On this special segment of The Full Ratchet, the following Investors are featured:
- Glenn Solomon of Notable Capital
- Vivek Vaidya of super{set}
- John Chen of Fika Ventures
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 Glenn Solomon of Notable. Glenn, what is the biggest mistake or hardest lesson you’ve learned? What’s the story behind it?
0:43
I think my biggest successes, by far, all correlate most highly with the quality of founding teams I’ve backed. No matter how great an idea is, if the founding team isn’t stellar, the outcome is not going to be great. I’ve had I’ve had to relearn this lesson many times, many many times in my career, and you know, but thankfully, I’ve also been bailed out many times by investing in incredible founders who always seem to find a way to make lemonade, even if even if they get dealt lemons. So.
1:24
On today’s special segment, we have Vivek Vaidya of Superset. Vivek, can you tell us a story highlighting a critical lesson that has changed the way you lead?
1:32
It’s along the lines of what I was saying about Satya, right? And it’s the lesson that I learned for myself is I cannot do everything myself, even though I might like to, even though I might things would only be done in a certain way if I had done them, I had to get really comfortable with giving people the space and delegating authority to them, pushing authority down, and then giving them enough of the context. That’s the other thing I learned. That’s the one thing I learned is it’s not just enough to delegate. You have to delegate and provide context, and no amount of context is too much. What I do now is I go out of my way to tell people why I’m asking you to do X, Y, and Z. Why am I asking you to do that? And I either narrate a personal experience or I’ll tell them, well, if this happens, that will happen, and this will happen. So that providing delegation with context has been key change in the last maybe five seven years or so. How I’ve I’ve led
2:31
on today’s special segment. We have John Chen of Fika. John, what is the biggest mistake or hardest lesson you’ve learned as an investor? What’s the story behind it?
2:39
I think like many invest, or maybe not many investors. In my specific case, I think passing on companies because of the deal spec has been, you know, one of the the bigger mistakes. You know, in and and this again, this runs runs counter to you know a lot of you know what constitutionally like FICA cares about making sure that again incentives are aligned on you know something that’s reasonable on all sides from evaluation and ownership perspective and all of that but the ones that are you know the the outlier outcomes you know oftentimes like look different or outrageous in in certain ways and so yeah not like not allowing the deal spec. Maybe maybe the lesson is actually not allowing the deal spec at all to creep into the conversation until you’ve actually done the real work of understanding the opportunity, the founder quality, etc. I think that’s like starting with the work before thinking about the deal is a lesson I’ve had to learn many, many times over.
3:46
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, overprepare, choose carefully, and invest confidently. Thanks for joining me.
