On this special segment of The Full Ratchet, the following Investors are featured:
- Eric Byunn of Centana Growth
- Seth Levine of Foundry
- Natalie Dillon of Maveron
We asked guests for the most important piece of advice that they’d share with folks early in their venture 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.
We’re proud to partner with Ramp, the modern finance automation platform. Book a demo and get $150—no strings attached.
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.
Transcribed with AI:
0:19
Welcome back to TFR on today’s special segment, we ask guests for the most important piece of advice that they’d share with folks early in their venture career. Here’s the segment called key advice. On today’s special segment, we have Eric biu of sentonic growth, Eric, if you could share one piece of advice with a young, new investor, what would you tell them? I’d
0:45
tell them that it’s easy to go with the conventional wisdom, and that that will lead to mediocrity, and that you need to trust yourself on a particular point of view. What I’d say about that is most new investors start investing in a substantial way on some sort of a platform and some kind of a firm. Every firm is set up to help avoid silly mistakes in the most traditional form. You have this investment committee. You have a set of partners who will you present to them multiple times and tell you, what are you thinking? So there are a lot of guardrails to make sure that you don’t do something silly, and you should take all that feedback into account. But at the end of the day, the way you generate alpha, the way you generate exceptional returns, is to take a different point of view from everyone else. That’s what your colleagues have brought you in to do. And so at some point, you have to trust your own view, taking into account and hearing and engaging on any objections you have around you.
1:37
You Beth
1:43
on today’s special segment we have Seth Levine of Foundry Group. Seth, if you could share one piece of advice with a young, new investor, what would you tell them? I would say, relax like I feel like there’s so much.
1:55
I wrote a blog post once. It was one of the one of the more popular ones that I wrote. It was called I’m getting sick of the bullshit. And it talked a lot about just everyone sort of talks like everything’s amazing, and I think it’s easy. And you know, if you’re in the venture business, you probably get one of, you know, whatever, 20 different newsletters. And there’s always companies that are raising crazy valuations. And you know, we’re all listening to this podcast or that podcast where people are, like, talking their book and telling you about all the amazing things that they’ve invested in. And I think it sometimes sounds both to investors and to entrepreneurs, that everything’s easy, everything’s amazing. And I feel like that’s just, I mean, it’s not, because one of the other posts I wrote that got a lot of positive feedback was the 10 year entrepreneur. I was like, there are no overnight success, or there are very few overnight successes. And just, it’s just a reminder for people to like, take a step back, relax a little bit. You can only control what you can control. You know your job is to make the best decision you can with the information you have at that moment. And again, mostly you’re in the influence business, so all you’re doing is offering opinions. So I feel like that’s been took me a while to learn that as a VC, especially as I became a partner, I held on to everything so tightly because I wanted everything to work out and and I benefited. I had an early company like it ended up being the first company that I invested in as a partner at Foundry, ended up sort of very clearly didn’t take off. It wasn’t like straight straight up to the right. It had some fits and starts, but over a couple years, it was clear that it was going to work. And then it was a big outcome that returned over half the fund. It was a whatever 15 extra terms might that, and that enabled me to be like, Oh, okay, I can do this, right? Even if the next company went out, you know, went out of business, and the company after that was a 3x and not a 10x or whatever. But that’s the advice I would give to, certainly the investors, but also the entrepreneurs listening, just, just relax, right? Like it all happens, and, you know, you’ll make a better decision, and you’ll you’ll ultimately perform better if you just kind of take a deep breath and take a step back.
3:50
On today’s special segment, we have Natalie Dillon of maverick. Natalie, if you could share one piece of advice with a young, new investor, what would you tell them
3:58
the first year in venture is so challenging, so you have no idea what you’re doing. Know that that’s like a completely a that’s a universal experience, I think, at the very beginning, meet as many companies as you can, and something that I did very early on in my career, even before I joined venture. But recommend this to all new folks is, as in that first year, even in that first six months you’re meeting, you should meet with every company. Say yes, like, it’s helpful to get those reps. But more importantly, start to have your own personal tab of what are the companies that you’re gravitating towards? What are the companies that late at night you’re still thinking about, or on the weekends or and you may not initially be able to say, Hey, these are the five attributes that I’m seeing across these companies that I continue to gravitate but look back at that list six months and be like, Oh, now I can start to pattern match. What I really love is a founder that has domain expertise, or what I really love are marketplaces where they’re taking underutilized inventory and creating value added. Of it, whatever it may be, it could be niche, it could be broad, but I think it’s so hard when you’re first starting out to actually have like, a true framework for yourself. You may be mapping to a rubric or that your team is telling you, but that’s very different than developing your own personal conviction engine. It’s an important part of becoming an investor is knowing, like, what are the things you’re looking for, but it’s actually quite hard to know when you’re first starting
5:26
out.
5:31
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
