On this special segment of The Full Ratchet, the following Investors are featured:
- David Garcia
- Bradley Tusk
- Ted Seides
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.
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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 the segment called Lessons Learned.
0:35
On today’s special segment, we have David Garcia of digit, David, can you tell us a story highlighting a critical lesson that has changed the way you lead Well, I
0:43
think going back to that advice from Danny Mayer, one of our very good flowers, left the company recently, and I just have the sense that I could have done much more to retain him. It was too late, because I took him for granted, and that’s a reality. He was happy. He was excited, but then an opportunity came, and he took it, and I’m pretty sure that if I had put a lot more focus and attention and effort into developing and nurturing him, he would have stayed so it was a great reminder of that advice from from daddy later
1:27
on, today’s special segment, we have Bradley tusk of Tusk ventures, Bradley, can you tell us a story highlighting a critical lesson that has changed the way you invest?
1:36
Yeah, absolutely. I would say that I, at times, have gotten too intrigued by, as I was mentioned before in the Beyond Meat story, my ability to change the regulatory outcome. Oh, I’m such a political genius, I’m going to solve this problem and figure it all out and remake everything. And the reality is that has to be correlated with, you know, how much for priority should this be for the portfolio company, and how much runway and bandwidth do they have, right? And so, like, yeah, in theory, on a sub stack, I could kind of like, make the case for how to legalize anything or come up with a good regulatory structure for anything, but in the real world where I have to pass laws and change things and overcome, you know, entrenched interest to do so the companies I’m investing in. A, it better be existential for them, for that to have to happen. B, I better think that I have a pretty good chance of pulling it off before I spend my LPS money on it and see, do we have enough, literally, runway to do it right, like your whole burn rate can’t be on lobbyists and PR firms and political polling, and so a lot of times, a seed or series, a company might have an amazing idea that could work and could be incredible, but it’s going to cost 10s of Millions of dollars to successfully run these kinds of campaigns. Kinds of campaigns all over the country. And if you don’t have that kind of runway, and no early stage company really does, then you’re not going to succeed. And so I’ve had to learn that just because something is intellectually interesting and challenging to me, or I think I could do something meaningful politically, that is not the basis by which to it very good.
3:29
On today’s special segment, we have Ted sides of capital allocators. Ted, can you tell us the story, highlighting a critical lesson that has changed the way you invest? Sure,
3:38
it’s not necessarily like a negative story. But for me, and again, almost all my investing is through managers. One of the things that’s changed from when I was doing that professionally to doing it on my own, is that on the margin, I want to try to be the most impactful LP ever, certainly per dollars invested. So let’s not talk about the denominator there, which helps me with that math. But I’ve made a couple of investments in some really, like, fantastic funds that I don’t really know them very well or have relationships with them, and it’s fine, like the outcomes will probably be fine, but it doesn’t bring that much to me and my life and my activities. Whereas I’ve invested in some funds that I think will be fine, they may not be fantastic, but there’s been incredible things that have happened for their organization, for me and what we’re doing because of the relationship. And so the biggest change in my investing has been focusing on, where can I have some value add as a tiny LP, and certainly relative to the institutional world, and I’m finding that that actually is also pretty correlated with outcomes.
4:56
Amazing. Love it. You. 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.
