On this special segment of The Full Ratchet, the following Investors are featured:
- Shamin Walsh
- Mike Schroepfer
- Shashank Saxena
We asked guests to describe the biggest change to their investment philosophy over the course of 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:
0:18
Welcome back to TFR on today’s special segment, we asked guests to describe the biggest change to their investment philosophy over the course of their career. Here’s the special segment called rewriting the playbook.
0:36
Today’s special segment, we have shameen Walsh BAM ventures. Shameen, how has your philosophy or approach to investing changed over the course of your career?
0:46
I think it solidified my belief that you need to stay true to yourself and your beliefs and time will tell, or else you’ll go crazy, because I feel like I’ve seen so many cycles where things got really hot, and then you wonder, Oh, did I miss this? Did I miss that? And then time comes rolling around, and some of them, folks may have had the benefit of exiting out of and then others kind of time showed that it was overhyped and it crashed and burned and and you really have to you really have to be patient and thick skinned in this game and have a long term view and not get caught up in what folks are saying in the moment. You really have to sit back and let the ride play its way out on
1:41
today’s special segment, we have Mike schrepfer of gigascale schrep. How has your philosophy or approach to investing changed over the course of your career?
1:50
Yeah, well, I’m, you know, I’m relatively new, you know, I’ve been investing for four or five years. I’m sort of on the, on the dangerous part of the knowledge curve, where I think I know what I’m doing, you know, as opposed to having no clue, you know, I think that the, you know, the basics are the same. Like, it’s not that hard to the base the basics of, like, all right, we look for a big market with a great team and an interesting approach. Like, you know, you could have learned that on day one. That’s not hard. What’s hard is to actually figure out how to tune the specific knobs of what does that mean exactly? So it’s like, okay, well, this entrepreneur is really great, but we’re a little worried about the market. Or this market’s great, but we’re a little worried great, but we’re a little worried about this team, like, how do you like tune the knobs to say we’re in anyway? And, you know, I think that that’s what a lot of the it’s we’re kind of fine tuning the pre trained models here. We’re kind of fine tuning the model for the specific domain. And I think in most cases, you know, my mistakes have been getting, like, not just going ahead and backing the really, really great founders. Those have been all my my biggest regrets. And anytime I’ve been worried about some skill set in the team, you know that that’s been hard, harder to manage. Like, market’s great, technology is great, but this team is missing commercial capability or something like that has been hard. So I think we’re like, I would say anything like getting more and more and more founder obsessed and team quality and skill set obsessed than anything
3:08
else on today’s special segment, we have Shashank Saxena of Sierra. Shashank, how has your philosophy toward building changed over the course of your
3:18
career? Initially, I thought, you invest in a product, the product’s going to reach a certain stage of maturity, and then it’s about sale, sale, sale. But when I went through my entrepreneurial journey, it’s not that, right, because this is where the fallacy of, you know, in business school, you’re taught about sustainable competitive advantage, that you build a business, the business has a big moat around it, and you enjoy that sustainable competitor advantage, like you invest in the product. You build a great product, and now you’re just milking it. That’s just not true, right? Instead, what it is is small bursts of constant innovation, which is you build a product, assume 10 competitors are going to be there, right there, behind you, neck and neck. And then you build the next feature, which is great, and customers love it, and assume that everything you’re building will be copied by competitors in the next few months. And then you build the next one, and then you build the next one, and you have to constantly innovate. So in the case of these products, there is no definition of done, right? We were all trained in an era of project management where a project had a finite scope, products don’t. So this whole wave of constant R and D constant innovation, constantly staying on the cutting edge of technology, that was the biggest learning in the startup journey, which is there’s never a done so don’t expect it. Don’t be frustrated by the fact that it’s not done and your to do list is still bigger than your done list. And that’s okay, because that’s the nature of the game. That’s how it’s always going to be.
4:58
That will conclude this in. 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.
