Investor Stories 495: Perseverance at Roofstock, Speed at Zero, Discovery at Anduril — Why These Founders Stand Out (Black, Chen, Fubini and Patel)

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0:23Manish Patel: 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 Ben Black. Managing Director of Acadian Ventures, CIO of PowerLock Corp, and founder of Raise Global. Ben, tell us a story about an exceptional founder you've worked with and the specific thing they do that's unique. Well, my favorite founder is really a story of perseverance. Gary Beasley is a longtime entrepreneur in the prop tech space. He is the CEO of a company called Roofstock, and Roofstock has had an incredibly tumultuous journey. Roofstock is a marketplace for buying and selling single-family home real estate and managing it. It's like a full-service marketplace that's kind of everything around single-family real estate.

1:39And that space was incredible for a while. Interest rates went up, hammered, and now it's all sorts of external pressures on it. And Gary is still working on it to this day. And he has recreated that company like three times before my eyes. pivoted to something new to turn the card and find something new again. And I think that that kind of perseverance in Silicon Valley is so rare. I've backed a lot of like hot founders, right? And the first time, you know, things get really, really hard, they go like, well, I'm just going to bounce off and do the next one. Besides the fact, he's just a great operator, like, and he has the true ability to both be an external CEO, as well as like running a really good company.

2:23He picked a really hard space and he has recreated the company again. And I just respect him so much for that.

2:36On today's special segment, we have John Chen of Fika. John, tell us a story about an exceptional founder you've worked with and the specific thing they do that's unique. I think Jake Cronin at Zero is an incredible leader of people. But the one thing that I admire most about him is his ability to make decisions with 70 % information. And this is obviously like everyone talks about this, but it's much like when you see it in action, like you know what it looks like. because I typically tend to be a much more deliberate decision maker. I want to check all the corner cases and I want to like sleep on it and rotate it around and turn an idea around.

3:17He turns like the speed of decision making into an advantage. Like he takes in all the inputs, he weighs it, and he's able to actually calibrate what's at stake in a decision very quickly and also determine like is this a one-way door where we can't reverse it or not and get to the bottom of, okay, well, now we're going to move in this direction. And usually it makes me uncomfortable. He's like, whoa, whoa, we haven't actually fully bottomed out on what all the scenarios see in D &E. But I think that the speed of decision making is he's usually right and he's sometimes wrong. He's usually right.

3:48The ability to make it quickly just means that he's able to iterate much faster and learn from those lessons. And I think that's a really important trait in a leader, especially in today's world where there is so much uncertainty about what is here to stay and what's a fleeting trend.

4:23save time, and extend runway. We 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 Ross Fubini and Manish Patel of XYZ Venture Capital. Ross and Manish, tell us about an exceptional founder you've worked with and the specific thing they do that's unique. I have to talk about Andrel, but it's because I want to explain to you a thing that nobody realizes about Andrel.

5:06Andrel is now well-established as a new neo-prime in the defense space. But what no one realizes is under the covers, what they're actually incredible at, it happened since the beginning, is prototyping, like generating whole new hardware and software, firefighting Humvees, breach devices, autonomous helicopters that may or may not have any purpose, have any need, but iterating and creating those things and then figuring out which one of them are going to scale, which one is going to become a counter-drone solution, which one is going to become a solution for secure communications, which one is going to become the satellite network that we need.

5:46But it's that iteration cycle, that discovery cycle that exists within the company, which is truly, truly novel. And it is so different now from so many different defense companies which show up like, we have one thing. And that one thing is going to make$10,$100 billion trillion. It's like, well, or the thing might be 10 degrees off. And Andrel has this unbelievable discovery motion. And it really comes from a combination of Matt Graham and Schimpf, the CEO, and Palmer. It's like the combination of the founders that enable them to do this.

6:31That will conclude this installment of Investor Stories. If you're enjoying the program and would like to see it continue, take a moment and leave a five-star review in iTunes. Okay, that will wrap things up for today. Until next time, overprepare, choose carefully, and invest confidently. Thanks for joining me.