Jeff Veen (True Ventures): Fundraising, Acquisitions, and Why Designers Should Start Companies

21:59Jeff Veen:I still don't know if I completely accept the title of designer after all these years.

22:05Andy Budd:And that's mostly because of what it connotates in people's minds

22:09Jeff Veen:when you say you're a designer. They will think of like, oh, you're sitting in Photoshop right now. Figma. There's many categories of types of design and many of our friends are very, very good visual designers, graphic designers. And that's a little bit of what I think people think of, to be honest, when you say that. When I go all the way back to when I was actually practicing, actually making deliverables and stuff like that, it was always interaction design. And that was back in the day when we did wireframes and flows. And then it kind of migrated into more of like reports, you know, more of strategy documents and things like that.

22:46And then as I got into more of the kind of design and product leadership,

22:53Jeff Veen:it looked more like product management and then leading product management, but always from a kind of a user experience point of view. So the tools that I would use went from like, you know, OmniGraffle into more like, oh, no, it's much more whiteboards and keynote. And, you know, and so strategy, basically. Yeah, it always kind of came back to strategy as the way in which because you can sit in your design tool all day long and none of it's ever going to ship unless it's doing it. It's solving the right problem. And understanding those problems means having really deep understanding of like business needs, technical constraints.

23:32Jeff Veen:So I've always felt very competent in conversations, both in technology and the underlying systems and how the infrastructure is going to support the kind of things that we're going to do and how all that's changing. I've always also felt very comfortable at the board table and are in the boardroom, you know, having conversations about cap tables and budgets and all of that kind of stuff. And I think all of that sort of holistically served very well going into it. But I would say the one thing that really served me, and I guess the angle here on your whole podcast of why design and venture, right, is that I do think coming from this like designer and moving into kind of product owner is a good way to put it.

24:30Jeff Veen:to, um, to, to give an inch on quality in the product. And, and I felt like everything that went into making really high quality products kind of worked well as a foundation for all the other aspects of the business. So when you were talking earlier about founders realizing that they, they don't get to do the fun stuff anymore. I never really kind of, I never really crossed that i found it like conversation funny to say out loud but i found conversations with lawyers really fun and creative and energizing because they were helping me shape a set of constraints for the product that i was making in the same way that talking to an engineer and saying like we could do that but it's going to be really slow you know and you talk to the lawyer and like we could do that but oh it's going to really cut into your margin like very very similar conversations and i I love both of them.

25:23Jeff Veen:Great. And how often would a lawyer have a conversation with somebody and that person say, oh, I know how I can change the product all the way over there. I can trace it all the way to say, we can make that change and solve this legal problem by doing this in the product. And that, to me, puts all the pieces together in a way that allows us to make this holistic thing that really holds together.

25:53Andy Budd:I mean, I agree with you. I think there's a lot of really good stuff there. I mean, I think designers, a lot of the really good designers are systems thinkers. And they are problem solvers. And often the way that they're solving problems is through software and the visual element of software. But another thing that they bring to the table is often designers are very user centered and quality focused. And so these are all really good qualities. Now, that doesn't mean that they were only in designers or amazing engineers or amazing product managers that have those skills as well. But I find that the best designers that make the transition have that kind of system mindset, that problem solver mindset and that user centricity.

26:33Andy Budd:and I think that's always something that you've had. I think a lot of designers particularly are fascinated by how things work. Very engineering mindsets, like if I pull this thing apart, how does it work? And I can see that happening on terms of go-to-market strategy. I can see that from you in terms of talking to your lawyers and thinking, well, how does this all function and how can we make it work better? And so I think there's some really great qualities there. But like I say, they're not solely held by designers.

27:04Jeff Veen:That's true. That's true. There's one author. There's sort of an almost philosophical beginner's mind kind of perspective to take on it too. And I do think that aligns with the designers that I know, which is, you can call it curiosity, but it's deeper than that. There's a sense of fearlessness walking in and not knowing. there's uh uh and so i started my career even before the web in journalism and i that has always sort of held uh strong all the way through this idea of like i i've got to file a story on something i know absolutely nothing about and so i'm going to go and find people and talk through them all and find where really is the truth and all of the truth for uh it's hard to say in this

27:54Andy Budd:media landscape but you know what i mean right like somewhere there is the story in here and

27:58Jeff Veen:then you piece it together by talking to a bunch of people and figuring out and not bringing if you can not bringing any assumptions to that so then there i was you know as a designer at google in 2004 walking into rooms full of these literally the best engineers in the world and saying like you're going to have to explain a lot more of that to me if we're going to come up with the right solution here um and often you'll i mean the the the weirdness in the universe comes around and and often you'll find that most of you can you can keep asking questions till you reach the edge of their limit uh or the limit of their knowledge um and then we're all on the same plane i'm like oh none of us know ultimately you know what the so um beginner's mind i i think the beginner's

28:43Andy Budd:mind is so important. I see so many founders who have built a vision of their product based on a huge amount of kind of knowledge of the industry and technology and space. But when they launch the product, it's so imbibed with their kind of their worldview that they struggle to see the product through somebody that doesn't have that level experience, that doesn't understand the ins and outs of their products. And actually, when people come through and they can't onboard, they can't find value um a lot of founders really struggle they often think maybe the we're talking to the wrong users maybe the users aren't smart enough maybe you know it's often like what what's wrong with them and I think what's really good with designers is designers go yeah we've built a system that is maybe you know not in their language it's not kind of like seeing things through the eyes of somebody that that you know is using this on day one and so I think designers are really really good at bringing that beginner's mind I think also there is often with a lot of founders that there is a real belief in their own vision and a hope that the first version of the product is the right version because it's also the most economical if they're right bang out the gate then they've launched they're getting really economical with their their spend and then they can just start kind of like growing and growing and growing and a lot of the time designers actually come from the opposite perspective they're like well what's wrong with this you know let's spend some time understanding what's wrong because we understand what's wrong and we can make it better.

30:09Andy Budd:And that spending time about looking at something that might be wrong often feels like waste because why would you bother trying to find something that's wrong with this? This is perfect. Clearly it's great. Go and just ship more of this. And so often I think it's only when the product meets the reality of users and it doesn't start exploding and it doesn't start making sense to people. They're not finding the value that often that kind of designers can come in and say, hey, well, look, well, well, I think it's because people don't understand this language, because the grouping of tools is in the wrong way, because the value is a little bit too hidden.

30:45Andy Budd:And knowing, being able to spot all of these problems, because you're trained to look for problems, that can be a pain in someone's neck in the early days. But actually finding problems, I think, is the way that companies find product market fit, because you're not going to get product market fit if all of these issues go unobserved and undiscovered and unsolved. And so I think having designers in an early team can be really, really beneficial. I don't know what you think.

31:11Jeff Veen:I do. I do. I think, I mean, all of this stuff that we're talking about right now, I think these are the qualities that you need, if not in the founders, at least in the early team, right? You and I have a little selection bias here in that we see those qualities in designers. And I think that's great. But I don't think, I've looked at this for 10 years now at TrueVentures, and I don't really think that what discipline a founder is coming from is a selection criteria, right? I just, if a person happens to have a design background, that's great. I know something about them. We can connect over that.

31:54Jeff Veen:But I still, I look for all the same qualities regardless of what the background of the person is. Um, uh, so, uh, yeah, 15 years ago or whatever, when I was out trying to fundraise the idea of a designer being a founder was, uh, maybe a little contrarian, you know, and that we, uh, also went through this phase where design became very, very prominent because Steve jobs was coming up and waving these devices from the stage and everybody got them and they were so much better. Like people don't remember like 2008, 2009, the iPhone comes out, the iPad comes out right after it. And almost nobody remembers how bad cell phones were and how much you had to use them and how painful that was and how somebody who came out and talked about design said, like, I have a new one.

32:47Jeff Veen:And we were all like, this is 10 ,000 times better. Oh my God. And so in that kind of soup, this idea of like, oh, design. And it did sort of kind of emerge in the valley, in the tech world, kind of like, oh, we should pay attention to that. We should listen to them. And you and I have been already saying that for 10 or 15 years at that point. But now I think that's all just table stakes, all of it. And really good founders are intuitively going to be doing user research. They won't call it that. They will talk and they will call it listening to customers, but they will set aside their ego and listen to what they hear and say, like, I thought this, but then I heard people saying this and that's the problem and I will solve that, you know, all of that kind of stuff.

33:35Jeff Veen:so um uh so yeah you know like i think i don't know i think designers have a lot of great skills but i don't think that um uh necessarily will like we should be looking out for i mean i'm more than happy to encourage designers to go for it um in some way i would encourage anybody that you know has the passion to go for it and hearing a story of you know you and I in the industry doing this kind of stuff I think that's great now all of that maybe we shift a little to talk about like what is happening right now which is crazy which is actually I'm a designer and I have more github checkups check-ins in the last year than I had in my whole previous career like I'm like producing code and doing prototypes and like everything has changed um really i mean it's been since the launch of chat gpt but really in the last 12 months the ability for it to like for for a person with a background like mine to produce viable code that we have running on servers and it works like and the developers that i work with are like yeah no that's fine it's good it like it's shocking to me so um perhaps there is and maybe now a second renaissance of like people with a design background who have really good product taste you know um and a real eye for what is going and real ability to do validation with youth like all of that like we've got this huge advantage of like we can prototype in minutes now it's unbelievable so maybe there's a balance between those two things i think so i mean i think you i mean i think

35:20Andy Budd:demonstrably like the world is full of business people and ctos that have run startups the number of designers who are running successful startups are actually kind of conspicuous because there's so few of them designer fund you know who you will know a kind of a a vc fund in in the bay area that kind of tries to support kind of bringing more design into startups are doing a round of interviews with design founders now and there's a lot more than there ever were but we're still talking you know dozens rather than hundreds or thousands and so I think designers are still in the minority um YC is talking about like we need more design founders um but at the same time I think you're right I think there is no you know the skills that I see a lot of designers have are actually also in amazing product people they're an amazing engineers they're an amazing business people so there's no um um you know a lot of designers would like to think that there's a and ownership of some of those skills, but I think they are fairly well distributed.

36:21Andy Budd:I think one of the things in which you're alluding to is one of the things that maybe stopped designers starting their own business is often they needed to have a technical co-founder. And that was always a little bit of a challenge. If you were a technical person, you could start a business, start a startup pretty much on your own. But if you were non-technical, then you would probably have to find technical people around you. I'm now seeing a whole group of young, non-technical founders who are able to get quite far in their thinking you know it's not just a deck it's not just some images it's not just a kind of a sketched out site map but there's a working product and more and more frequently not just an ugly working product but a working product that actually if you blinked if it was moving really fast you wouldn't know that it wasn't kind of you know launch ready and so I think AI has massively unlocked a lot of opportunity for non-technical people.

37:17Andy Budd:This is kind of moving us into a little bit into the VC world. Like I'd love to talk a little bit about how you got into VC. But I guess one of the things I'm seeing is I think with that kind of lowering the barrier to entry, we're going to be seeing more and more people start businesses. We're going to be seeing more and more people look for funding, maybe small amounts of funding, because maybe they don't need a couple of million seed. Maybe they need half a million or quarter million to get their ideas off the ground. Is this something you're seeing true? Are you seeing an increasing volume and increasing kind of appetite or not so much yet?

37:50Jeff Veen:Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, that's it is. It's always an interesting time, but it's particularly interesting right now. So True is 20 years old now. And when True was founded, venture capital was very, very different. It was all big firms and they were all on Sand Hill Road and and they didn't do deals for less, like they wouldn't put less than$10 million in it because they were funding companies that said, I have an idea and we're going to prove it out. And we're going to need a giant data center full of computers. I mean, I did it on our tiny little scale measure map. Like we were in, we were in a data center loading Dell servers into the rack at two o 'clock in the morning to get started with our beta, our idea.

38:35Jeff Veen:So it was a whole different world. Um, but, uh, like true. And a few other firms were like, wait a minute, there's probably something else going on here. There's cloud computing. You can start to build apps and you only have to pay 10 cents an hour. You don't have to spend$200 ,000 just to get the first thing in the browser to show up. That's really interesting. And so they were, we talked a lot about, they at the time talked a lot about more venture and less capital, right? Like we want more, you can take far more risk because it's so much cheaper and you need far less. And so like they would do$2 million seed stage investments and you could do a lot more of those in a fund and you could have more opportunity and stuff like that.

39:17Jeff Veen:And so now here we are 20 years later and we are seeing companies that are a year old and have$20 million in revenue with eight people on the team.

39:28Andy Budd:Yep, yep, yep. It's bonkers.

39:31Jeff Veen:Yeah. But that's what it felt like in 2005. Absolutely felt like that then too. that, you know, there's companies, let's say back then with$2 million in revenue, with 15 people on the team. They're like, what? What about the data center staff? You're like, you don't get it. It's all different now. The cloud, right? Now we're saying the same thing. It's all different now, right? The LLMs. But it really is different. And I really do think you can go in two ways. You can say, ah, that's the end of everything. Or you could say like, oh my God, look at how much more opportunity there is. And I think now is one of the best possible times to be doing seed stage investing.

40:10Jeff Veen:It's one of the best possible times to be starting a company. And also, one of the things that happened in the dawn of the cloud was that everything got rebuilt. I mean, you could not have imagined in 2004 that there would be a competitor to Microsoft Office until I showed you one that had two cursors moving around at the same time. and everyone was like, oh my God, and it's working in the browser. We're going to rebuild everything and we're going to build it as these lightweight web apps that people can collaborate in. And now the same thing has happened. We're going to rebuild everything. We're going to rebuild all of it, every app.

40:47Jeff Veen:Some companies are making a slow transition and a pivot. Most won't. We'll rebuild it all.

40:54Andy Budd:I think you're absolutely right. I think these platform changes create a huge opportunity and all of these old businesses will have to adapt, but a lot of new companies will come in and try and rebuild what their sort of older competitors did. And so I think there's a huge, it's a huge fun time. And you're absolutely right. I can't remember who wrote it, but I remember reading an article a number of years ago called the small Silicon Valley sort of startup. And the idea being, you know, it's possible now with all the tooling, with all of the, you know, the cloud computing and the libraries and obviously the AI tools coming on board, that you can be a 30, 40 person company and be doing 100 million in revenue.

41:32Andy Budd:And actually, maybe you don't need multiple rounds of CDE. Maybe you do one or two rounds of investment. And that's enough because they're not as capital intensive as you were saying. You can do a lot of customer service on a small amount. You could do a lot of engineering on a small amount. And also for a lot of people, they had to build a huge business and a huge infrastructure to get to where they needed to go. Whereas now, if you're doing like 10, 20, you know 50 million a year in revenue on a team of 30 40 people for you that might be that might be enough and so i think we're going to see a whole bunch of differently shaped businesses and that's going to have an interesting effect on on how capital is deployed and the times types and shapes of of companies sort of investing so um probably a good time to kind of bring us on to like your venture journey so obviously after um adobe you moved into vc you've already alluded to it like how did that happen what was the the draw that that brought you into true ventures so uh when we funded type kit my lead investor was true ventures it was tony conrad from true

42:40Jeff Veen:ventures i had known tony because when he had done a startup a few years earlier he hired adaptive path to help him with price so it was a long relationship um and it was amazing to work with Tony at True Ventures while we were building Typekit. Also, I think one of the things that kind of, I don't want this to be an entirely just a pitch for True, but I fundamentally believe one of the things that we do very, very well is a sense of community around the rest of the founders, right? We don't believe that we are particularly experts. We see a lot of stuff and that's helpful and can give advice around what we're seeing a lot of stuff, but the stuff we see is being practiced right at the coalface by a bunch of founders that are out and so those founders i think helping each other because being a founder's super lonely job um right and i experienced that while we were building typekit i was like this is actually incredible like i feel like i have people around me that are rooting for me and i'm rooting for them and like we're trying to figure all this stuff out together um and so i had this great experience then we sold the company to Adobe and I went and worked there for a while.

43:50Jeff Veen:And when I came out, like Tony took me out for breakfast and he was like, why don't you think about venture? Try it for a little while. I was like, I think I'm going to start another company, but all right, like let's do it, you know, let's try it. And I tried it and it was great. So I had no ambition in getting into venture. I'd never, I wouldn't have done it with any other firm. It was really like the relationships that I had, the experience that I had. I didn't choose venture. I just chose true.

44:21Andy Budd:I mean, again, that's a story that resonates. I mean, to some extent, I got into venture partly because I saw your journey. I didn't realize that venture was a role that something someone from my background as a designer and a company owner could do. But when I started seeing like you and Daniel Berker and Irene Auer and people like that, it kind of opened it up to the possibility. But I didn't actually deliberately decide to get into venture. I had great experiences and relationships with Seacamp and Carlos there, the general partner, and it was being brought into that particular company with that particular culture that attracted me.

44:57Andy Budd:So it's fascinating to hear that that was a similar journey for you. I'm curious, like it sounds like, again, I think Seacamp and probably true are similar in some of the things you said. Like, I think a lot of VCs, a lot of traditional VCs, understandably, have to come from a legal or a financial background because there's a lot of mechanics and rules and regulations you need to run a very, very large fund. But coming from a legal or finance background doesn't necessarily mean that you're the best person to advise a founder. Whereas someone like you and I, particularly you, you're an operator, you're someone that's been through the trenches.

45:33Andy Budd:If you're talking to a founder, it's not theoretical, it's not based on the last 20 companies you invested in it's based on like really hard-earned knowledge you've done the reps and so it sounds to me like that's a real value that true have is like you can you can help these founders not from a theoretical perspective but they gain trust in you because they know that you've been there

45:55Jeff Veen:yourself would you say that's that sounds right yeah um we have a lot of operational experience at true i think there's uh something like 18 companies founded amongst the current partners So I think that's right. And I think that I'll say that it does, but with a caveat. And like, I think, yes, having that experience, I can relate to the person and I can say, here's, you know, the experience I had. I think it's more important kind of emotionally than it is tactically or strategically. I think I know what they're going through and I can help them almost at a coaching level. Like I don't really consider it coaching, but like they're going to have a conversation with me and come away from it being like, oh, right.

46:43Jeff Veen:Yeah, like that really resonated, I hope. As opposed to let's do design review, you know, of your product. Like show me what you're working on. I do all that kind of stuff too, quite a bit. I think it'd be helpful. But again, like any good design review, you're really going to be like, you know, I don't know if it's good or bad. tell me your thinking. Tell me, how did you get here? And how confident are you with that journey to getting to what I'm looking at on the screen? But again, I've been doing this 10 years. Type 2 was a long time ago. Creative Cloud at Adobe was a long time ago. None of that stuff is going to kind of strategically apply to building an AI native company in 2025.

47:27Jeff Veen:five. But it can very much emotionally apply to all the things that they're going to go through. And again, we do seed stage. We do the first two years. That's where we are all dialed in with our founders. Later, as they found product market fit, they're scaling up, they're building out the team, they're raising, they're going to have a whole different set, different kind of venture capitalists that does very different things for them than I can do. Right. So so having operation and I don't know. I know a lot of those people, but I don't really know what that experience is like and whether operational experience is as valuable there as it is.

48:12Jeff Veen:But at seed stage, I know like on day zero, having some people who have been there before is having them around is really, really important. But I come back to the community again and again. Like, I think the real work of venture is bringing people together so that they feel like they are supported. Right. So that's a set of advisors that we have. It's a whole network of other founders that I know in other people, even in corporate world. Oh, I know who you should talk to about that. It's all of that kind of stuff. And then it is here are all the founders who are building right with you, backed by true our community.

48:49Andy Budd:let's you know i mean i totally agree i think that operational experience is really useful but i also think the half-life of operational experience is very short and like you say you know in five years time the whole of what you know is probably kind of you know half of it is disappeared half of it isn't valuable anymore and that that just keeps happening i think your network is really useful though again the thing i find is that people now come to me and say hey and do you know any great designers you know any great engineers i look at my contact book i know a lot of great design leaders and a lot of great CTOs and a lot of people that are now you know would be perfect for that company at series b cd my network of kind of like young you know you know three four year in designers is is definitely a little bit sort of lacking now so even that I think um my network in that area is a little bit limited but obviously what I do have is a lot of founders that can I can kind of introduce people to that I can talk about their their challenges the one thing and again it resonates with me as well the one thing I find is that a lot of founders I talk to their relationship with their other VCs is a little bit more like they might have a relationship with like a their their partner's parents there's a little bit more kind of distance there there's a little bit more authority there's a little bit more kind of you know kind of status and one of the things I think that I do really well with my founders they see me just as one of them like we get on we chat we laugh you know we're equals and often I find that that lowering a status and allows you to have better conversations it allows them to be a little bit more open and honest when things aren't going particularly well they don't feel like they're going to get a scolding for me they feel like they're going to get understanding they don't feel that they need to sort of play their cards by their chest whereas with some of their other venture partners that status means that they feel a little bit like oh I've got to always put on the the the bright side of how everything's going and so i i really love that i really love the relationships i've built with the founders i work with and it sounds like you have as well yeah yeah no i like that uh quite a

50:50Jeff Veen:bit i think a lot of these firms really have deep kind of structural design um liabilities in that uh they are it's very difficult to align with the founders um just because of some of the nature of like how attribution happens and like the pressure that so many vcs are under and things like that I think we've dodged a fair amount of that at True. But it is, yeah, that can be really kind of a relationship filled with tension. And it's very hard to be creative when you're feeling a threat. And so I'm the same, Andy. Like, I really do try to say, like, what? And to be fair, I don't sit on a lot of boards.

51:36Jeff Veen:So I can go meet with founders. and then they have their other true founder who is their board member that they, right? And I do think we're very approachable and have great relationships with our founders, but it is structurally different for me to just be like, hey, I can help. I've got, you know, I'm not gonna like, we're not gonna go through your financials. We're gonna look at the product.

51:58Andy Budd:I'm the same. And actually having that kind of other sort of partner who can be a little bit more rigorous can be, it can be really useful. It can be really helpful in that dynamic. If there are certain things that you're finding hard to say because you don't want to challenge the relationship, having somebody else come in and kind of help push in that direction can be really useful. But I also think a lot of founders think often, I think maybe due to TV shows like Silicon Valley and kind of some of the stuff you read on blogs and whatever, they often think that the relationship with the VC is a power dynamic where the VCs are basically owning the company and telling the founder what to do and bullying them.

52:38Andy Budd:And at least at the early stage, that's not the case. I mean, it might be a little bit more prevalent as you start taking board seats. But I've always seen the VC relationship at Pre-Seed Seed and Series A as much more of a facilitator and enabler than anything particularly directive. Like we have invested in founders and we believe them and we trust them. And we're not trying to constantly grab the wheel from them, you know, and drive the drive the kind of the car or the plane ourselves. Like, you know, if we wanted to do that, we should probably go and start our own company rather than, you know, live vicariously through somebody else.

53:14Andy Budd:But moving on really quickly, I'm kind of curious, because we've talked a little bit about why you joined True. Like, could you just describe a little bit about what your day to day sort of life is like at True? Because you've had a few different kind of focuses. So like, where did you start and where are you now?

53:33Jeff Veen:Yeah, so I do not spend as much time now on the like deal flow, right? My own. I do that with the rest of my partners quite a bit. They'll bring in deals and we all look at them together and spend time with the founders before we make our decision. I spend more of my time after the check now, and I quite like that. That aligns a lot more with, I think, what I bring to the table, my experience and all of that. And so what that looks like is I have a team of people. I lead this team that have a bunch of specialties in the things that an early stage venture capital firm should have. So somebody who is very, very good at team culture, people ops, all that kind of stuff, how a team scales and grows without imploding.

54:28Jeff Veen:Somebody else who's very good at follow on fundraising. right like and it's always a little bit of i think a startling to a founder is like all right we're going to do the deal we've done the deal uh welcome to true uh let's get you fundraising for your

54:42Andy Budd:series a and they're like well okay there's always fundraising and um right you got to build the

54:49Jeff Veen:product you got to build the team but you can you certainly don't want to run out of money um so anyway so we do a lot of work on that um revenue sales ops and it's all that kind of stuff pr um We spend a lot of time helping them on their launch announcements, you know, early stage before they have a marketing team and all of that kind of stuff. And we have, what do we have? 456 active companies in our portfolio. So, no, sorry. 456 active founders, about 212 companies. Anyway, it's a big portfolio. It's a bunch of people and they're all doing stuff. And so there's a lot of support there. And I also jump in on the product market fit stuff that we've been talking about, hiring product, hiring design, things like that.

55:40Jeff Veen:And then I also have this other team that does product development. I have a development team and we do two things. We have a bunch of internal like a proprietary community platform that we have built that all of our founders kind of come in. And and there we've got lists of all our co-investors and all the pre-negotiated discounts and deals that we have and an opportunity for them to discuss a very vibrant amount of engagement. So that's very satisfying and rewarding as somebody who likes to build product. And then spending a fair amount of time as well, thinking about kind of the future of a VC firm in a AI agent enabled world is very exciting.

56:18Andy Budd:Which must be keeping you very busy at the moment.

56:21Jeff Veen:Yeah. And that really, that's what, like I said earlier, with all the GitHub commits that I've had over the past year, that does look like me and a couple other people, like building an agent just last week that extracts co-investors out of all of our cap tables. The table that shows the ownership percentages at the close of each deal. So it's like pulling those out and processing those and getting more data on them and putting it all into a database and then using that database to help us make future decisions. and stuff like that. A whole deal sourcing, due diligence, and all of that. It's a ton of going.

57:04Jeff Veen:It's just so exciting.

57:06Andy Budd:On the role that AI is going to play in venture, I'm curious your thoughts here. Obviously, 20, 30 years ago, the stock market was very different. It was lots of people in brightly colored shirts, trading tickets manually. A lot of relationship building, a lot of account management. um i'm sure the account management stuff is still there but a lot of it is also algorithmic trading i'm starting to see a lot of vcs saying hey look our deal sourcing and our judging of suitability for investment you know we're stopping using humans because humans are biased and actually we're building algorithms we're building ai tools that will automatically while we sleep judge the best um decks that come in from our massive pipeline of decks and so almost we don't need to do anything like the machine will do make the investment decisions for us and we manage the machine and then manage the relationships afterwards like do you see a world where a significant number of of um vcs will be automated in that way or is that a bit of a pipe dream

58:06Jeff Veen:i really couldn't tell um it doesn't it uh and i don't know if that's a lack of imagination on my part, right? Like perhaps I feel like so much of, again, I'll catch this in seed stage, but so much of the decision making comes down to spending time with the person because that's all you got at the beginning is the person. But if people are now increasingly coming with working prototypes and increasingly even coming with customers, having raised no money, then perhaps there is some more signal sooner on. I don't envision and make forward-looking statements on the future of venture capital. I'm very interested in the future of how we make products.

58:57Jeff Veen:And I do think that is going to dramatically change. But look, if you think about it, with True,

59:06Andy Budd:we're a pretty busy and active fund.

59:08Jeff Veen:And we're pretty big for seed stage funds in terms of the staff and things like that. But we'll do 40 deals a year, 20 deals a year, 40 deals per fund. So, and a fund is typically about two years long. So 20 deals in a year is one every two weeks and there's 10 partners, right? So a partner may only do a deal a year, right? But they're going to take a thousand meetings to get to that one deal. So if we can make that easier, I think that's great. That's not AI doing all the decision making and saying, put your money here. What it is, is even better discovery, right? So that we potentially could put, take the dials that we use and take our influence in how we make decisions and have it look more broadly for us so that the stuff that come into us is just a higher signal quality.

1:00:05Jeff Veen:Like that would be great. And I think that would be fine. And I don't think that takes the people out of it at all. In fact, it probably helps us discover stuff because of the bias that we never would have seen. But at the end of the day, I think we're still going to shake hands with somebody and say, let's do this deal.

1:00:23Andy Budd:I agree. I mean, I think it's a really interesting time. I think it's a really interesting time for software and startup founders. I think it's also an interesting time with VCs. I'm not entirely sure where things will go. I mean, I am seeing some, you know, it used to be quite common in the corporate world to give people kind of psychometric tests. You know, I'm starting to see some funds say, hey, look, in order to kind of take investment with us, we want you to do this, you know, automated online personality test. And because they're looking for signals in the personality test, you know, like I have a family member who actually designs these psychometric tests.

1:00:59Andy Budd:and he believes there's as much signal in them as there are kind of reading tea leaves so he's very suspicious of this but you know you can see some people doing that you can some people you know pulling in all of the founders social media content to look for signal I think you know a lot of you know as more and more companies enter this market as more and more founders start up there's going to be more automation I mean we're seeing this sadly at the moment with recruitment It used to be the case that you'd put a job description out for a new engineer and you get 20, 30, 40, 50 applicants. Now you're getting four, five, 600, maybe four or five, 6 ,000.

1:01:37Andy Budd:And so you're seeing so many automated kind of recruitment tools are trying to kind of manage that volume. and unfortunately they are you know kind of using AI and some of that some of that might be really helpful some of that might be baking biases into the system as we know you know AI is trained on kind of past behavior and past behavior doesn't necessarily mean sort of you know the signals we're looking for always visible but I think it's a really interesting time look we're coming to the end of our hour I've really really enjoyed chatting with you I'm just kind of curious like what's what's bringing you joy at the moment what are you excited about whether it's in life or in

1:02:14Jeff Veen:work or or yeah uh well the easy answer is my children um uh i do actually um take great joy and see because they are they are really becoming um adults even though they're very bad at it

1:02:33Andy Budd:You know, like 15, 16 years old, that around that time.

1:02:38Jeff Veen:But seeing how they approach not just the world, but like technology is always fascinating. And seeing how important the human connection is to them, the constant group chat and, you know, all of that kind of stuff. I love seeing that there. The way they embrace AI is super, super interesting. But that's the easy answer. Like, of course, I'm a father. I'm going to say my kids, right? I think we could do a whole nother episode of a podcast just on what it's like for a product leader to now have these developers that can keep up with them. That's never been the case. I spent my entire career waiting.

1:03:21Always like, we're going to design.

1:03:23Jeff Veen:We're going to do some tests. We're going to iterate the whole lean product. The lean startup methodology was all around minimum viable. Just do the minimum about and test. And you don't have to, you can do maximum viable. Like just make the whole thing. So that to me is bringing me a tremendous amount of job. Like I have an idea and I talk to the, like come up with a little spec collaboratively with the AI and it could be made that afternoon. Like that's truly, truly remarkable. And I think it'll, it's got implications in ways that I don't think we can possibly guess at, but we're trying because that's the game.

1:04:00Jeff Veen:That's venture capital.

1:04:01Andy Budd:I mean it is venture capital I think venture capitalists generally are quite optimistic because they're always looking to the future they're looking for the next kind of exciting new thing I think you know we're always living three or four years in the future because we're seeing signals now that will hopefully turn into more mainstream products in three four five six seven years times I think it's I think it's a really exciting time maybe after a few years of kind of uncertainty in in the tech space so I'm really really glad that you're enjoying enjoying seeing your kids grow up that's amazing and you're still really really excited about sort of where you are and what technology is taking you um if if people want to sort of find out more about you like are you are you all over the social medias or like what not at all not even remotely uh i gave

1:04:48Jeff Veen:all that up in like 2015 that was enough um weirdly i can't believe i'm going to say this out loud, but weirdly I would say LinkedIn. I like, I looked at, I look at LinkedIn a couple times a week and that's the highest signal I see for the, like the people who are doing, who are thinking about design and are thinking about venture and stuff like that. Um, and so that's the best way to like, I do it a little bit, a little bit of posting there. I'll probably do a little bit more as, uh, as I start to think more about really what should we be thinking about as designers looking at this age of automation.

1:05:23So yeah, find me on LinkedIn.

1:05:25Andy Budd:Who knew when LinkedIn started that that would be like the dominant kind of social media platform in 2025. But look, it's been such a joy and delight speaking with you, Jeff. I really appreciate the time. Thank you so much for joining us.

1:05:38Jeff Veen:Oh, thanks for having me, Andy. It's always a pleasure. I really look forward to hearing the other episodes of this podcast.

1:05:43Andy Budd:Oh, wonderful. And thanks to everyone else who joined us. I hope you all enjoyed the episode. If you did, please do kind of share it with anybody you think might find it useful or interesting. And until next time, I've been Andy Budd and this has been The Design VC.