On this special segment of The Full Ratchet, the following Investors are featured:
- Vince Hsieh of Cypress Growth Capital
- Ryan Delk of Primer
- Mike Maples Jr. of Floodgate
We asked guests to discuss the most visionary founder that they’ve worked with and what makes them so special.
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 discuss the most visionary founder that they’ve worked with and what makes them so special. Here’s the segment called visionary founders.
0:35
Today’s special segment, we have Vince Shea of Cyprus. Vince tell us about an exceptional founder you’ve worked with, and what specific thing they do that’s unique. So we
0:44
had an entrepreneur that we invested in about 18 months ago that just exited us a few months ago to a strategic acquire right around Christmas time. It was a great Christmas present for him and us. The best thing he did is that he was a listener. He was a learner and a listener. He listened to his executive team a lot. He listened to his customers and obviously iterated the product based on their feedback. He listened to investors like us, a lot of our entrepreneurs, they tend to, when we have conversations with them, they tend to kind of, I call it present to us information that we could probably read in a report or an email about the customers, the numbers, all that kind of stuff. He would send us the information ahead of time and assume we read it and were smart on it. Would spend most of the time in our conversations asking questions about product strategy, about capital strategy, about sales hires, things like that. And learned a lot from those things, which I think is what allowed him to grow so quickly in the first 18 months after we invested. So I think honestly, the best thing he did was he learned to listen quite a bit, and that allowed him to build enormous team around him and scale quickly.
1:48
On today’s special segment, we have Ryan Delk of primer. Ryan, if you had to choose one visionary founder or leader that has inspired you most, who is it?
1:55
He’s not, probably not visionary or or it’s definitely not known by the rest of the world. But my dad taught me a lot about what working with integrity looks like, and making making unpopular or hard decisions, the being willing to make unpopular and hard decisions when your integrity is on the line, basically, regardless of what the consequences are. And I learned that from him at a very young age, and I think I did not realize at the time how impactful that would be, but that’s that’s probably the most valuable kind of formative lesson that I learned from him, that I took into my career. So I’ll go with him awesome
2:35
on today’s special segment. We have Mike Maples, JR of floodgate tell us about an exceptional founder that you’ve worked with, and what specific thing they do that’s unique to any other founder.
2:46
I’d say in recent times, one has been Cass or Eunice at Applied intuition, so he was thinking about starting a company, and he was at the time at Google, and his co founder was also there, and they’d worked with the Waymo guys and the Google Maps people. And both of them had grown up in Michigan. Kasser had gone to General Motors Institute for College later, later to business school. And so he had, they had this unique blend of built in Detroit, people that also had lived in Silicon Valley and new AI and new bunch of great front edge leading technologists in that field. And so we spent about 14 months going back and forth on ideas, and he said, Okay, there’s a set of conditions that need to be true for me to start a startup. It has to have software margins. I’m not going to do hardware. It has to leverage the fact that I know the car companies as well as what’s going on at the big tech companies. And you know, it has to be truly differentiated. It can’t be something that becomes obsolete when AI gets commoditized. And so he had a whole list of things that he would look for, and as he came up with ideas, if it didn’t meet all of his conditions, he wouldn’t pursue the idea. And so he just kept waiting until it met all of his criteria. And then when he started the company, the first 10 people they hired was not just based on who they knew, but it was about assessing the risks. You know, what type of technical risks do we have? What kind of knowledge do we need that we don’t have on the team? And they would hire people based on risk removal. And so I think that that’s also a really good strategy for your first people. So they had to get along with each other, and had to have startup DNA, but they also had to specifically remove specific risks that could be existential to the company if they weren’t removed, which I think is a good way of doing it. And you know, they’ve just done a great job. They’ve been very deliberate in how they’ve run the company and and how they’ve scaled and, you know, just how they’ve upped their game throughout time. Amazing.
4:56
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.
