pool of assets that we’ve invested in over the last 20 years, and what people do is buy into that portfolio, and so they can buy in, either from, you know, existing investors selling to them, or there are also opportunities to invest in the new capital, and then what they commit to is to invest alongside us for the next two years as the capital then goes into new investments alongside the existing pool of assets. And the goal is to keep these cash flow positive, so we are budgeting the amount that we allocate every year is to be able to keep that in a cash cash flow neutral or positive portfolio. And so the the distributions from the existing asset base are then used to fund calls of new investments that make either funds or CO investments. And so that’s how it works. And so that’s why it can become what we call a perpetual fund, where the cash flows just are recycled into to new investments. And so it’s a kind of a nice way for people to have a set and forget it out allocation to privates, as they think about, kind of building those, either from from scratch or adding to their private allocation without having to have a J curve,
4:03
I see. And is it fair? Fairly evergreen in nature. Can you know, allocators move in and out?
4:10
Yeah, that’s the goal. And so some people decide to sell. Some people decide if they want to redeem is to keep their assets and have those cash flows accrue to them over the ensuing years.
4:22
Perfect. I think a good place to start would be, you know, thinking about how you underwrite new funds, how you think about partnerships long term, when you bring on new managers. You know, are you underwriting to multiple cycles, or is each fund that they raise and manage kind of a new underwriting process for McKenna.
4:43
Our goal is to have long term partnerships, and that’s part of the model is to define talent that has the ability to invest for a number of years. Obviously, a existing one fund is a 10 year commitment, so you hope that you would be doing that for multiple funds. Given that they would be managing out those investments over a very long period. So we spent a lot of time when we’re thinking about a new fund commitment around the team, the experience set, the opportunity set. We don’t generally do a lot of like special sets, one time opportunities, because of that orientation. We will do those in CO investments, because we think that that is a better kind of allocation of time and just a matching of the opportunity and the relationship got it.
5:31
And we are VC focused on this show what, what would be kind of the size and profile of a good fit
5:38
for you. We try not to put kind of too hard and fast rules, but generally, 75 million is kind of the low end of where we invest. We try to invest 15 to 25 million per early stage manager. We have done much smaller than that, not in the past, as we think about, kind of creating relationships for the long term. But those are usually that kind of when we think about, like the core size would be 75 and up, and we’ve done a range of funds over the years, perfect.
6:08
You know, I know many allocators still heavily lean on past returns as a guide. How do you think about past performance and sort of other leading indicators of success? You know, when you’re going through that underwriting process?
6:23
Yeah, I try, not, particularly in venture, to spend too much time on performance. It is important to understand, like, I think, more around the quality of the network and the quality of founders that the team has been able to partner with in the past. So we have a framework that we use, and one of the elements is experience slash track record. And I’ve been really clear on experience is just as good as a track record. We do not need to have just a track record in venture we can have experience in building relationship with founders doing angel investments is, and I think it equates to that that same kind of track record of success. One of the things that you can worry about with track records in venture in particular is like, once the numbers look so good, the people who have created that return are either no longer there because it does take so long, or they’re not as involved or as motivated. And so we spend a lot more time thinking about that experience component, the edge of what is that manager bringing to the table for the founders are partnering with the opportunity set that they’re going after, and then, kind of like, you know, their own portfolio management and those elements than we do on exactly the track record of that manager. It’s important. It’s an element, but it cannot be. The end all be all in investing, and that’s what allows us to do more emerging managers, is having a broader set of criteria that we use to establish what managers will fit for us or not.
7:59
Tell us more about that criteria. You know, what are, what are some of the characteristics that cause you to lean in? And maybe, what are some that are, you know, common disqualifiers or deal breakers? Yeah.
8:12
I mean, I think the the quality of the team and their network is one of the kind of most common things that pushes us to lean in. It’s like, you come out of a meeting with someone, you’re like, wow, they just have something different in terms of how they view the world, how they partner with founders. Even sometimes it’s just the strategy. They have something that is different in strategy. And we do have, I’d say, like, slightly a bias for kind of larger ownership, more active kind of partnership. But there are times where, like, that’s, that’s a new way of looking at venture, and that can get us really excited. The things that make us lean out would say, you know, alignment issues is something that we spend a lot of time on, is, is this really what someone is wanting to do? Do they think about the LPS first, alongside the founders, and kind of being an investor? And that’s, that’s something that has been, can be a challenge in the venture, and just in general, in allocation,
9:04
you know, Lara persistence has long been cited as as better in venture than in other asset classes. Have Have you found that to be the case, you know, and in the portfolio that you’ve built and observed over time,
9:19
we have seen more persistence in the brands. And I’d say like it is very important to understand that versus private equity, where someone is selling all of their company to a fund, in venture, you’re selling a portion. So you really are looking for a partner, and so having seen other founders that you respect partner with that firm, I think is a very important thing for founders and when they’re making decisions, and can be really helpful for talent acquisition, which is a lot of the founders time is finding the right talent for their organization. So we have seen that some organizations and certain people within those brands have a lot of persistence. That being said, that there is, there are very few funds that consistently have a certain track record. There’s always, like one fund that doesn’t do as well. And so there was a value of diversification across across funds. And I’d also say that there are funds that have done a great job of building that brand. It is something you have to cultivate and continue to have grow over time. It doesn’t just stay there, right? It’s like you’re only as good as that last success, and so you still need to have another success coming along. You can’t have just one a decade. And so I think that there have been brands that kind of have fluctuated over time because they haven’t continued to be able to drive those same successes and the quality of founders that they attract?
10:42
Yep, market’s constantly evolving, and everyone’s trying to stay relevant, right? Build that brand, yeah,
10:50
which makes it exciting, right? Like for us, I think some ways it’s a more interesting market than a decade ago, where you had a handful of brands that really dominated. I think right now there, there are a lot of brands. And it’s not just the the big name brands. There are the, you know, solo, G, P brands, like in a lot of Gil that actually have almost as as much clout as some of the the bigger brands that have very large teams behind them. It’s, it’s
11:15
funny and ironic that, you know, we’re investing in companies that should have a moat and a long term defensible advantage, and are in these blue oceans, and venture itself can very much feel like a red ocean at time with, you know, tenuous moats, and you just have to constantly, you know, evolve and and stay front of mind and kind of build that, that brand to sustain.
11:38
Yeah, I agreed.
11:40
So another conversation point that’s come up frequently with LPS is on CO invest. So you know, direct investing and CO invest is increasingly popular, but it can also be a challenge, right? There’s timing constraints. You got a hot deal. It’s coming together. It’s oversubscribed. Talk to us about how you approach co invest in how GPS can be proactive, you know, through this process to achieve favorable outcomes for allocators and, of course, the target companies, yeah.
12:11
I mean, I go back to, you know, excels phrase, like a prepared mind is really important for call investments, particularly in venture, because I think that the timelines are the shortest there. What we have done is we have a really, like a wealth of knowledge from our existing portfolio. We have 100 1000s, actually, of companies in our portfolio today. And so we do a screen of those companies and assess kind of which ones are seeming to break out. And so we have a list. It takes a lot of effort, and actually AI is helping us a little bit on kind of keeping that up to date, but that gives us a sense of what are the companies that we had touch points on. We see kind of existing proof points, and if there is a company in that group that we get a call investment on, we can move really quickly. I will say we’ve also seen more data provided on the CO investments than called the 2020, 2021, cycle, and that’s been hugely advantageous to feel like we can actually understand kind of what the revenue growth looks like, what they’re projecting, and understand more around the expected unit economics. But it is something that is a work in progress and will continue to happen. You know, there are times where you just say, No, we don’t know the company well enough, and so we can’t move in that time. Time Frame.
13:31
So is there like a cadence to a portfolio review that you’ll do with GPS to kind of make sure that the ones that are coming up maybe are front of mind. And some of that prepared mind work is is being done ahead, ahead of time.
13:45
Yeah, we try not to make it too prescriptive. This is actually where we’re trying to have aI help us, and just knowing which ones we have to talk about with all the managers that we are speaking with. But, you know, we have a sense of those portfolios and are constantly having conversations, depending on kind of the relationship with the manager. But also, I know just in general, like we sit in a really exciting spot where we get to talk to some founders through references. We get to talk to up and coming VCs. We get to talk to our existing managers. And so through all of that, we get a lot of Intel and information. And so that’s, that’s really where this initial kind of sparks of these are, the interesting companies come from. And then from there we can build upon that when an action or a particular company comes up from a manager in our portfolio or or not. And we do, we do look at common investments with managers across the ecosystem, because there are people who have opportunities that we might might not be partnered with today, perfect.
14:44
So in our back and forth, you’ve you’ve mentioned that alignment is a non negotiable for you. So give me, give me a common misalignment, maybe that you’ve observed between GPS and LPs and how managers should avoid that.
14:58
And I think that there’s all. Always chant challenges when you have multiple funds, and kind of putting different investments in different funds that can, that can be a problem, but I have seen a lot of managers deal with that appropriately. We think about alignment of time as well. And so where are you spending your time? How are you thinking about that? And then economics, and so we talk a lot about GP commits and making sure that the GPS do feel like this is really where they’re putting their dollars, as well, as well as our clients. So it isn’t, it’s not just one thing. There’s kind of a compilation of items that we look at as we think about is our true alignment here, and a lot of it goes also to the intangibles. There are certain managers they have in our portfolio that are just, so I say, like, mission driven. And it’s not because they always are mission for the good of the world, but mission for, like, the founders that they’re investing in, like to them, this is just so interesting, so important. It’s just like they can’t imagine doing anything else. And I love to see that in people, where it is like that empowering the founder to be successful and to build their vision is what is driving that manager. And those are the types of things that we’re looking for, outside of just kind of the basics of making sure our capital is appropriately kind of viewed from from the manager,
16:24
I guess. You know, after you get the basics of a pitch, you kind of have the shape of the fund, the portfolio construction, the headline thesis, you know, you’ve reviewed the deck. There’s some key questions, maybe two or three questions that you ask that come to mind, that reveal some of these intangibles and and some of these deeper levels of conviction and differentiation, that that stand out, you know, that come to mind, that that you would ask a manager,
16:54
I’d say, I channel i Sun a little bit in the whys, like we spent a lot of time on the whys behind an investment the whys behind. Why are you doing this? A lot of people, actually, that we invest with Don’t, don’t economically, need to do what they’re doing. And so understanding that, like, deeper motivation around their personality, of like, what is that it that makes them tick? So we spend a lot more time on that and and then understanding the types of founders, like, when, if this type of founder came in, like, how would you respond to that? And so kind of giving them their scenarios that they can react to, I think that helps us also understand what is it that they are looking for in their portfolio.
17:34
Love it. So, Larry, you’ve also warned against strategy drift. How often do you see managers losing discipline. And what are some of the subtle signs before it becomes obvious? Venture can be
17:47
like a five year old soccer game where everyone is going after whatever the ball of the day is. And I think that’s natural, because there is this, like FOMO around. There’s only a couple of really big ideas and big companies around those ideas that will be meaningful. But just because there is a new big idea of the day does not mean that, like you should be investing in that there needs to be a view of like, this is my strategy, and I’m gonna have to let this one go and so, and I’ve seen this actually, in a couple of funds recently, where they have just done a great job of even AI like AI is not core to what they are thinking about. It’s obviously important in every company, but in AI, you know, LLM, or even some of the applications, are outside of their strike zone, and they’ve done a great job of just staying the course, obviously, embedding AI into the companies they have and improving go to market or customer success with AI, but not going after the new shiny thing, because AI does feel like a place where you can quickly make money. So that’s something I spent a lot of time thinking about. Is just like, what are people focused on today, and how much is that aligned with what they said they’re going to be. One of the things we do as we think about strategy drift and keeping ourselves accountable is put in our memos, like what we want to see for the next fund, and so outlining that, usually there’s something around the strategy, there’s something around the team, something around the portfolio, and we’re pushing to be as quantitative but also flexible in those descriptions, so that when we do come back to the next fund, we have an anchoring of like, what we expected at that point. Because sometimes it’s hard to go back to that point in time, because so much does change in venture, and I think that has helped us be accountable. And then we sometimes share that with managers, like this is what we thought was going to happen and it didn’t. And sometimes there’s a justified, like, a real justification for the shift, and they kind of did a review. They need to shift their strategy, and that makes sense. But other times it’s it’s much more of the FOMO, and that’s when we have to kind of part ways
19:52
interesting. So you’ve mentioned Eli Gill, you’ve mentioned AI a couple times. He wrote this piece, AI market. Click. 30, and in the piece, he was arguing that we’re moving towards this new paradigm in AI markets. Where do you think allocators should place their chips across infrastructure, Model layer and application layers? I’d say
20:14
there’s no one right answer for us. We have. We’ve seen some emerging, dominant players in the models, and through our managers, we’ve gotten exposure to those and I think that where we probably will see more time and attention and therefore capital put to work is in the applications and but applications have been hard. There’s been, I think a lot kind of showed that there’s been more crystallization around the key leaders in certain areas. But there are certain areas but there are certain areas that still don’t have a key leader, or don’t really have that many really actionable applications. And then there are the applications that are scary, that they could be in the line of, kind of, you know, the open AI development roadmap. And so I think that there will be, you know, potentially some places that don’t work out there. But that being said, I think Appalachians will be the place of growth over the coming years, and I think what that’s what we will be spending more time, though, I am humble in that the space has changed really rapidly. I just say, like even in anthropic a year ago, we would not have expected to be this dominant and this big in terms of just the revenue base. So we realized, like things could shift, and maybe the leaders today might not be the leaders that it feels like there are some emerging players on that side, but I think that’s what’s exciting, is like that there’s a lot changing, and just the scale of these companies, the fact that they are getting to you know, billions of revenue, obviously the applications like, not at that level, but still hundreds of millions of revenue within a year or so is really unprecedented, and I think that that makes us excited, but also a little wary, because I do manage a portfolio across all privates. And so where does that profit pool come from? Is something I’m thinking a lot about as an investor,
22:03
interesting so Tomas Tungus, a frequent guest on the show here, he recently wrote that secondaries are the new IPO. We’ve seen a lot of challenges with value being locked up and companies staying private longer, and the IPO window being relatively shut. Do you agree that secondaries represent sort of this permanent shift in liquidity, or do you think this is a temporary cycle?
22:27
I think that secondaries are going to be here to stay. We see them obviously, in the private equity side, and they are a big part of the ecosystem, both on GP LEDs with continuation vehicles, but also with LPs. There’s a lot of capital formation around secondaries on the buyout side, and I would expect something likely similar in the venture side, for a couple of reasons. One is that these businesses now, particularly the later stage ones, look like buyout companies in that they have real revenue, generally having profits or near that. And so you can kind of get your head around the underwriting, um, the harder part is the the liquidity is, when are you going to get liquidity? Which is, is a nuance, because that is a big part of the secondary markets in, as I said today, or kind of, it’s a more of a financial engineering component to it. The second thing I think that we’re going to see is just that there is these companies are getting bigger and bigger, and so there are going to be opportunities for people to invest. You think about some of the biggest companies today, like those would be mega cap or large cap tech companies, and they’re ipoing at 20, $30 billion and so I think there’s a lot of potential capital that goes into those companies, just given the scale of what venture is going after today versus what it might have been going after 10 years ago. And this goes back to this idea of profit pools like the the businesses that are in the venture universe are much bigger than just software. And I think we’re seeing, we’ll see more and more of that with AI. And then I do think that, I think that there will be a handful of companies that do stay private for a longer period of time. There is some there are some benefits to that. And if there is a liquid market, I think that there will be secondaries into that. And I see this as a can be like a double edged sword. You know, we’re seeing for a seed manager and seed manager, this can actually be a good thing where they can sell into some of these rounds that are going on at, you know, the five, $10 billion round, they get a very nice return. We’re actually seeing some managers even, I wouldn’t say, like, be dogmatic, but at least, like putting together frameworks of if I get this much potential exit, so like, a 1x on my fund, and then I can still keep another 2x or 1x in the company, like I’ll do that and crystallize the return kind of boosts IRR, but also generates faster dpi. So I think there’s an element of that being good for the seed managers and that they can sell before the IPO. And that is not as seen as you know. Out a negative from the founders, because there are other pools of capital who want to come in. So I do think there’s going to be a mix. But I think we were in a period where there was obviously a dearth of IPOs, and so I think there’s going to be a it’ll be an amalgam of exit opportunities. And think some companies will go public, some people will take M and A route, and then I think the secondary route will be more of that third door than we had in the past, and that we’re already seeing that. And the people who are taking that, in terms of the opportunity for them is a lot of the growth funds we’re seeing them use added as a lever and and then us, as LPs, want to do that as well. And so I think that you’re seeing, you know, as we talked about earlier, and having this prepared mind around companies, we can be then buying some of that secondary and then you also see, I think, the secondary funds, and you have seen them start to move into the space as the companies have nearer term cash flows and things that can be viewed in the same way that they think about their buyout investments.
25:58
And if an early stage manager were to take, you know, some of their position off the table at one of those later rounds and return some dpi. Is that? Is that seen as a negative? In some cases, you know, that they’re harvesting too early in a winning company. Or, you know, how do you think about that? And how do you advise, you know, GPS that are trying to weigh Well, you know, I’m moving maybe the ability for my fund to be a 5x plus, but I’m getting some DPI back.
26:27
Yeah. I mean, it’s, it’s always, like, a very difficult conversation. And I think it’s, it’s never, there’s never, like, a clear, right way we think about kind of splitting the the baby of it, like do some secondary and sell a bit, and then also keep some in the company. There are situations where it does make sense to sell everything, where the valuation has gotten really ahead of itself. You can, you know, crystallize a great return for your fund, and then move on, especially if you see some potential risk. But generally we see our see people kind of de risk a little bit and sell down a piece and then continue, continue on, so they can still have upside from there. Great, great.
27:07
Want to talk about AI a bit more before we leave that. So you know, Union Square and others have published content on native business models due to the impact of AI and lines are are starting to blur between the tools and the workers, lots of content being published on service as software services, AI, and it’s kind of requiring a reevaluation of how value is defined and priced. What do you think are the implications for allocators like yourself, you know, as you’re evaluating opportunities on the direct side, as well as funds.
27:41
Yeah, I think this, like, this question is actually a really, I think, important one for allocators in terms of, like, how are we structured? How do we think about investing? When I first came to McKenna, I was, like, kind of befuddled by the buckets. Like, I didn’t have buckets when I was trading, or a GE we didn’t have these, like, buckets. So it’s a very process driven place. I just thought about good investments and like frameworks for good companies. And I think that as you do this for a long time, you do get a little bit more entrenched in the buckets and how we allocate across those and but I think this is in a really important time to kind of try to break down those barriers and think more around, like, go, like, where are there going to be excess rents? Where are there going to be shifts in those profits, and who is going to win over that time period? I don’t think we can necessarily, you know, definitively say, but we can say, generally, these areas maybe have some risk that we need to better understand. These areas seem to be more beneficiaries. And then it also, you know, it relates to the pricing of these assets. One of the things we think, think about is essential services is something we do on the buyout side, like, maybe those are more valuable over time, because, you know, it’s going to be harder, and you can’t AI Ify that. So those are things that we’re just, you know, spending more time thinking around at our at the higher level, and something that we’ve been talking about at the Investment Committee, what, where are we seeing shifts and kind of getting those like pieces and glean from public trans like the trends transcripts from public companies, from our own, you know, private equity managers, where they’re Seeing chefs, and then where we’re seeing venture managers see seeds of opportunity. And so I don’t think that we have it kind of definitive today, of like, this is how we’re going to see either funds or companies change, but we’re starting to kind of try to put the pieces together and then be more open minded about things that do kind of straddle what we consider kind of traditional buckets as we think about where to allocate in the future.
29:45
You know, it seems like value is increasingly being concentrated at these later stages. You know, does does that concentration make you rethink how you allocate across early versus Late? Late? Stage strategies.
30:01
No, I mean, I think it’s, this is a point in the cycle, I think right now, more so than the longer term. I do think a little bit around concentration of company value, meaning that there are, like, a handful of companies, you have this and mag seven in the privates as well. But that being said, like our early stage investments in those companies have been, you know, very, very strong ROIs. And so the the opportunity for us is making sure that we double down in those companies over time, both with our existing managers and directly. But we also are seeing, you know, new AI companies come from zero to nothing like a lovable in the portfolio. So I, I think that there are some of this is because the companies that we see that are at the later hinges are just so big, but underlying that, there are a whole host of other companies that are doing really well that are, you know, sub 10 billion or a billion. So I think that the there’s an opportunity in in both sides, and also depends on what you’re optimizing for, from an ROI versus an IRR standpoint, standpoint, and we try to kind of deliver both to our clients.
31:05
You had mentioned buckets before. Are there certain buckets that you feel like are underdeveloped, maybe in the general market, as you look across VC, you know, here are some areas that are very interesting, from an allocator standpoint that you feel like, you know, VC, VCs will emerge in these categories, in these spaces, and develop compelling offerings, but you’re still looking for interesting bets to make, yeah,
31:33
and we try to be broad and just look for bottoms up talent. I’d say, you know, deep tech is an area where you continue to challenge ourselves on it’s been, I’d say, like again, that’s been an area where we have seen a handful of very big winners, and if you weren’t in those, it wasn’t as interesting. But it is, I think, a unique point in the cycle where we’re seeing the Adams component of venture come back and looking at some of those opportunities. I’d say another area that we’re interested in is climate and just how are we kind of doing more with less? I think that’s something that we’ve seen some people across our portfolio do in their broader sense of of their funds. But I don’t think there’s one area where we have to be investing today that we haven’t been investing in in the past. So I’d say, like it’s, it’s more evolution versus kind of a revolution on the buckets. The one thing that we probably haven’t talked about is the the like merging of venture and buyout in kind of AI ifying existing businesses, and not something that we have a handful of managers kind of dabbling in, either in building new companies from the ground up, doing roll ups, kind of adding infusing AI and so I think there will likely be more partnerships from venture and bio managers to figure out what’s the best way to kind of bring these AI tools and just like rethinking businesses. But that’s something that I don’t think has fully kind of formed today.
33:03
100%
33:06
Larry, if we could feature anyone here on the show, who do you think we should interview and what topic would you like to hear them speak
33:12
about? Oh, there’s so many great, great people I’m trying to think of. I you know, I’ve gotten to know Jack Altman a bit, and I really enjoyed learning more about about him. And I think he has a great interview slate as well. So I think he could be a really good person for you to talk to.
33:29
Awesome Lara. What book, article or video would you recommend the listeners?
33:32
One that we used a couple years back for an offset was thinking in bets, and I really liked that. That was Annie Duke’s book, and it actually helped me frame a little bit more on like, how do we assess investment, how do we upgrade our processes? And it helped kind of push us forward in some of those process improvements.
33:54
Awesome. Lara, do you have any habits or behaviors that are a secret weapon?
33:58
I’m just a really curious person. I think that really helps in understanding kind of what drives other people. I do also love to do walks and hikes, and so those are fun activities to do with managers and to others on my team. And I think opens the aperture in terms of what you talk about with others. Perfect.
34:18
And then finally, here Lara, what’s the best way for listeners to connect with you and follow along with McKenna? Yeah, you
34:24
can find us on linkedin@mckennacap.com, and and we’d love to kind of connect with listeners and talk more about venture perfect.
34:33
She is Lara banks, and the firm is McKenna McKenna Capital Management, Lara, thanks so much for the time today, and appreciate all the insight.
34:41
Thanks. Nick, enjoyed it.
34:47
All right, that’ll wrap up today’s interview. If you enjoyed the episode or a previous one, let the guests know about it. Share your thoughts on social or shoot them an email. Let them know what particularly resonated. With you. I can’t tell you how much I appreciate that some of the smartest folks in venture are willing to take the time and share their insights with us. If you feel the same, a compliment goes a long way. Okay, that’s a wrap for today. Until next time, remember to over prepare, choose carefully and invest confidently. Thanks so much for listening.
