On this special segment of The Full Ratchet, the following Investors are featured:
- Ambar Bhattacharyya
- Mike Droesch
- Sami Inkinen
We asked guests to tell the most important lesson they’ve learned in their career.
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.
Want to keep up to date with The Full Ratchet? Follow us on social.
You can learn more about New Stack Ventures by visiting our LinkedIn and Twitter.
Are you a founder looking for your next investor? Visit our free tool VC-Rank and we’ll send a list of potential investors right to your inbox!
Transcribed with AI:
0:19
Welcome back to TFR on today’s special segment, we ask guests to tell the most important lesson that they’ve learned in their career. Here’s a segment called Lessons Learned.
0:35
On today’s special segment, we have Ambar Bhattacharya of maverick ventures. Ambar, can you tell us a story highlighting a critical lesson that has changed the way you invest? Yeah,
0:45
I mean, I’ll tell you that, you know, one of the this is going going back eons ago. I started, you know, right after, right after I left MinuteClinic. I went to Bain Capital ventures. They were the primary investor in MinuteClinic, so I joined them early on, and I did both healthcare and tech investing, and one of the companies I was fortunate enough to be on, on that, on the diligence team for, and on the What’s a company called, called LinkedIn, which we all know today, right? Is, you know, it’s critical, critical system of record for everyone in venture. But this is when it was a small, small, little company, and there was risks galore, right? There was the revenue model was not yet proven out. There was a company called Facebook that was, you know, around that was also building a social network that was very large and growing at a very rapid clip. And I’m talking about circa 2007 2008 so this is, this is a long time ago, and what the and there was all sorts of factors. There was a lot of competitors linked into globally. But what I learned there was, as a was around the power of network effects, and I think until you until I was able to see it in my career, I don’t think I really understood how powerful they could be where, if someone had created a social network in and around their personal lives, and that was Facebook, there actually had a desire to create a separate personal a social network in and around their their professional lives, which was LinkedIn, and there was actually a desire to keep them separate. And the ways you can monetize network effects. You fast forward a bunch of years of, you know, a decade plus for both of those businesses. You know, Facebook, obviously, you know, hundreds of billions of market cap, but you know, LinkedIn, acquired for 26 billion by Microsoft. Really, really good sound businesses. But I’ve been able to take some of those lessons around network effects and apply them in healthcare where, where you can see how networks of of providers, networks of of clinicians, or frankly, how data gets connected and passed between different settings. That’s the concept of interoperability, how you can actually build really interesting businesses on top of a network effect. The most relevant one in healthcare so far has been Doximity, which has created an, you know, network effect among amongst physicians, publicly traded company, very, very profitable, very successful. But I think there’s many other examples that that we’ve seen that have done this, and I think had I not had that front row look at a very early stage in my career of understanding how those look in in that example, I just don’t know if my mind would have been prepared to look for them again in other settings. And so that’s been a huge inflection point for how I think about investing.
3:42
You on today’s special segment, we have Mike drosh of Bessemer Venture Partners, Mike, can you tell us the story, highlighting a critical lesson that has changed the way you invest? Yeah, for me, I
3:54
think one of the biggest shifts in how I thought about investing since I started is I when I first got in the industry, and this may have just been, like, my engineering background, but I was always looking for, like, what is the really clear bright line product differentiation here? Like, there has to be something that’s just clearly better. It’s a really defensible, obvious moat, better feature. And I used to weigh that, you know, business model, product, much more than, let’s say, team. And I’ve, over time, realized that’s a bit of a blind spot for me and so and I think just seeing how these businesses get built and being associated with many of them, I’ve just, in reality, come to just appreciate the people side of it so much more. And I know this is obvious for a lot of other people who tell you, like team is the most important thing. I’d always known that, you know, academically, but in practice, I found myself indexing much more on product. And so over the, you know, over the past few years, I have put far, far more weight on both teams, ability to to execute quickly and to just hire really incredible talent. Um. Yeah, and maybe the only example I’d give you is again, with a recent investment in Goodship. I had gotten to meet Ryan and the team over two years before we ultimately invested. And I just every time I checked in with them, I couldn’t believe how much product they ship, how quickly they moved, how much division had expanded, how receptive they were to customers. I just think that that product velocity is such a great leading indicator of success. And the second thing was, just like the quality of the people they hired, they had deep, deep networks in this industry, they never had to go to like recruiters, which I also think is like, maybe a somewhat of a correlative, you know, leading indicator, like, how often do you need to use recruiters to fill exec hire roles? They just always work. Had a bench of great people for, you know, for their leadership team, to to to build on. So, yeah, more and more, particularly at the really early stages. I know this is obvious for most people, but team, Team matters
6:01
on today’s special segment, we have Sami inkanen of Trulia and Virta health. Sami, can you tell us a story highlighting a critical lesson that has changed the way you lead?
6:12
I think maybe the hardest times that I’ve gotten through, like 2008 collapse, collapse, a bit more or less the whole economy, particularly real estate economy during Trulia and then covid For a healthcare company, by the way. What is it about me? Like, I started a real estate company, and then real estate market collapses, and then I started a healthcare company and covid hit. So it’s like, I’ve definitely been tested a few times coming into covid. I made the decision before almost any other company did in late March, early April, I laid off 1/3 of a company on the front end of covid as a telemedicine company. Then obviously, like, you know, telemedicine was the thing for for covid, but getting through, managing through both of these times have been it’s been hard, tough, emotionally, practically, but I’ve learned so much about leadership, communication, how to motivate people, what motivates people, how you get through tough times, how you not let a crisis go to waste. I think those two events have been transformative on my journey as a leader. You
7:25
that will conclude this installment of investor stories. If you’re enjoying the program and would like to see it continue, take a moment and leave a five star review in iTunes. Okay, that will wrap things up for today until next time over. Prepare, choose carefully and invest confidently. Thanks for joining me.
