The Long Game of Venture and Generosity with David Hornik

0:00Welcome to the Give First podcast, where we explore how generosity drives success in business and in life. I'm Brad Feld, and today I'm joined by David Hornik, founding partner at Lobby Capital and the poster child for Adam Grant's bestselling book, Give and Take. David's been living the Give First philosophy for 25 years in venture capital, providing that you can do great as an investor while prioritizing relationships over transactions. From being one of the first VC bloggers to running the legendary Lobby Conference, he's built an extraordinary career on a simple principle. Help amazing people achieve their dreams, and the universe will take care of the rest.

0:40Let's dive into how being genuinely generous became David's competitive advantage.

0:50Hi everyone, this is David Cohen, and I'm here with my amazing co-host, Brad Feld. Hey Brad, and this is the Give First podcast. In the startup world, Give First means simply trying to help anyone, especially entrepreneurs, without any expectation of getting anything back. So we'll be talking to mentors and founders about what Give First looks like in action and how it makes great entrepreneurship possible. We polled everyone and they said consistently that their favorite part of the show was the legal mumbo jumbo. So here it is. The following discussion is an expression of personal opinion and does not represent the opinion of Techstars or any company we discuss.

1:25Our conversations for informational purposes only, including any mention of securities or funds. This is not legal business investment or tax advice, and is not intended for use by any investor. Certain of Techstars funds own or may own in the future securities and some of the companies discussed in this podcast. Got it?

1:46David Hornick, it's wonderful to see you with your lovely round glasses that look just like my reading glasses. Thank you, sir. These are bifocals, so I can use them for both. I have extreme progressives, and I read so much that my doctor finally told me I needed separate classes for my reading. Well, you know, it's so interesting. So I'm dyslexic, and it's an interesting challenge in this world when, you know, like reading is the thing. You're supposed to be reading. And here I am. I still have terrible eyesight because I went to law school and it destroyed my eyes. But as a dyslexic, I should at least have the advantage of excellent eyes.

2:25But there you go. Oh, well, genetics. I curse genetic thing. Well, thanks for spending time. I love to think of you for people who don't know you as one of the poster children for the philosophy of give first. part of that being your very visible presence in Adam Grant's book, Give and Take. And we'll get to that. But let's start with like, what are you doing today? You know, what excites you? What have you been doing? What are some of the things for people that don't know who David Hornick is that they could tie back to you? Yeah, great. I mean, you know, I am a VC. I'm a venture capitalist. I invest in little companies early.

3:11I hope they get bigger. You know, that's the day job. But that job, as you well know, is such a strange job because it involves a billion different things and you can do it any way you want to do it. And so I've just hit 25 years in the business. And for the last 25 years, the way I've wanted to do it is to just be helpful to all sorts of smart, interesting people in any way I can and know that some point in the future, the universe will result in it working out. I believe in a world that is about relationships. I do not believe in a world that is about transactions. And so for my entire career, and certainly for the 25 years I've been a VC, my life has been about relations.

3:57How do you meet great, interesting people? How do you engage with them on an honest level? How do you help them to achieve the things that will make them happy? And if I'm successful at any of that, then, you know, it will work out. And so far, that's been the case, right? And so, you know, the most significant alternative things to the venture world is I've been running this conference thing called the lobby for 20 years. And it's brought together a really interesting and fun, lovely group of people. And then I've been teaching for the same about 25 years, you know, law school, business school, undergrad, mostly because I just think students are awesome and I want to spend time with them and I want to figure out how I can spend more time with them.

4:48That's fabulous. Well, I know that you raised a fund recently, so maybe just give yourself a little brag on that? What's the fund that you raised? Sure. When I joined the venture business, I came into a really astonishing fund called August Capital with some folks who had been very, very successful. They were the first investors in Microsoft and Sun and Compaq and blah, blah, blah. They were astonishing. And I was there for 20 years through August 3, 4, 5, six, and then the seventh fund. And after August seven, I had a conversation with my partner, Eric, who had really become kind of my right-hand person.

5:30And we said, what do we want to do next? And we decided to bring together the lobby conference and this community with the firm. And so we raised a new fund that was really just a continuation of what we'd been doing, but called it Lobby Capital. And so we raised Lobby One, I don't know, three or four years ago. and we just raised lobby two. And so, you know, we're early stage investors. If you're working on something interesting that involves software and you've made a little bit of progress, then great. Tell me about it. You know, that's that's I now have a whole new pot of money and I'm really excited to fund great people.

6:09For people who don't know what the lobby is, give a couple of minutes Yeah, the lobby is just, you know, if you took the conference world where you go to some hotel and then a bunch of people are on stage in a dark room and you're sitting in that dark room wondering to yourself, why am I sitting here? If you were me, then you wandered out to the lobby because there were interesting people out in the lobby. And so I just spent all my time at conferences talking to people in the lobby about what they were up to. And I decided, wouldn't it be better to just have a conference that was about those conversations?

6:45So for the last 20 years, there are a couple hundred people come together in Hawaii to talk about the stuff that's important to them. And when I started it, I was like, oh, this is a tech conference. This is a business conference. Every topic is going to be running a good board meeting or AI. And what I've realized is humans like to engage with other humans as humans. And so the lobby conversations now might be, you know, agentic AI and customer support, but it's just as likely to be, you know, we had an incredibly lovely session called Raising LGBTQ Kids with a bunch of parents who had LGBTQ kids and wanted to talk about, you know, the joys of these extraordinary kids.

7:32And it was an amazing hour. And, you know, meanwhile, these were some of the most interesting tech, you know, entrepreneurs and investors on the planet. But what we wanted to talk about was our kids, you know, and that's what's made it really compelling. And it's resulted in, you know, extraordinary friendships and extraordinary, you know, business connections because people want to work with other people they respect and love. that's awesome let's talk about uh what i would consider to be a fame moment for you yeah uh which was around 2013 uh being the lead-off character in uh adam grant's book give and take and for me uh and for people listening that that are regular listeners they know that Adam has had huge influence on me and his thinking specifically sort of was adjacent or overlapped at the same time that I was sort of playing around with this notion of startup communities and what a startup community was.

8:41And this construct that I had, just a simple paragraph, it was very anecdotal. It had no research behind it that I described as give before you get. And the definition of that was very similar at the time of that paragraph that I wrote when I go back and look at it again, very similar to the definition of give first, which is this idea that you're willing to put energy into a system without knowing what you're going to get out of it. It's not altruistic, but you expect to get something back over time from someone, but all these things are not defined up front or non-transactional. Adam then, comes out maybe six months later with this book that's not just got a bunch of good stories in it, but thoroughly researched.

9:29Right. Talks about three different categories of people, givers, takers, and matchers. And he starts the book with you as the example. And of course, at the very end of it, he sort of has the very good writer's hook of, you know, well, you know, if you do the sort of research on who comes out ahead and who comes out worse, like the givers always come out worse. And then you turn the page. And the next thing is, and oh, by the way, the givers also always come out best. Yeah. And so, you know, there's this bifurcation. And then he goes on to like, talk about what the different characteristics are that cause that bifurcation, including the dynamics with matchers and takers.

10:19How did you get to know Adam? How did that come about? What was it like, you know, being interviewed? And what was it like sort of being on the receiving end of the response to what then became like he was he was number one for a while in New York Times bestsellers? I mean, this was it. I mean, that book was an astonishing book. And to this day, I'll have someone, you know, people say, Hornick, like, are you the Hornick in give and take? And I'll get emails. I just got an email, you know, this weekend that was, I know because of give and take that you're a giver. And so let me ask something of you.

10:59You know, it's like, oh, I think, I think you should reread the book because you're kind of missing the point. But, you know, the way I met Adam in many ways came out of just your philosophy and my philosophy, which is you say yes to things because that's how the universe is, you know. And Reid Hoffman, a friend of ours, said, hey, David, I have this thing I've been doing called Silicon Valley Comes to the UK. Because, you know, he had gone to Oxford and I had gone to Cambridge. And he was like, you know, they're trying to build a bigger tech ecosystem and startup ecosystem. And so we just spend a week talking to students at Oxford and Cambridge about what it's like.

11:44And maybe you want to come out. And I said, yeah, of course I do. That sounds amazing. You know, let's do that. So a group of us, a really fun group of people, DJ Patil, who ended up being the chief data scientist of the Obama administration, and Joey Ito, who ended up being the head of the media lab. They were just like this fascinating group of people. And we flew out and we were doing a bunch of things. And along the way, I met the editor of Wired, who was in the audience in one of these conversations. And he said, oh, David, I read your blog. And you and I share this blogging thing because we had been some of the earliest VC bloggers back when blogging was new, right?

12:29You're too humble. You were the first VC blogger. I mean, I think it depends on who you talk to. You, Fred Wilson, Ed Sim, and I can all sort of duke it out for first. I remember when I started blogging, I remember I'd seen your blog. And, you know, you mentioned Ed. I think I remember having read Ed's blog. Obviously, I didn't meet him after. But you were definitely first on my list. All right. Well, it is possible that it was the first blog. And so the Wired editor had read. I was writing quite consistently and he'd read my stuff. And so he said, hey, David, if you ever want to write something for Wired, let me know.

13:13And I said, of course, you know, let me know. Happy to do it. You know, we chatted, exchanged information. And I was literally heading to the airport and I get a text from him. It says, hey, one of my one of my columnists just had to drop out. Any chance you have something you'd like to write for the next issue? And I had just read this thing that had completely pissed me off. It was this story in Stanford magazine about a set of professors, Stanford and Harvard Business School professors, who had done an experiment that determined that jerky executives were more successful than nice ones. And I read the article and I just said, this is bullshit.

14:01I do not believe this at all. So I said to him, 100%, I absolutely have something I want to write. When do you need it? And he said, well, the sooner you could write it, the better. And so literally on the plane flying from London back to the Bay Area, I wrote this article. And basically with the idea that, look, if you think about business in a transactional way, in a one-off way, then for sure, if you're a jerk, you can take advantage of the situation. But business is not a one-off experience. Business is about a long-term relationship and it's about your reputation and it's about longitudinal experience.

14:40And therefore, it is not the case that executives who are jerks are the most successful. That's not the case. And the article that the editor has titled it, Nice Guys Finish First, dot, dot, dot, eventually, which I 100 % agreed with. So I get this email from Adam Grant, who I'd never heard of. And he says, hey, I'm working on this book. I just read your article. Do you actually believe that? And if you do, do you mind hopping? I'd love to hop on the phone. And I say, 100%, like I religiously believe that. And I'd love to catch up. and we were on the phone the next day. It was supposed to be for an hour.

15:24We talked for like two. And at the end of the conversation, and in that conversation, I shared the story of Danny Shader and Pay Near Me and trying to fund the company and not getting the deal. And he was so excited. But what I realized is because he's such a good storyteller, what he realized was, oh, this is such a good story where you look like a moron for being a giver. You know, like you it looks like you've done the wrong thing for half of the story. And then it turns out that it turns around and it's a good thing. So that's how I met Adam. And then he and I had a bunch of conversations.

16:02And then he and I are now good friends. And and we have lots of conversations about all sorts of things. That's wonderful. So book, you know, interview happens. And for anybody that's ever. That's listening, it's ever been interviewed for a newspaper article or for a book. the opacity of what ensues is fascinating, right? Because a good writer, a good journalist doesn't send you back the thing and say, feel free to edit whatever you want. I guess podcasts today, that's the thing too. I'm happy to let you take a look at the podcast and see if there's anything you don't like. And the real sort of historical way of doing this stuff was like you do your thing and then crickets for a while.

16:50And then one day the thing comes out. If it's an article, it happens pretty quickly. If it's a book, it might be six months later. And sometimes you probably got the advanced reader's copy of Adam's book. But by that point, it's baked. You're not giving feedback on anything. You're not doing anything. And so you got Adam's book. What was your reaction as you – two layers. One is got whatever you got is the first thing to read. What was your, before you'd read it, what was your, how'd you feel? And then my sense, my, my conversation with Adam was, okay, what's the theory? Like if the theory of the case, Adam, is that there are givers and takers and takers are more successful than we need to talk a lot more because I just think that's wrong.

17:42And I'll give you all sorts of examples. And I introduced him to people in the context of the book anyway. It was like, I just don't think those things are true. Right. But it wasn't. He said, no, the research is very clear. And he's, you know, what's astonishing about Adam is that he has studies for everything. He has this photographic memory for studies. So it's like, you know, the phone a friend thing on a rare occasion, I'll be having a conversation with someone and they'll, they'll posit something and I'll think, I don't really think that's true. and I'll text Adam in a meeting like, hey, Adam, here's the proposition, whatever.

18:17And I'll in almost every instance, get back this text that says, yes, that's correct or no, it's wrong. There are three studies and here's what the studies, you know, like, and so I'll get to say in the meeting, okay, wait, according to Adam Grant, these three studies say that you're full of shit or whatever, you know. But anyway, we had this conversation was very clear to me that, you know, what I believe to be true was what Adam had determined to be true. But beyond that, I had no idea where it was going to come out. And as you say, I got an advanced reader copy of the book and I was flying with one of my kids and I'm reading the thing, you know, and in the beginning, I'm like, oh, this is going terrible.

19:02like there's no way that Adam's gonna sell me out this badly but like boy this is tough and then of course it comes around and then I think like what an extraordinary and generous depiction of me but my favorite thing was there's a line in the book he talks about different givers over time and he talks about my story when I read somebody's talking about Abraham Lincoln you know, and how Lincoln had done this and that. And there's a sentence that, and I handed the book to my son who was sitting next to me. And I just showed him the sentence. I did read the sentence and the sentence said, Lincoln comma, like Hornick comma, something, something amazing, you know?

19:45And, uh, I just started laughing and my son throws the book down, like, get a, you know, get a grip. And I emailed Adam and I said, well, it's extraordinarily generous of you. It's the book is fantastic and I agree with all of it. But holy cow, that sentence comparing Abraham Lincoln to David Hornick. And he said, yeah, that was way over the top. But my editor liked it, wanted my editor wanted it in. I said, well, my son thinks it's insane. Well, I reread the first roughly third of the book over the weekend in advance of this just to remember it. I hadn't read it in quite some time. And I remember when I hit that sentence, I thought to myself, yeah, I've always thought of David as a shorter, better looking version of Abraham Lincoln.

20:35Thank you. Yes, I appreciate that. That's exactly how my family thinks of me. that's great well let's let's uh let's cycle around you know so that book came out a dozen years ago and you've continued to live your life very uh you know very visibly for people that know you very publicly uh in the same way that it's represented uh in the book you know how has that worked for you well look at i think it's worked amazingly um i when i was made a part you know like a partner in my venture firm, a banker from Goldman Sachs reached out and said, I'd love to meet with you. You know, like you're going to be rich in the future and I want to talk to you.

21:22And stupidly, I said, sure, come on over. And so I was having this conversation and and I said to him, like, I can't possibly be worth your time. You know, how much money do you need to manage for me to be worth your time? He gave me some ridiculous number. And I said, you know, I'll never have that much money. And he was like, well, of course you will. Like, don't sell yourself short. And I was like, no, I'm going to give it away. Like, why would I, what is the advantage of amassing that money? So you could, and he looked at me and he was like, well, what is your goal? Right. What is your goal as a VC?

21:59And I said, my goal is to be as successful a VC as possible without being an asshole. And he was like, so confused. Like, how is that? How is that a goal? Like, you know, but that's been my goal. My goal is, you know, but the challenge of that is part of that is you have to be a successful VC. It's not enough to say like, oh, David was such a good guy. And yeah, it was a mediocre investor, but he was such a good guy. No, I want you to say like, holy cow, that guy has crushed it as a business person while still prioritizing relationships and the humanity of the experience. And so it's important to me to be economically successful, right?

22:48To have these companies succeed or it undermines the fact that you can be successful while being a great human, right? And you've done this. The other thing that you have done that I have done is to be honest about who we are. This isn't, oh, I'm some master of the universe, whatever. I talk about my dyslexia. I talk about my kids' mental health challenges. I talk about the things that make it hard because it is hard. But in the end, if you say, I'm going to try and be as helpful and supportive to extraordinary people as possible, it will work out, right? It has worked out. And how lucky is that?

23:34That's been amazing. I think the way you describe it is awesome. I mean, we've always been very simpatico in terms of our styles. And while we haven't spent huge amounts of time together, you know, you can just see it in the things that are interwoven between us. And just, you know, listening to you talk about it is very reaffirming to me. I mean, there's a lot of these moments, especially, you know, now while I'm doing this and out of hibernation for six months and talking about this concept, you know, fully with the idea of going, you know, back into hibernation, enjoying turning 60 and like saying, you know, all right, I got, I got work to do, but I'm not going to worry about sort of the public facing dynamic around it.

24:18Yeah. You know, the, the number of people in the world, especially in 2025, who are very focused on transactional dynamics, who view things as a win, lose everything, who are playing zero sum games, who are trying to be dominant, you know, who, to your comment earlier, I don't have that much money because, yeah, I'm going to make a bunch of money, but I'm going to give my money away versus, you know, I need more power. I need more money. That's how I get my own sense of self. Like, it's, it's, I don't have the right words for it. I mean, it's it would be nice for my from my worldview, it would be nice if there were more people that out of the gate embrace that frame of reference.

25:06Right. And I think I've accepted now as I get close to 60, that the only way to reinforce that across society is just to talk about it. And everybody gets a choice as to how they want to behave. But, you know, seeing somebody that's had the success that you've had with the clarity that you talk about where, you know, by the way, the cynical person could say, you know, something around, well, that was a nice moment in Adam's book. and then what happened 12 years later. But, you know, the through line, the through line of the behavior is actually positive reinforcement. I think of other people, you know, in my world that I think, you know, have very, very similar frames of reference.

25:47Greg Sands immediately comes to mind as somebody. Scott Dorsey would be another person that immediately comes to mind with the same frame of reference. Sean O'Sullivan, like, you know, sets of people that have been very, very successful, all either founders or VCs or both who have real clarity of their own view about being themselves, being their own person in this very complex environment that we're in. So, you know, for my conference, it's been this invite only event, right? I'm the benevolent dictator of the lobby. And so I ask for recommendations and people give me recommendations, which is the best way to meet great new people.

26:30But I talk to everyone before they get invited to the lobby. And my partners, others have said, like, that's a crazy amount of time. Like, how is that a good use of your time? And the answer is that in a half hour, if you are not a giver, it is obvious. So I'm just having that conversation to hear about you and learn about your... Now people are hearing this. They're going to be like, ha, I can game him. I know how to get my lobby. invite. No way. And gave it because you can't help yourself. You inevitably say, oh, well, I built that company or whatever. You're like, no, you didn't build it. Like you helped, you were involved.

27:11Like, it's just amazing. And it's very rare because if I said to you, hey, you know, who do you think would be great? You'd introduce me to the Greg Sands of this world. And I say, oh, they're amazing. But every so often I'll have a conversation and six minutes in, I'll be like, oh, no, you don't have you do not share this worldview. And if you don't share the worldview, I'm not interested in creating a community that accelerates you. Right. It's like taking a cancer cell and giving it an accelerant. No, I want to take these extraordinary benevolent cells and figure out how I can make them grow faster.

27:49You know, I think that's a great line to end on. I think the anti-cancer benevolent cell growth is a good thing. I'll carry that around all day. David, thanks for the time today. It's really great to connect again and, you know, just reinforce some of these important things around givers. And both of us have a lot to thank Adam Grant for in terms of not, you know, not just codifying it, but also doing, again, real research around it versus just anecdotal. Look, it can work. I promise. Trust me. so thank you it was great loved it thanks a lot for listening to the show today we'd love to hear your feedback, ideas or who you'd like to hear next on Give First and please leave a rating and review ideally a good one and reach out anytime to podcasts at techstars.com or on Twitter I'm at David Cohen see you next time don't forget, Give First

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