On this special segment of The Full Ratchet, the following Investors are featured:
- Ben Black of Akkadian Ventures
- John Chen of Fika Ventures
- Ross Fubini and Manish Patel of XYZ Venture Capital
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. On today’s special segment, we have Ben Black, managing director of Acadian Ventures, CIO of PowerLaw Corp, and founder of Raise Global. Ben, tell us a story about an exceptional founder you’ve worked with and the specific thing they do that’s unique.
0:51
Well, my favorite founder is really a story of perseverance. Gary Beasley is a longtime entrepreneur in in the prop tech space. He is the CEO of a company called Roofstock, and Roofstock has had an incredibly tumultuous journey. Roofstock is a marketplace for buying and selling single-family home real estate and managing it. It’s like a full, full-service marketplace that’s kind of everything around single-family real estate. And that space was incredible for a while. Interest rates went up, hammered, and now it’s all sorts of external like pressures on it. And Gary is still working on it to this day, and he has recreated that company like three times before my eyes, pivoted to something new to turn the card and find something new again. And I think that that kind of perseverance in Silicon Valley is so rare.
1:44
Yeah,
1:45
I’ve backed a lot of like hot founders, right? And the first time you know things get really, really hard, they go like, “Well, I’m just going to bounce off and do the next one. Besides the fact, he’s just a great operator, like, and he has the true ability to both be an external CEO as well as like running a really good company, he you know picked a really hard space and he has recreated the company again, and I just respect him so much for that.
2:16
On today’s special segment, we have John Chen of Fika. John, tell us a story about an exceptional founder you’ve worked with and the specific thing they do that’s unique. I
2:25
think Jake Cronin at Zero is an incredible leader of people, but the the one thing that I admire most about him is his ability to make decisions with 70% information, and this is obviously like everyone talks about this, but it’s much like when you see it in action, like you know what it looks like. Because I I typically tend to be a much more deliberate decision maker. I want to check all the corner cases, and I want to like sleep on it and and rotate it around and turn turn turn an idea around. He turns like the speed of decision making into an advantage. Like he he takes in all the inputs, he weighs it, and he’s able to actually calibrate the what’s at stake in a decision very quickly, and also determine like is this a one-way door where we can’t reverse it or not, and get to the bottom of okay, well now we’re going to move in this direction. And usually it makes me uncomfortable. It’s like whoa, whoa, we haven’t we haven’t actually like fully bottomed out on like what you know all the you know scenarios C and D and E. But I think that the speed of decision making is like he’s usually you know he’s sometimes right and he’s sometimes wrong. He’s usually right. The ability to make it quickly just means that like he’s able to iterate much faster and learn from those lessons. And I think that’s a really important trait in a in a leader, especially in today’s world where there is so much uncertainty about what is here to stay and and what’s a fleeting trend?
3:49
On today’s special segment, we have Ross Fubini and Manish Patel of XYZ Venture Capital. Ross and Manish, tell us about an exceptional founder you’ve worked with and the specific thing they do that’s unique.
4:02
I have talked about have talked about Androll, but it’s because I want to explain to you a thing that nobody realizes about Androll. Androll is now well established as a new neo prime in the defense space. But what no one realizes is under the covers, what they’re actually incredible at, and have been since the beginning is prototyping, like generating whole new hardware and software, firefighting Humvees, breech devices, autonomous helicopters that may or may not have any purpose, that have any need, but iterating and creating those things and then figuring out which one of them are going to scale. Which one is going to become a counter drone solution? Which one is going to become a solution for secure communications? Which one is going to become the satellite network that we need? But it’s that iteration cycle, that discovery cycle, that exists within the company, which is truly. Truly novel, and is so different now from so many different defense companies, which show up like we have one thing, and that one thing is going to make 10 100 billion trillion dollars. It’s like well, or the thing might be 10 degrees off, and Andrew has this unbelievable discovery motion, and it really comes from a combination of you know Matt Grim and Schimp, the CEO and Palmer. It’s like the combination of the founders that enable them to do this.
5:37
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.
