Investor Stories 486: The Traits of Visionary Founders: Ecosystem-Scale Thinking, Data-Driven Truth-Seeking, and Relentless Customer Experience Design (Blank, Demaree, Cheng)

0:00This episode is brought to you by Ramp, the spend management platform we use here at TFR. They're offering listeners$150 just to take a demo. We've never had an offer quite like this. Claim your$150 before this offer is gone at our partner link, ramp.com slash partners slash TFR. Now on to the episode. Welcome to the podcast about venture capital, where investors and founders alike can learn how VCs make decisions and reach conviction. Your host is Nick Moran, and this is The Full Ratchet.

0:39Welcome back to TFR. On today's special segment, we ask guests to discuss the most visionary founder that they've worked with and what makes them so special. Here's the segment called visionary founders.

0:56On today's special segment, we have Steve Blank. Steve, if you had to choose one visionary founder who has inspired you most, who is it and what about their leadership approach resonates? There's all the usual suspects of, you know, whether it's Elon or Steve Jobs or depending on your generation, or maybe it's Jensen now or, you know, NVIDIA. I go all the way back to, and I'm not sure he would have described himself as a founder, but there was a professor at Stanford named Fred Terman. And Fred Terman, if you actually know deep history of Silicon Valley, was essentially the founder of Silicon Valley.

1:36He was the first, remember I talked about World War II, electronics warfare, and Harvard took his professors, managers back to Stanford. That was this guy. He was a professor of electrical engineering, then became the head of the department, and then eventually became the provost, essentially the COO of Stanford. And he was the first person to turn any university, probably, in the United States into what I call an outward-facing university. Meaning, instead of the greatest thing that his students could, his grad students could have done is get their PhD and become a professor. In the 50s and 60s, he was saying the greatest thing you could do for your country is take your stuff out and actually build something and share it with, again, no VCs, share it with, like, defense companies and start companies.

2:24So he started taking boards on the boards of the startup companies. His first two students he did that with were named Hewlett and Packard. They were students in the 1930s. He was on the board of Watkins Johnson and Varian and a whole set of microwave companies. And when before Silicon Valley was microwaves and defense valleys, basically probably 30 years before every other university figured it out, he turned Stanford because he saw something that no one else did and broke the rules about how a university should actually work with the outside world. His successor, at least in terms of vision, was John Hennessey.

2:57John Hennessey was a professor of computer science and then dean of the department. And then again, just like Terman, became president of Stanford. Well, unlike Terman, who was just COO, Hennessey became president of Stanford. And if you walk around the Stanford campus and see all these amazing physical facility, it was John's genius in figuring out how to get someone to give Stanford all that money. But at the same time, he understood Stanford's place in the kind of the ferment of Silicon Valley and its ecosystem. And so people tend to look at technical founders. I look at guys who, and in this case, they were just guys, but who have changed the nature of innovation and entrepreneurship at a massive scale that was enduring past the company.

3:37Turman lasted multiple decades. The Hennessy generation, again, is written in buildings and innovation, et cetera, in the Valley. So those would be my two founders.

3:54Grant Emery joins us today from the Bay Area. He's the CEO and founder of One Brief, the defense company building the operating system for military planning. If you had to choose one visionary founder or leader that has inspired you most, who is it and what about their leadership approach resonates most? Hans Rosling. So Dr. Hans Rosling, I got to know him in Liberia during the Ebola epidemic. He was a very well-known medical doctor who spent most of his career in Africa, originally pioneering cyanide poisoning treatments around people who were eating cassava, and then later expanded to a number of other ways of responding to disease in Africa.

4:35He was very smart, very compelling in his speaking. Shortly before his death, wrote the book Factfulness. Perhaps there's a lot of narratives in the world that things are getting worse. But in fact, like here's what infant mortality curve looks like. Here's what these deaths from violent conflict look like. Here's what the number of people in extreme poverty around the world looks like. And in fact, there is no better time in human history to be born than today. He did a lot of things that had like a pretty, pretty big impact on me. I got to Liberia and he, on his first day there, had been able to put his desk in the same office as the key Liberian.

5:16That meant that whenever you went to see the key guy, you would go to see him. But he was so well loved by most of the responders and the locals that this was a good thing. No one was like, you can't do this. It was, no, no, we're really happy to have you here. But he would know everything. He was able to jump to the truth very quickly. And when I think responders got off on some paths that wouldn't actually solve a core problem, like he would have compelling and memorable ways to say, stop doing that. There were a bunch of things I learned from him. You know, for one thing, like where to put your desk and how to interact with all the people, but like how to take like some really bold risks.

5:56So he was he was terminally ill at the time. He didn't tell me. So I found that out a lot later. He took a lot of risks that I think made him much, much more effective that I think, you know, someone like me who is quite healthy right now would be reluctant for bad reasons to take and would say, no, no, no. Like, why should I do this thing that might cause me mild social embarrassment? There's a lot to be learned from, well, here is how I would behave if I were terminally ill. And in fact, what we're working on is so important that the things that need to be done are not going to be deterred by mild social embarrassment.

6:36Love that.

6:57We use Ramp at TFR and it's been a game changer. As our preferred partner, they're offering listeners$150 just to take a demo. No need to sign up. Head to ramp.com slash partners slash TFR to claim your$150 before the offer expires. Now back to the interview. On today's special segment, we have Larry Chang of Volition. Larry, can you tell us about an exceptional founder you've worked with and the specific thing they do that's unique? Not to go back to Chewy, but Ryan Cohen, the co-founder and CEO there, his exceptionality is amazing. And I think what he did at Chewy that others don't do is probably driven by his paranoia, was that he had in his mind what the amazing customer experience would be for his customer and really differentiate it.

7:43Like really out there, he worked backwards. He worked backwards from that and made every decision to build that amazing customer experience. So we made decisions like insourcing our own fulfillment center. We built Fulfillment Centers because we wanted to be able to deliver pet food better than any 3PL, better than Amazon could. So we built our own. We made the decision to put hundreds of customer service reps on the same floor as the CEO in our headquarters office in Florida when everyone else outsources it. We made the decision to encourage people to talk to the customers. So our longest talk time per day from one rep to one customer was over two hours every single day.

8:18There are decisions like that that were made to create the experience that we thought we wanted to win. Most people think incrementally and don't think holistically about customer experience. And Ryan did that. There's a great quote. I think it's from Tony Shea at Zappos. He had that book, Delivering Happiness. He said something like, marketing is the tax that you pay for your customer experience not being sufficiently amazing. I think a lot of companies, when they're younger, they try and find good marketing channels. Ryan thought about what is the winning experience to the customer and worked backwards.

8:51And I think that's what made him amazing.

8:57That will conclude this installment of Investor Stories. If you're enjoying the program and would like to see it continue, take a moment and leave a five-star review in iTunes. Okay, that will wrap things up for today. Until next time, over-prepare, choose carefully, and invest confidently. Thanks for joining me.