On this special segment of The Full Ratchet, the following Investors are featured:
- Eric Byunn of Centana Growth
- David Ulevitch of Andreessen Horowitz
- Jake Saper of Emergence Capital
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. On today’s special segment, we have Eric Biyun of Centonic Growth. Eric, what is the biggest mistake or hardest lesson you’ve learned as an investor, what’s the story behind? Yeah,
0:45
I came to the investing business from operate from a series of operating roles where I’ve been a manager in a company. That lesson that was very hard at the beginning, and which I still have to remind myself from time to time, is management is management. They are spending all of their mindshare on the issues and problems of advancing their company. We, as investors, it’s.. it can be easy to kind of sit back and be like, oh, I have a clear point of view of this. I’ve seen 50 companies in this space, or in this category, or in this situation, and you always have to do this. I just think that lesson is always, you got to work with, you got to trust management. They have a perspective, they have a view. There’s a reason for that. I think most management teams are very good about trying to understand the perspectives of their investors, and I think investors as a whole, whether it’s myself or others that I sit on boards with, we sometimes forget that we should do the thing
1:45
on today’s special segment, we have David Ulevich, GP of Andreessen Horowitz American Dynamism. David, what is the biggest mistake or hardest lesson you’ve learned as an investor?
1:55
There’s probably two people that I interviewed on the team early on who I didn’t hire, who have since gone on to become competitors, so I wish I had hired them. I guess that would you miss in that
2:04
journey cycle.
2:05
What did I miss? That is a, that is a good question that I actually am still trying to figure out the answer to. I think in the case of one of them, I failed to understand how high agency this person was, and how much of an original thinker he was. I think I didn’t interview deeply enough to understand that he was not a herd thinker, but was really an original thinker at his own point of view. You know, I’m very lucky I have a partner, Katherine Boyle, who she started the American Dynamics in practice with me. She is truly an original thinker, and so I benefit from that on a daily basis, and I think that’s an important attribute in venture, and I think I underestimated, actually, with both candidates, just how original their thinking was, and how they kind of came at things from a first principle to view, and how high agency they were to be able to articulate those things. I don’t think I interviewed them deep enough or asked the right questions to really identify that, which is now very apparent from observing them as investors, I
3:03
On today’s special segment, we have Jake Saper of Emergence. Jake, what is the biggest mistake or hardest lesson you’ve learned as an investor, and what’s the story behind it?
3:12
Well, I mentioned the Figma passing. I think that when you overly rotate on monetization and you under rotate on leading indicators of value creation, that’s where you mess up. There’s a place you mess up, right? Like, if, as an early stage investor, if I’m investing just based upon commercial success, then in some ways I’ve, like, missed the boat, because my job is to bet on the company before the commercialization, you know, is truly obvious to everybody. My job is to bet when, like, I have a unique thesis before the rest of the market. Mechanical Orchards, a good example, we invested in that company in 2023 and it was a services business, and people were like, what? And I remember actually being apologetic because I was explaining it to people, including total he’s.. I remember showing up at like a VC thing a few weeks after I did, and people like, what’s the most recent investment you’ve done, and I was like, well, I did this services business, and people were like, what, that’s stupid, and I mean, they didn’t say it, but you could see in their faces, but I think like, like leading indicators there were interesting, and like having following this hunch that, like, AI native service is going to be a thing, was the right, you know, so far it was the right bet. Who knows, obviously, how that whole AI native services thing will play out, but I’m betting a lot of my time and money on it.
4:10
I love that lesson. I feel like if you’re not doing investments that make people furrow their brow, maybe you’re not pushing the boundaries enough.
4:18
I’m literally going to my first board meeting today for a company called Bedrock Robotics, which is aiming to be way more for construction. Wow, I think similarly I kind of get like looks where it’s like, what, how was it? Like, does that make sense? Like, like, I don’t know if it will make sense or not, but hopefully people will be listening to this podcast in five years and be like, oh yeah, Bedrock Robotics way more for construction. Of course, that happened.
4:37
Amazing, that 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.
