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Get your pitch-off on with our Disrupt Startup Alley companies on upcoming episodes of Extra Crunch Live

Disrupt is right around the corner, and this year the show is packed to the brim with incredible panels and conversations, an absolutely stacked Startup Battlefield cohort of companies launching on our stage, investor insights and a virtual expo hall full of exciting new products and services in the Startup Alley.

We can’t wait! Literally. So we’re giving you guys a sneak peek at some of the startups you might see at Disrupt in upcoming episodes of Extra Crunch Live.

Usually, the Extra Crunch Live crew sits down with founders and the investors who finance them to learn how they decided to partner with one another and, ultimately, how startups can get to “yes” when fundraising. In the latter half of the episode, those same guests give live feedback to folks in the audience who come on our virtual stage and pitch their products.

Truth be told, everyone loves a good pitch-off. So in these upcoming Startup Alley Edition episodes of Extra Crunch Live, we’re turning the entire episode into a pitch-off. SUA companies will come on stage, one at a time, and have exactly 60 seconds to get us excited about their startup. But it wouldn’t be a true pitch-off without some expert feedback.

I’m excited to announce the investors joining us on these episodes to share their insights and wisdom with both the startups and the audience.

On September 1, we’ll be joined by Neil Sequeira, co-founder and partner at defy.vc, as well as Stacey Bishop, partner at Scale Venture Partners.

Image Credits: Elena Zhukova / Scale Venture Partners

Sequeira was managing director at General Catalyst before venturing out to start Defy. Before GC, he was at TimeWarner Investments and was a founding member of AOLTW Ventures. Defy has a portfolio that includes Dropcam, Nest, Bustle and more. Sequeira has served on more than 40 company boards, so it should go without saying that he’ll have plenty of insightful feedback for our founders.

Bishop brings more than 20 years of investment experience to our little pitch-off. She currently serves on the boards of Abstract, Airspace, Demandbase, Extole, Lever and more. Bishop has also served on several boards where the company has seen a successful exit, including HubSpot, Bizible and Vitrue. Bishop specializes in business applications and will have lots to share with our pitch-off startups.  Register here for Extra Crunch Live with defy.vc and Scale Venture Partners.

On September 8, we’ll be joined by Next47 CEO and Managing Partner Lak Ananth and Moxxie Ventures founder and General Partner Katie Stanton.

Image Credits: Next47 / Amanda Aude

Ananth serves as founding CEO at Next47, which is backed by Siemens AG. He’s sat on several boards where he has helped the companies grow beyond $1 billion valuations. Ananth specializes in emerging areas of deep tech, including AI/ML, vertical SaaS, robotics, mobility, etc. Some of Ananth’s current investments include Verkada, rideOS and Markforged.

Katie Stanton has been an executive and an operator for much of her career, holding roles at Twitter, Google, Yahoo and Color across a wide variety of departments, including marketing, comms, recruiting, product and media. Stanton also served in the Obama White House and State Department after getting her career started as a banker at JP Morgan. She currently sits on the board of Vivendi and has invested in dozens of early-stage companies, including Airtable, Cameo, Carta, Coinbase, Literati, Modern Fertility, Shape Security and Threads. Register here for Extra Crunch Live with Next47 and Moxxie Ventures. 

You don’t want to miss these episodes of Extra Crunch Live. Register (for free) to come hang out with us!

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CEO Shishir Mehrotra and investor S. Somasegar reveal what sings in Coda’s pitch doc

Coda entered the market with an ambitious, but simple, mission. Since launching in 2014, it has seemingly forged a path to realizing its vision with $140 million in funding and 25,000 teams across the globe using the platform.

Coda is simple in that its focus is on the document, one of the oldest content formats/tools on the internet, and indeed in the history of software. Its ambition lies in the fact that there are massive incumbents in this space, like Google and Microsoft.

Co-founder and CEO Shishir Mehrotra told TechCrunch that that level of competition wasn’t a hindrance, mainly because the company was very good at communicating its value and building highly effective flywheels for growth.

Mehrotra was generous enough to let us take a look through his pitch doc (not deck!) on a recent episode of Extra Crunch Live, diving not only into the factors that have made Coda successful, but how he communicated those factors to investors.

Coda Pitch Doc

A screenshot from Coda’s pitch doc.

Extra Crunch Live also features the ECL Pitch-off, where founders in the audience come “onstage” to pitch their products to our guests. Mehrotra and his investor, Madrona partner S. Somasegar, gave their live feedback on pitches from the audience, which you can check out in the video (full conversation and pitch-off) below.

As a reminder, Extra Crunch Live takes place every Wednesday at 3 p.m. EDT/noon PDT. Anyone can hang out during the episode (which includes networking with other attendees), but access to past episodes is reserved exclusively for Extra Crunch members. Join here.

The soft circle

Like many investors and founders, Mehrotra and Somasegar met well before Mehrotra was working on his own project. They met when both of them worked at Microsoft and maintained a relationship while Mehrotra was at Google.

In their earliest time together, the conversations centered around advice on the Seattle tech ecosystem or on working with a particular team at Microsoft.

“Many people will tell you building relationships with investors … you want to do it outside of a fundraise as much as possible,” said Mehrotra.

Eventually, Mehrotra got to work on Coda and kept in touch with Somasegar. He even pitched him for Series B fundraising — and ultimately got a no. But the relationship persisted.

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Vise CEO Samir Vasavada and Sequoia’s Shaun Maguire break down the art of the pitch

In just a few short years, Vise has gone from launching on the Disrupt Battlefield stage to unicorn. Co-founders Samir Vasavada and Runik Mehrotra met Sequoia’s Shaun Maguire at an afterparty at the event, and Maguire ended up leading a seed and Series A round while Sequoia led the Series B. Last week, Vise raised its Series C of $65 million and was officially valued at $1 billion post-money.

A good pitch deck is short and simple, and covers the key points in less than 12 words a slide.

We sat down with Vasavada and Maguire to talk about the early fundraising process for Vise, specifically the seed round, and get a look at the startup’s first pitch deck. We discussed what Vasavada has learned about delivering a good fundraising pitch, and what stood out about the pitch and the product for Maguire.

Simplicity is key

Vasavada says he’s made dozens of pitch decks since starting Vise and that this early deck was not his best because it was trying to do too much.

“A good pitch deck is short and simple, and covers the key points in less than 12 words a slide,” said Vasavada, adding that many founders think they need to show investors every part of their business.

“The deck has to show that you’re solving an important problem, that you’ve got the path to an important solution, that there is a big market opportunity, and that your team is positioned to execute,” he said. “Those are the only four things that matter. Everything else can be discussed in the Q&A.”

The goal of a pitch meeting is not to get the “yes” instantly, and satisfy every curiosity, but rather to give the investor something to think about and a reason to want another conversation.

Vasavada explained to the audience that this early seed deck certainly went into too much detail and was too text-heavy. (You can check out the full deck below.)

Why will this product be successful right now?

Beyond the problem, solution, market and team, there is an additional X factor that makes a difference in pitching for fundraising.

Timing can make or break a startup. Incredible ideas, ones that have gone on to be some of the biggest businesses in the world, have fizzled out and died for being too early.

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Scale CEO Alex Wang and Accel’s Dan Levine explain why sometimes unconventional VC deals are best

Few companies have done better than Scale at spotting a need in the AI gold rush early on and filling that gap. The startup rightly identified that one of the tasks most important to building effective AI at scale — the laborious exercise of tagging data sets to make them usable in properly training new AI agents — was one that companies focused on that area of tech would also be most willing to outsource. CEO and co-founder Alex Wang credits their success since founding, which includes raising over $277 million and achieving break-even status in terms of revenue, to early support from investors including Accel’s Dan Levine.

Accel haș participated in four of Scale’s financing rounds, which is all of them unless you include the funding from YC the company secured as part of a cohort in 2016. In fact, Levine wrote one of the company’s very first checks. So on this past week’s episode of Extra Crunch Live, we spoke with Levine and Wang about how that first deal came together, and what their working relationship has been like in the years since.

Scale’s story starts with a pivot, and with a bit of rule-breaking, too — Wang went off the typical YC book by speaking to investors prior to demo day when Levine cold-emailed him after seeing Scale on Product Hunt. The Product Hunt spot wasn’t planned, either — Wang was as surprised to see his company there as anyone else. But Levine saw the kernel of something with huge potential, and despite being a relative unknown in VC at the time, didn’t want to let the opportunity pass him, or Wang, by.

Both Wang and Levine were also able to provide some great feedback on decks submitted to our regular Pitch Deck Teardown segment, despite the fact that Levine actually never saw a pitch deck from Wang before investing (more on that later). If you’d like your pitch deck reviewed by experienced founders and investors on a future episode, you can submit your deck here.

Knowing when to bend the rules

As mentioned, Levine and Accel’s initial investment in Scale came from a cold email sent after the company appeared on Product Hunt. Wang said the team had just put out an early version of Scale, and then noticed that it was up on Product Hunt — it was submitted by someone else. The community response was encouraging, and it also led to Levine reaching out via email.

“One of the side effects of that, one of the outcomes, was that we got this cold email from Dan,” he said. “We really knew nothing about Dan until his cold email. So like many great stories that started with a bold, cold email. And we were pretty stressed about it at the time, because in YC, they tell you pretty definitively, ‘Hey, don’t talk to a VC during the batch,’ and we were squarely in the middle of the batch.”

Wang and the team were so nervous that they even considered “ghosting” Dan despite his obvious interest and the prestige of Accel as an investment firm. In the end, they decided to “go rogue” and respond, which led to a meeting at the Accel offices in Palo Alto.

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CEO Manish Chandra and investor Navin Chaddha explain why Poshmark’s Series A deck sings

Mayfield partner Navin Chaddha and Poshmark founder and CEO Manish Chandra met all the way back in 2003, well before Poshmark was even a glimmer in his eye. They stayed connected over the years, through Chandra’s sale of his startup Kaboodle to Hearst and after he left.

At a breakfast one morning, Chandra told Chaddha he was going to try to do everything from his iPhone for the next six months.

Over the course of that time, the idea for Poshmark started to percolate into something more concrete. Chandra, following Kaboodle, knew he wanted to do several things differently. The first was create an engagement and revenue model that was symbiotic, rather than starting with engagement and having to build out a business model later. He also knew he wanted to start with people first, and build a founding team that had deep DNA in the fashion world to pair with his technical background.

He met Tracy Sun, brought her on, and got to work.

This was back in 2011, and Chandra was absolutely adamant that he wanted Poshmark to be an app, not a website. So adamant, in fact, that during beta he actually provided 100 users with video iPods. (He recalled that he only got 20% of them back.)

“Lead with love, and the money comes.” It’s one of the cornerstone values at Poshmark. The company practiced that early on by holding IRL, and then virtual, parties, allowing users to show each other their wares and create an engagement cycle that offered instant gratification. The user base grew from 100 to 150 to 1,000 and so on.

“We still to this day use a similar kind of strategy in a much more compressed timeframe as we go to different countries,” said Chandra. “We focus on building the community first and then scale that community.”

Chaddha and Mayfield led the company’s Series A deal a decade ago. On the latest episode of Extra Crunch Live, Chandra and Chaddha sat down with us and walked us through that original Series A pitch deck (which you can check out below). They also participated in the Pitch Deck Teardown, giving their expert feedback on decks submitted by the audience. If you’d like your deck to be featured on a future episode of Extra Crunch Live, hit up this link.

Poshmark’s Series A Deck

Time stamp — 11:00

Poshmark was built on a couple fundamental premises. The first was that the iPhone would transform the way we do just about everything. The second was more pointed: That fashion, at the time underserved by technology, was a discovery process over a direct search process. A decade ago, Chandra envisioned a fashion marketplace that mimicked shopping in the real world — walk into a shop and let natural attraction do its thing — without holding any inventory.

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Justworks’ Series B pitch deck may be the most wonderfully simple deck I’ve ever seen

It may be tough to remember, but there was a time long ago when Justworks wasn’t a household name. Though its monthly revenue growth charts were up and to the right, it had not even broken the $100,000 mark. Even then, Bain Capital Venture’s Matt Harris felt confident in betting on the startup.

Harris says that, with any investment (particularly at the early stage of a company), the decision really comes down to the team and more importantly, the founder.

Two of the main reasons this deck “sings” is the line it draws to the Justworks culture and that the deck isn’t “artificially simple.”

“Isaac is a long-term mercenary, but short- and medium-term missionary,” said Harris. “The word that really comes to mind is ‘structured.’ If you ask him to think about something and respond, he’ll think about it and come back with an answer that has four pillars underneath it. He’ll create a framework that not only answers your specific question, but can prove to be a model that will answer future questions of the same type. He’s a systems thinker.”

In 2015, Justworks closed its $13 million Series B, led by Bain Capital Ventures. Harris took a seat on the board. Since, the duo have been working closely together as Justworks has grown into the behemoth it is today.

But these relationships work both ways. Oates said that one of the main things he looks for in an investor is how they’ll react when the chips are down.

“Different people behave different ways under stress,” said Oates. “And people show their values and integrity in those types of situations. That’s when these things are tested. The simple way I think about this is, will this person pick me up from the airport in a pinch?”

Though he’s never asked, he believes Harris absolutely would.

On Extra Crunch Live, Harris and Justworks CEO Isaac Oates sat down to talk through how they resolve disagreements, why Oates never changed what must be one of the most simple pitch decks I’ve ever seen in my life, and how founders should think about pricing their products.

They also gave live feedback on pitch decks submitted by the audience in the Pitch Deck Teardown. (If you’d like to see your deck featured on a future episode, send it to us using this form.)

We record Extra Crunch Live every Wednesday at 12 p.m. PST/3 p.m. EST/8 p.m. GMT. You can see our past episodes here and check out the March slate right here.

Episode breakdown

  • Working through disagreements — 11:30
  • The Justworks Series B Deck — 15:00
  • Pricing the product — 25:00
  • Pitch deck teardown — 33:00

Working through disagreements

Despite their glowing praise of one another at the top of the episode, the founder/investor duo haven’t always seen eye to eye. But they did provide an excellent framework around how founders and VCs should wade through disagreements around the business.

Oates gave an example from 2017. He was considering putting in a dual-class stock, which would give a kind of high-vote, low-vote structure to the company. He said that it interested him because he’d seen other companies out there who were vulnerable after going public, whether it be activist shareholders or other outside forces, and that that might prevent a CEO from thinking about the long term.

Harris disagreed and gave a long list of reasons why that neither shared on the episode. However, Oates said that one of the great things to come out of that disagreement was seeing how Harris went about this decision.

Harris introduced Oates to every expert on this particular subject that he knew, asking them to have meetings and discuss it further.

In the end, Oates ultimately stuck to his guns and decided to go forward with the dual-class stock, but armed with all the information he needed to feel confident in the decision.

“I learned a lot about how Matt thinks and how he approaches decisions,” said Oates. “The process of making decisions is just as important as the content. As I’ve gotten to know him more, it means that when we find something where we don’t necessarily agree, we’re able to step back and make sure we have an intellectually rigorous way to process it.”

The story reminded me of a similar conversation with Ironclad CEO Jason Boehmig and Accel’s Steve Loughlin. They explained how much time and energy they spent early on in their investor/founder relationship talking about the “why” behind opinions and strategies and decisions, plotting out the short-, medium- and long-term plan for the company.

“I want to know what you want the company to look like so that I can push you and we can have constructive conversations around the plan,” said Loughlin. “That way, I’m not getting a phone call about whether or not they should hire a head of customer success without any context or a true north in mind.”

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Ironclad’s Jason Boehmig: The objective of pricing is to become less wrong over time

In 2017, Ironclad founder and CEO Jason Boehmig was looking to raise a Series A. As a former lawyer, Boehmig had a specific process for fundraising and an ultimate goal of finding the right investors for his company.

Part of Boehmig’s process was to ask people in the San Francisco Bay Area about their favorite place to work. Many praised RelateIQ, a company founded by Steve Loughlin who had sold it to Salesforce for $390 million and was brand new to venture at the time.

“I wanted to meet Steve and had kind of put two and two together,” said Boehmig. “I was like, ‘There’s this founder I’ve been meaning to connect with anyways, just to pick his brain, about how to build a great company, and he also just became an investor.’”

On this week’s Extra Crunch Live, the duo discussed how the Ironclad pitch excited Loughlin about leading the round. (So excited, in fact, he signed paperwork in the hospital on the same day his child was born.) They also discussed how they’ve managed to build trust by working through disagreements and the challenges of pricing and packaging enterprise products.

As with every episode of Extra Crunch Live, they also gave feedback on pitch decks submitted by the audience. (If you’d like to see your deck featured on a future episode, send it to us using this form.)

We record Extra Crunch Live every Wednesday at 12 p.m. PST/3 p.m. EST/8 p.m. GMT. You can see our past episodes here and check out the March slate right here.

Episode breakdown:

  • The pitch — 2:30
  • How they operate — 23:00
  • The problem of pricing — 29:00
  • Pitch deck teardown — 35:00

The pitch

When Boehmig came in to pitch Accel, Loughlin remembers feeling ambivalent. He had heard about the company and knew a former lawyer was coming in to pitch a legal tech company. He also trusted the reference who had introduced him to Boehmig, and thought, “I’ll take the meeting.”

Then, Boehmig dove into the pitch. The company had about a dozen customers that were excited about the product, and a few who were expanding use of the product across the organization, but it wasn’t until the ultimate vision of Ironclad was teased that Loughlin perked up.

Loughlin realized that the contract can be seen as a core object that could be used to collaborate horizontally across the enterprise.

“That was when the lightbulb went off and I realized this is actually much bigger,” said Loughlin. “This is not a legal tech company. This is core horizontal enterprise collaboration in one of the areas that has not been solved yet, where there is no great software yet for legal departments to collaborate with their counterparts.”

He listed all the software that those same counterparts had to let them collaborate: Salesforce, Marketo, Zendesk. Any investor would be excited to hear that a potential portfolio company could match the likes of those behemoths. Loughlin was hooked.

“There was a slide that I’m guessing Jason didn’t think much of, as it was just the data around the business, but I got pretty excited about it,” said Loughlin. “It said, for every legal user Ironclad added, they added nine other users from departments like sales, marketing, customer service, etc. It was evidence that this theory of collaboration could be true at scale.”

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Felicis’ Aydin Senkut and Guideline’s Kevin Busque on the value of simple pitch decks

Even though Kevin Busque is a co-founder of TaskRabbit, he didn’t get the response he was hoping for the first time he pitched his new venture to Felicis Ventures’ Aydin Senkut. Nonetheless, he said the outcome was one of the best things that could have happened.

“I’m kind of glad that he didn’t invest at the time because it really forced me to take a hard look at what we were doing and really enabled us to become Guideline,” said Busque. “That seed round was an absolute slog. I think I spent seven or eight months trying to raise a round for a product that didn’t exist, going purely on vision.”

Eventually, that idea evolved into Guideline, which describes itself as “a full-service, full-stack 401(k) plan” for small businesses. Eventually, Senkut did write a check — Felicis led Guideline’s $15 million Series B round. Today, Guideline has more than 16,000 businesses across 60+ cities, with more than $3.2 billion in assets under management. The company has raised nearly $140 million.

This week on Extra Crunch Live, Busque and Senkut discussed Guideline’s Series B pitch deck — which Senkut described as a “role model” — and how they built trust over time.

The duo also offered candid, actionable feedback on pitch decks that were submitted by Extra Crunch Live audience members. (By the way, you can submit your pitch deck to be featured on a future episode using this link right here.)

We’ve included highlights below as well as the full video of our conversation.

We record new episodes of Extra Crunch Live each Wednesday at 12 p.m. PST/3 p.m. EST/8 p.m. GMT. Check out the February schedule here.

Episode breakdown:

  • How they met: 1:30
  • Building trust: 11:30
  • Inside Guideline’s Series B deck: 16:00
  • Pitch deck teardown: 33:00

How they met

Senkut and Busque met nearly a decade ago, when Busque was still at TaskRabbit. Several years later, Busque launched out on his own and went fundraising for his original idea. Even though he got a no from Senkut, it wasn’t an easy decision.

Looking back, Senkut said he had much more freedom to follow his instincts while angel investing.

“As an institutional fund with LPs, we were feeling the pressure of checking all the checkmarks,” explained Senkut. “It’s amazing how, sometimes, being more structured or analytical actually does not always lead you to make better decisions.”

When Busque came back around after the pivot, looking to raise a Series B, Senkut called it a “no-brainer,” particularly because of the type of CEO Busque is.

“My opinion of Kevin as a person is that he’s an excellent wartime CEO, but also he’s a product visionary,” said Senkut. “We call them ‘missionary CEOs.’ There are mercenary CEOs who can extract every ounce of dollar from a rock, but we are gravitating much more toward CEOs like Kevin who are focused on product first. People who have a really acute vision of what the problem is, and. a very specific vision for how to solve that problem and ultimately turn it into a long-term scalable and successful company.”

Busque said he was drawn to Senkut based on his level of conviction, explaining that Senkut doesn’t always have to go by the book.

“If he wants to write a check because the founder is great or the product is great, he does it,” said Busque. “It’s not necessarily that he has to see a certain metric or growth pattern.”

Building trust

Obviously, years of staying connected and communicating (and not just about Guideline) laid the foundation for building a relationship. Busque said the honesty in their conversations, including Senkut’s initial rejection, lended itself greatly to the trust they have.

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Extra Crunch Live is back in 2021, connecting founders with tech giants and each other

In April 2020, when the entire world was laser-focused on the coronavirus pandemic, we realized that startupland was in unprecedented territory. How should startups navigate fundraising, operations, and better understand the market? 

In a matter of a couple weeks, we spun up a little series called Extra Crunch Live, giving Extra Crunch members the chance to hear from and connect with leaders across the industry. We brought on some of the biggest names in tech and VC, including the likes of Roelof Botha, Kirsten Green, Zach Perret, Charles Hudson, Aileen Lee, Mark Cuban, Howard Lerman, Niko Bonatsos and Alexa Von Tobel — and the list could go on and on and on

Somehow, we did 44 episodes of the show in 2020, the year of our Lord. 

By any measure, it’s been a huge success. But we’re not ones to rest on our laurels here at TechCrunch. Which is why I’m thrilled to announce Extra Crunch Live 2.0. 

In 2021, we’ll be tweaking the format of ECL to provide even more interactivity between founders and audience members and the speakers we host on the show. You’re going to love it. 

What’s New: 

  • Series A – Learn how others have fundraised! We’ll have a segment dedicated to hearing from founder/investor duos who walk us through the Series A pitch deck that led to investment. 
  • Pitch Deck Teardowns – Extra Crunch members will have the opportunity to submit their pitch deck and get feedback from our guests, which will include VCs and founders (EC members can submit their pitch decks right here!). 
  • Live Pitch-offs – Audience members can raise their hand to practice their elevator pitch in front of the audience and get real-time feedback from VCs.
  • Networking!! – The Extra Crunch membership is a community. ECL will be an opportunity to meet your fellow audience members, even in a virtual environment. Who knows? Maybe you’ll meet your next co-founder or investor! 
  • Consistency – ECL will always be at 12pm PT/3pm ET on Wednesdays. When it comes to your calendar, set it and forget it. 

We’re super excited about our ECL plans for 2021 and we hope you are, too. More on upcoming speakers soon. 

Remember, Extra Crunch Live events are for EC members only, so if you haven’t joined Extra Crunch, get over here! 

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General Catalyst’s Katherine Boyle and Peter Boyce are looking for ‘obsessive’ founders

General Catalyst has made early bets on some of the biggest companies in tech today, including Airbnb, Lemonade and Warby Parker.

We sat down with Katherine Boyle and Peter Boyce, who co-lead the firm’s seed-stage investments, to discuss what they look for in founders, which sectors they’re most excited about and how business has changed in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic.

This conversation is part of our broader Extra Crunch Live series, where we sit down with VCs and founders to discuss startup core competencies and get advice. We’ve spoken to folks like Aileen Lee, Mark Cuban, Roelof Botha, Charles Hudson and many, others. You can browse the full library of episodes here.

Check out our full conversation with Boyce and Boyle in the YouTube video below, or skim the text for the highlights.

Which personality traits are most important in founders

Katherine Boyle: I look for what I would call this obsessive trait, where they are learning more about the regulatory complications, where they are constantly trying to figure out how to solve a problem.

I’d say that the common theme among the founders that I support are that they have this sort of obsessive gene or personality, where they will go deeper and deeper and deeper. When we invest in these companies, it becomes very clear that they often have sort of a contrarian view of the industry. Maybe they are not industry-native. They come at it from a different perspective of problem solving. They’ve had to defend that thesis for a very, very long time in front of a variety of different customers and different people. In some ways, that makes them much stronger in terms of the way they approach problems.

Peter Boyce: I think the first would be being magnetic for talent. It ends up influencing the speed of learning and development. Really incredible founding teams that can be magnetic for talent and learning just kind of spirals out of control in really good ways over time. I really look for the speed and the sources of learning. And can folks be really intentional? Can they get the right set of advisors and teammates around them?

The second would be the personal connection to the problem space. It’s like there’s this kind of deep-seated source of energy and fuel that actually isn’t going to run out. Catherine and I’ve been lucky to work across a number of different particular thematic areas, but the thing they have in common is just this personal connection to how and why their business needs to exist. Because I just think that that fuel doesn’t run out, you know what I mean? Like, that’s renewable.

On fundraising and building trust remotely

Boyle: If you’re someone who’s comfortable presenting on Zoom, making connections on Zoom, or using Signal and using Twitter and being very online, then I 100% think that you can make investments, build community and build connections through digital worlds and digital platforms. If you really like that in-person connectivity, then you might consider staying in a tech hub, or you might consider sort of these distanced walks until things go back to normal.

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