In short
Podcast Summary: This Week in Startups - Episode E1759
Episode Overview Guest: Stanley Tang, Co-Founder of DoorDash Date: Live from LAUNCH Angel Summit in Napa Host: Jason Calacanis Topics Covered: DoorDash's founding story, challenges in startup funding, insights on first-time fund managers, and investment strategies.
Key Segments
- DoorDash's Founding Story
- Founding Year: 2013
- Origin: Started as a class project by Stanford students Stanley Tang, Andy Fang, and Tony Xu.
- Initial Idea: Focused on helping local businesses, particularly restaurants, with delivery services.
- Experimentation:
- Launched a static website (palatodelivery.com) to validate demand for food delivery.
- The first real order came unexpectedly from a user who found the site online, leading to the first delivery and kickstarting the business.
- Navigating Challenges and Growth
- Market Dynamics:
- Discussed the early struggles to raise funds amidst a competitive landscape dominated by high-profile startups like Uber.
- Emphasized the importance of lean operations and unit economics in the early years, which prepared DoorDash to scale effectively when funding arrived.
- Effects of COVID-19:
- The pandemic led to a surge in demand for delivery services, forcing rapid adaptations in operations, including implementing contactless delivery and supporting partner restaurants by reducing commission fees.
- The Cloud Kitchen Movement
- Concept: A shift toward delivery-only kitchens that optimize for delivery efficiency, separating it from dine-in experiences.
- This model allows brands to expand quickly across cities without the overhead of traditional restaurant setups.
- Discussion on First-Time Fund Managers
- Panelists:
- Kelli Fontaine (Cendana Capital)
- Sophia Amoruso (Trust Fund)
- Paige Doherty (Behind Genius Ventures)
Key Insights
- Investing in First-Time Managers:
- Emphasis on understanding the motivation and background of fund managers.
- Importance of passion, experience, and strategic vision in fund management.
- Challenges of Fundraising:
- The panel discussed the increasingly crowded space of startup funds and how emerging managers can differentiate themselves.
- Practical advice for managing a small fund sustainably, focusing on disciplined fundraising and operational excellence.
- Advice for Startups and Fund Managers
- For Founders:
- Importance of strong product-market fit and the ability to pivot based on market feedback.
- Execution velocity (speed and direction) is critical for success.
- For Fund Managers:
- Maintain a clear investment thesis, focus on a specific niche, and prioritize building relationships with founders.
- Understand the economics of fund management, including how to structure fees and manage investor relationships.
Key Takeaways
- Market Pull: Strong product-market fit can create demand that drives growth, leading to sustainable business practices.
- Operational Excellence: A focus on unit economics and operational efficiency can position a startup favorably for funding and competition.
- Investment Strategies: First-time fund managers need to leverage their backgrounds and networks to attract investment and build credibility.
Related Resources
- Follow Stanley Tang: [Twitter](https://twitter.com/stanleytang)
- Check Out DoorDash: [DoorDash](https://www.doordash.com/)
- Follow Kelli Fontaine: [Twitter](https://twitter.com/kells_bells)
- Learn More about Cendana Capital: [Cendana Capital](https://www.cendanacapital.com/)
- Follow Paige Doherty: [Twitter](https://twitter.com/paigefinnn)
- Check Out Behind Genius Ventures: [Behind Genius Ventures](https://www.behindgeniusventures.com/)
- Follow Sophia Amoruso: [Twitter](https://twitter.com/sophiaamoruso)
- Discover Trust Fund: [Trust Fund](https://www.trustfund.vc/)
Conclusion This episode provides invaluable insights into the startup ecosystem, particularly the evolution of DoorDash and the challenges faced by first-time fund managers. The discussions highlight the importance of adaptability, market understanding, and operational discipline in launching and running successful ventures.
Written by AI. May contain mistakes. Listen to the episode to check what was said.
Transcript
Automatic transcript. May contain errors.0:00On today's episode, we have two amazing talks from Jason's Angel Summit, which he hosted earlier this week in Napa Valley. First up, DoorDash co-founder Stanley Tang sits down with Jason for a fireside chat. He tells DoorDash's amazing founding story, explains how they mostly avoided Zerp distractions, and more. Then, Jason hosts a panel focused on first-time fund managers with Sophia Amoruso of TrustFund, Paige Finn Doherty of Behind Genius Ventures, and Kelly Fontaine of Sindana Capital. Stick with us. This Week in Startups is brought to you by Embroker's Startup Insurance Program. Helps startups secure the most important types of insurance at a lower cost and with less hassle.
0:46Save up to 20 % off of traditional insurance today at Embroker.com slash twist. While you're there, get an extra 10 % off using offer code twist. LinkedIn Marketing. To redeem a free$100 LinkedIn ad credit and launch your first campaign, go to linkedin.com slash thisweekinstartups. And Squarespace, turn your idea into a new website. Go to squarespace.com slash twist for a free trial. When you're ready to launch, use offer code twist to save 10 % off your first purchase of a website or domain. next up a real treat uh we have the co-founder and chief product officer of door dash how many people have door dashed this month raise your hand jesus whole audience um how many people have be honest now have double dashed have you ever double dashed sickos double dashing it's enough you get one restaurant it's enough you don't need to pick from two you're gonna be doing a triple dash soon it's ridiculous my daughters want a triple dash for dessert i have three of them one wants boba one wants ice cream other one wants cookies it's enough it's enough stanley i at this point i don't know if i've i've won more money from you in poker or you've won more money for me i'm door dash views it's probably about right I mean, I'm just giving what people want.
2:15Exactly. Stanley and I became friends because he has a passion for poker as well. You may have seen him on some of the online poker games. But I wanted to specifically have an entrepreneur here at the end to talk a little bit about the three cycles that you've operated DoorDash under. You started in 2013? Yeah, 2013. 2013 as a landing page for one Indian restaurant, I believe it was. Yeah, something like that. Yeah. We had like eight restaurants on a landing page called, it was called palaltodelivery.com. So it was really a big vision at that point. Yeah. I mean, I can go into the story. Do you want me to?
2:57Yeah, please. So, I mean, so we started 2013, and I'll get to the palaltodelivery bit later. But, I mean, it's funny because we really weren't trying to do a startup. It was literally one of those typical Stanford dorm room class projects. We weren't trying to do a startup or even a food company or delivery company. I think me and I met my co-founders, Andy and Tony, through... Andy was in my freshman year dorm. And then Tony, we met through one of those project-based classes at Stanford. and the the idea we were sort of working on for this class was software for small business and i remember uh at the time the kind of the hot startup or the hot thing everyone was doing back then was like social apps snapchat things like that like everyone's very focused on sort of the the digital world but no one was really focused on the the physical world like So what about the mom and pop shops, the local businesses?
4:09None of these people were using software. And Tony, he just wrapped up an internship at Square. So this idea of software for small business was very fresh on his mind. I've kind of built... When I was in high school, I used to build a lot of websites for small business owners kind of for fun. and so this was kind of an area like we were just talking about maybe we can work on something here but of course none of us have we're all college students none of us have worked at a small business before or ran a small business before so the way we kind of approached this was why don't we just start talking to a lot of these business owners like why don't we just go after class we'll just go down to palo alto go down university avenue and literally we'll just go door to door we just walk in and say hey we're a couple of stanford students working on a class project we'd love to just sit down and interview you try to understand what your day-to-day life like what are some of the challenges you were facing um and see if there are any unique insights we could get out of that and and we told you if you order 30 worth worth of food you can sit if not get the check out.
5:26Did you get any no's? I guess in Palo Alto, people love Stanford students. I think the Stanford student class project trick worked almost every time. And we always try to go between 2 and 4 p.m. when it wasn't busy. So, yeah, we talked to pretty much every business in Palo Alto, Mountain View, San Mateo. I mean, these were restaurants, retailers, flower shops, furniture stores, you name it. And I remember one day, we walked into this macaroon store in Palo Alto on University Avenue. If you haven't been, it's this place called Chantal Guion. They have great macaroons. And I remember I walked in, sat down, and Chloe, who was the manager of the store at the time, greeted us.
6:16We started talking. And I remember in the middle of a conversation, she had to go take a phone call real quick. She came back a couple minutes later. She brought this really thick booklet with her, opened it up, started writing some stuff down. And we asked her, oh, what was that phone call about? And she said, oh, it was someone placing an order for MacGroons for one of their office parties, and they wanted it delivered. But the problem is, you know, I had to turn that order down because you know i don't have the capacity to fulfill it and i asked her oh interesting like so how often does this happen do you get uh these requests all the time and she said yeah this happens all the time and she started showing her this book label which turns out was her um what do you call her order uh bookkeeping right like a booklet of all her orders she she has from the previous month and she started showing her showing me all the orders she's gone that were delivery requests that um and majority of them she had to turn away um and i started and which was you know again like super strange like why would you turn down business um you know it's and and and and as i started talking to chloe and she said well actually i don't want to turn them down i wish there was a solution out out there but unfortunately like uh you know If you think about it, as a small business owner, if I have a delivery request that comes in, I pretty much have one of two choices.
7:50First is I could do it myself, which is what ends up happening 99 % of the time. But that means it's taking time away from the store. I have to go do it myself. So unless it's like a huge catering order or something massive, it's not really worth my time. All the alternative is I can use one of these third-party delivery services. And at the time, you would think like, you know, delivery is not a new thing. You would think with like UPS FedEx, they've been around 50 years. You would have thought. It would be an option. Yeah, there would be not. I'm sure there's like a UPS version that can do a five-mile delivery or a three-mile delivery.
8:39And it turns out, actually, there were. And there are kind of these old-school services. We looked into it. And these are typically these courier services, very old-school, no technology. Everything was operated with pen and paper. And they typically are very expensive, not very efficient. I think their average delivery fee is probably like$100 to do a three-hour delivery. Not really designed for local commerce. Typically, they're designed more for legal documents, medical supplies, things like that. So again, if you're going to pay$100 for a delivery, but the macro itself is only$50, the economics just doesn't make sense.
9:28and then we started talking to other business owners and we kind of heard the same thing from this flower shop, we heard the same thing from a coffee shop and of course we heard this from a bunch of restaurant owners and that was kind of when the light bulb started ticking so well maybe instead of building software for these small business owners, what have we built new software and applied it to building a more efficient local delivery service that was designed for local commerce, designed for the consumer goods, and offered that to the business owners. It's almost like a delivery as a service.
10:15Maybe that's actually the piece of quote-unquote software that these business owners were looking for. That's what we should work on. uh so kind of the kind of our you know our you know the the light bulb moment kind of turned on and you know we kind of got got to work uh but except there's just one problem we have who are we to offer these delivery service service like we don't we're just three college students you know we we didn't uh we had one car between the three of us credit cards Was it working? Sorry, I said cars. Oh, cars. Yeah, one car. Yeah, one car. So we can't go out and also one credit card too.
10:57And it's like, so where are we going to get the delivery drivers and the trucks and the infrastructure? It's not like we can just start offering this service. Listen, I work with super early stage companies at launch, like literally year zero. They haven't even incorporated yet. And then we hit the Series A. people have thousands of dollars in mrr and they maybe they've only raised a couple of hundred thousand before that series a and they don't have their insurance set up and in fact we recently had a great startup that didn't have dno and we had to really stop everything because they were having board meetings they were making massive decisions there were legal issues and they didn't have the basic dno insurance that protects directors and officers so we send them right to a broker and broker is business insurance built specifically for startups.
11:42A single application will help your startup get four quotes for four lines of coverage in 15 minutes. Think about that four quotes, four lines, 15 minutes. And they're going to connect you with one of their expert brokers for unmatched service that goes beyond your policy. We use it at launch. It's easy peasy, lemon squeezy. It's easy breezy. What more do I need to tell you? I use it. I love it. A lot of our startups use it they love it try and broker today with the code twist and you'll get 10 off their startup package in broker.com twist that's e-m-b-r-o-k-e-r.com twist and use the code twist for 10 off okay let's get back to this amazing episode so we decided okay you know we can't run we can't operate it we we don't have the the the resources to build a delivery service but what we can do instead is why don't we run an experiment?
12:32And this is where the policy delivery comes in. So the experiment was basically what we wanted to validate was, is there actually a customer demand for something like this? Well, maybe it turns out there's no delivery service because actually besides a couple offices wanting macaroons, maybe it turns out people don't want delivery. And that's why no one built it. And that seems to be a kind of a pretty logical kind of premise. So we kind of wanted to validate, okay, well, do customers actually want delivery? And once we can validate okay, the customers want delivery, then we can go back to the local businesses and kind of figure something out.
13:21And that part, honestly, we haven't really thought through at the time. It was really, okay, let's try to validate this first part offer. So what we decided to do was, okay, let's pick one thing to focus on to deliver. What is it? Restaurants seem pretty obvious because people are used to pizza delivery, Chinese food delivery. Or pickup in Palo Alto. Pickup was still a business at the time. Exactly. And also the other thing was the reason why I picked restaurants was also we thought, okay, restaurants probably one of the hardest categories to nail when it comes to delivery. because if you think about it, the food is perishable.
13:59It has to be instant. It has to be immediate. So the idea is... People are hungry. Hungry, exactly. So the idea is if you can build something that works for food delivery, then you should be able to build something that works for anything. Dry cleaning. Exactly. Groceries, whatever. Shaving cream. Yeah, because you're starting with the hardest thing to nail, perishable. It's an important insight, yeah. Yeah, so we decided, okay, let's do this. Let's run this quick experiment. So what we did was we went ahead, found a bunch of restaurants we liked in Palo Alto. We found eight of them. None of them offer delivery, of course.
14:34And we found their menus, put into these PDFs, linked it to them on this website. And it's literally just a static page. It has no functionality. And all it said was, if you want to order delivery from these eight restaurants, call this phone number. and it was basically a Google voice number we set up that ran our cell phone. It probably took us two hours to make that website. It's probably one of the ugliest websites I've ever made in my life. The idea was, okay, let's put this website out there. Put a menu on it. Yeah, and see people. And a form, yeah. Yeah, see, there wasn't even a form. It was just a phone number.
15:10And this idea was like, okay, see if people will start calling his phone number. If people called in, we'll just make a note of it and we'll just explain to them, oh, this is just a class project. We're doing research. we're going to gather so you just frustrate the hell out of users to understand user demand exactly brilliant and and and and and and like I said like we we didn't even bother coming up with a name so we decided what should we name this well let's just name it palatodelivery.com it's not like this is going to go anywhere you guys hadn't taken any marketing classes at that point clearly but great SEO I see this with a lot of Palo Alto students they're like website domain name dash available.com is like the name Exactly.
15:49But it turns out it was actually great SEO because I remember we launched this website out. I remember it was a Saturday afternoon. We wrapped up about 4 p.m., went back to our dorm rooms. We haven't told anyone. We kind of just forgot about it. And an hour and a half in, all of a sudden, our phone rang. We picked up. This person said, Oh, I came across your website, palatodelivery.com. Honestly, to this day, I have no idea how he found our website because we have not told a single person about it. So he literally must have typed in palatodelivery.com or Google picked it up. I have no idea how, but he called in and he said, Hey, I'm hungry.
16:33Sorry, website. And I want to place the delivery order. I remember his exact order. He wanted shrimp pad thai and egg rolls from this place called Bangkok Cuisine, which unfortunately, I think, closed during COVID. Did you upsell him on the Vietnamese coffee? Because that's a big margin item. You could have upselled him on the macaroons on the way back, too. That's true. That's true. Well, originally, we were supposed to tell him, well, this is not a real service. But you said, fuck it. Well, I think what ended up happening was, I think we were all around the phone and then said, well, I'm not going to be the one to tell this hungry person this is not real.
17:10So are you going to do it? And it's like, well, Andy, are you going to do it? And he's like, I'm not going to do it. Tony, are you going to do it? Well, I'm not going to do it. So we said, oh, well, screw it. Why don't we just do this delivery? It's just one delivery. It's not a big deal. We'll drive to the restaurant ourselves. We'll place a pickup order with the restaurant and deliver it. Just to fast forward. Last quarter, they did 512 million deliveries. So that was pretty much the starters. Yeah, and that was the start of Paul to Delivery, January 12, 2013. Now, what's really amazing about this is, pretty great story.
17:48And one of the things I wanted to talk about is just this product market journey that you went on was very basic. You talked to customers, you found a pain point, you observed. You didn't come into it and say, I know better than them. you put up an experiment and the experiment showed you i think the big lesson for founders is you know when you have strong product market fit that you will get market pull and market pull arrived uh and obviously uber lyft and some other companies started to show hey on demand was the thing i want to fast forward to the era of excess and just tons of money being dropped into the space.
18:27I saw it up close and personal with Uber. Obviously, you guys experienced it. It went into such a velocity and a global scale for your business. Maybe you can talk about the peak insanity of the growth at DoorDash. Then we could segue into the age of austerity and how the market has changed its demand. When you were but three students looking for seed funding, just having some customers was great and you were forced to grow at ungodly rates unnatural rates and then the market was like you know what uh show us that you can make this profitable and you had to shift gears yet again so let's do the second act and the third act together yeah um be crazy well it's funny because for a very long time we actually couldn't raise money I remember between 2015 and 2018 when Uber was going crazy, all these funding started coming in.
19:27We weren't actually one of the beneficiaries of it. We struggled to raise money. Why did they tell you they didn't want to give you money?
19:40That's a good question. I guess you have to ask investors that. But I think people were not used to this idea of investing in operationally intensive businesses. I think that's exactly it. It wasn't like a SaaS company or a social app or digital app. It didn't fit the mold. Yeah. It's like, I remember...
20:09Oh, actually, I don't know if I want to share the story, but the sentiment was... Well, sure, we take the names out. Yeah. I remember there was an investor that said, oh, well, you guys are three super smart Stanford students. Why are you guys working on this food delivery business, operatially intensive, a real-world business when you can just go work on something when you can build the next Google? Because applying high-margin software-only business. Not an invalid question. And what was your answer? I mean, for us, I think it's... Well, I mean, going back to how we worked through this phase, I think because the first five, six years we couldn't raise money, we were forced to stay super lean.
21:03And I think whenever people ask me, well, what's DoorDash's superpower? It's our ability to execute and our maniacal focus on unieconomics, operational excellence, and how do we get that operational excellence. Well, it wasn't because we decided one day we're just great operators because we were forced to... Constraints. Exactly. Constraints breed in creativity. And between 2016 and 2018, that was when I felt DoorDash was a company, was built because we didn't have the money. so we did not have the luxury to go out and just you know you know just burn money and acquire customers and lose money on every order like we had to do we had to get we had to get to unit economics profitable like we had to just go you did that but then uber came into the market with uber eats postmates got super funded i believe and every instacart which is not exactly a direct competitor but they also got hyper uh funded that hyper funding environment forced your hand you had to play a different game at the poker table correct so once so once so so so and then when the soft bank round did come in in 2018 late 2018 then all the work we did between 2015 and 2018 sort of paid off because now we were just uh structurally we were just much more efficient than our competitors.
22:32We had better unit economics. We had better product, better quality, much more efficient driver networks, more efficient customer acquisition. Everything was just more efficient. So then when we did have the capital to kind of accelerate this, we were just able to grow so much faster. You were thoughtful about it. Exactly. When you're selling to B2B buyers, you really need for your pitch to reach decision makers. It's great if you meet some people who are going to use your product. Okay, great. But you can get those anywhere. Decision makers, the people who can take their credit card out, those are called decision makers.
23:13And they're upper level executives, right? The problem is, where do you find high level folks? They like to hide, but there is one place that they love to hang out. And I can tell you because I am a high level decision maker myself. I live on LinkedIn. Why do I live on LinkedIn? Because I'm constantly trying to find talent or reach important people and important people use LinkedIn. I've been saying this for a long time. LinkedIn would hit a billion users. They're at 930 million members right now. And there are 180 million of those senior level folks and 10 million of the C-level executives, okay?
23:42Those people make the purchasing decisions. They are the ones who will cancel software or approve software. They'll cancel a trip. They'll approve a trip. Every expense. Well, LinkedIn ads is the most efficient way for you to reach the decision makers. no other platform in the world can offer these kind of eyeballs business equals linkedin linkedin equals business business equals linkedin linkedin equals business it's that simple so how about i just give you a hundred bucks right now to test your first ad campaign that's right go to linkedin.com slash this week in startups linkedin.com you got that in your auto populate in your browser then just type this week in startup to claim your hundred dollar credit terms and conditions apply because they're giving you a hundy.
24:23Were you put under pressure though to spend harder, go faster, build market share, grow the top line? Did you feel that kind of weight from that giant amount of cash just weighing on the company? And how do you as founders say, hey, this is not what got us here. Let's stick to our knitting. Let's keep our discipline. Yeah, I think that was one thing um i guess our board member alfred lynn from sequoia did a really good job keeping us in check was because he he went through he also kind of went through the same experience with zappos kind of low almost ran out almost went out of business kind of low margin so he kind of lived through that experience and so so for him you know even you know when we did raise the big round he He always kept us in check and said, hey, it's important to continue to stay super efficient.
25:20He was obsessed with the... He would go line by line into our financial statements and our unit economics and just question everything. and just make sure, like, look, it's, you know, once you, you know, go down the route of, like, of kind of excess, it's really hard to turn the ship. It's not like you spend a lot, you just burn a lot of money and then at the end it's like, okay, I'm going to be lean now. Like, it doesn't really work like that. The culture gets completely broken. And I think, you know, and so I think having, those constraints ourselves, yes, just because we raised 500 million or a billion doesn't mean we have to go spend a billion.
26:07It's like if you're spending all the money to subsidize and as a result you have negative unit economics but you're getting a lot of growth, that's very different than if you have positive growth or positive unit economics and you're spending that money for maybe geography expansion or you're spending it on customer acquisition where you know what your payback period is. It's like not every dollar burned is the same. There are more efficient ways to burn the same dollar. Talk about the whipsaw of the pandemic because things shut down. Restaurants weren't allowed to open their doors. Then society had to decide, well, people need to, at least if they're going to be locked in their homes against their will, or in some cases, I guess, opting into being locked at home, we're going to at least have to let restaurant workers go to work.
27:09That was kind of interesting. And delivery started up again, and it created, I guess, a boon for the company. So take us through, just for a minute, the crazy, a minute or two, the crazy 2020 year that you had. Yeah, it was, it was, um, yeah, COVID, it was definitely, it was a pretty unique moment for us. I mean, like, we honestly didn't really know what to expect. Like, is it, you know, are people, you know, you know, like everything's shutting down, like, is that going to impact us? uh and well and it turns out like the exact opposite happened and you know things like it's like we like growth started like the growth rate started accelerating which is not common right like as as you get bigger and bigger you know typically your growth rate slows down but during covid it kind of just you know yeah i remember like every week like it was like a record week and it was just it was just a lot to just even keep up it's like well all of a sudden like you know like well um you gotta start thinking about uh well you know like we we had to like like roll out all these new features around like you know distributing like ppe to all of our dashers like how do we get how do we how do we get that rolled out uh you know we you know consumers now are asking for contactless yeah leave on doorstep yeah you basically have to write new software in real time in real time and then for the merchants you know like i think one thing we did uh you know because all of a sudden like a hundred percent of their sales were coming through delivery you know so one thing we did i think we were the only player that did this was we decided okay like we're going to reduce our our commission our cut from the restaurant so the way our business works is we take a fee from the consumer the delivery fee and then a commission from the restaurants, the delivery fee sort of pays for the drivers, and then our DoorDash's margin is sort of the commission.
29:13We decided, well, if restaurants are going through tough times, we should also help take some of that burden off their shoulders. So we kind of slashed everyone's commission by 50 % across the board, which in the short term costed us a lot of money, but we felt like it was the right thing to do long term. I remember there were a bunch of businesses like Taisho Ken, my favorite ramen place in San Mateo. And I talked to Yoshi who runs it and he's like, we don't do delivery. Our food is not good for delivery. I want people to experience it here. The Suki Man dipping noodles, he had very particular and rightfully so because it's the best in the world.
29:53And I said, you know, you got to figure it out. You know, I think this could be incredible for you. I would order it. And, you know, he's like, no, never. And then COVID happened. And now he's got this incredible delivery business. And so I guess a bunch of people who never believed remote work or remote ramen could work now believe that it can. Yeah, it was definitely an accelerant. COVID kind of made merchants realize kind of the importance of having a kind of a, what I call, I guess, like an online or e-commerce strategy, right? And it applies to restaurants and also just any local business.
30:30I mean, I think before COVID, less than 20 % of, maybe even less, of small businesses had an online presence. And that number has obviously jumped significantly higher now. And DoorDash is a great platform to help enable that transition. And that's kind of the position we set ourselves up as in terms of helping the merchants and local businesses. Tell me a little bit as we wrap up here about how the virtual kitchen, the cloud kitchen, not specifically Travis's company, Cloud Kitchen, but that whole movement. And you can talk specifically about his company, if you like, as well. But just how does the whole cloud kitchen movement, how has that now accelerated your business?
31:17Because it's pretty extraordinary to be able to see certain brands pop up in multiple cities. I was watching Starbird Chicken. I really enjoy the chicken. And what's that? they have great salad yeah i don't know about that but um i like the fried chicken but yeah well the fried chicken with the salad they do have i have had that it's pretty it's a great way to ruin your the healthiness of a salad i agree um but i'm like oh now i'm in new york and i'm at my hotel and i have a choice door dash starbird or uber eats starbird whichever um and uh or do i order this shitty food from the hotel at 11 o 'clock at night it's an obvious decision.
31:58So talk about that. Yeah, I think something we always believed early on as we once as delivery became a bigger, bigger thing was kind of this bifurcation of experience and convenience. Like before virtual kitchens came on. And I think we're still in that transition. I don't think we're there yet. But I think the way delivery came along to the restaurant and the local business world was kind of a bolted on experience like it was kind of hacked on like the the same place where you sit down and dine in is also the same place where a driver goes picks up the food and and if you think about it that doesn't really make sense right like if you start from first principles because well a you know the the dashers are sort of like these restaurants are not set up to take this many dashers and not laid out in a way where um yeah like it's efficient for drivers to come in and out you know you're disrupting the dining experience uh and secondly which is probably more important factors you know typically like these restaurants are located in like the most expensive real estate of part of the of the university avenue exactly right like but if you're ordering delivery like do you care if your food coming from university avenue so so i think i think it was really this idea like well as the as delivery becomes a bigger and bigger thing like you you start seeing these this bifurcation where if you want an experience like you want a great date night on a on a on a friday uh you go you go to you go to a restaurant like if you want to um experience what the the i don't know the what the latest i guess apple vision headset you go into an apple store to experience it but if you want convenience you just need food delivered to your house it's just you know right away kids are screaming right right um then then it should come from a different place right like a like a warehouse or or a or a virtual or what they call ghost kitchens or ghost convenience stores which we're making a big push, which we call Dash Mart.
34:18There's no reason why these two things should be in the same place. They should be separated. I think that's the trend you start seeing. That's why you're seeing all these platforms emerge, like Cloud Kitchens, etc. that are helping these merchants and these local retailers navigate through this transition. It's all part of this bigger trend of this kind of post-COVID world where how do merchants adopt kind of an e-commerce strategy? How do they move into this kind of convenience world? And new, right? I mean, you might have somebody who's Danny Meyer or some famous chef who wants to have some sub-brand that goes into 200 cities.
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34:58But you also might have the next Danny Meyer who wants to create the next Shake Shack, Emerge. And we won't tip our cards here, but we're going to be working on something kind of fun. That's true. We are, yeah. But yeah, it's all part of that. To maybe inspire some Mr. Beast. It's all part of that trend. And I think that to me is really, really exciting. And we want DoorDash to be, it's just going to be one of many companies that's going to help enable that transition. All right. Give it up for Stanley for being so honest and awesome. Thank you. Listen, we have been doubling and tripling down on Founder University here at launch.
35:36In fact, it's kind of the future of our firm. And it's amazing for us to work with hundreds of early stage founders, even before they incorporate, right? They have ideas, and they're trying to figure out what tools to use to make their ideas into a reality. And we're seeing so many of these founder university startups using Squarespace. Everybody knows Squarespace has beautiful design templates. They're all mobile optimized. And of course, they have powerful e-commerce integrations. But did you know that Squarespace also added member areas? This is where you can sell members-only premium content.
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36:40We love you, Squarespace, our longest running partner here on This Week in Startups. Thank you so much for supporting our founders and for supporting This Week in Startups. Sophia Amorosa is a serial entrepreneur, event host, podcaster, author, and her fund is TrustFund. Full disclosure, I'm an LP, and her fund, Paige Doherty, is behind Genius Ventures. Did I help you hear from that? I didn't. Not yet. Not yet. Not yet. I do one new fund a year, just small checks to build relationships. So who knows, maybe 2024 we'll work together. And then Kelly Fontaine is with, how do you pronounce your firm?
37:19Sendana, which is a fund of funds. Maybe you could tell us a little bit about what Sendana does. I know Michael's here from Sendana, but maybe you could explain how a fund of fund works and how you pick managers to start. So Sandana Capital is a fund of funds founded by Michael Kim. He started in 2010 to solely focus on pre-seed and seed funds. Back then, it wasn't really a thing where there's like 20. So we raise our own capital from foundations, endowments, family offices, and then we choose to invest in pre-seed and seed funds. And as we heard in the earlier panel, it's hard for them to do these small checks.
37:59So I'm assuming people like Hewlett or USC or other folks who want to get access to this, they'll pay you a fee. Essentially, you get part of the carry, you get part of the management fees. How does it work in terms of the deal? We charge our own economics. So how does that work and then how does that affect decision making? So yes, we charge a management fee and carried interest on our performance. We think that's the best alignment of interest is the carried interest. so it works that you know essentially our our lps are getting the piece and uh carry from the underlying funds and then our economics applied on top but our first fund is 2x distributed net and over 4x net so the performance is there if you choose correctly and so we really focus on portfolio construction um and fund sizing for underlying managers and what a fund of funds typically charged because we know funds are typically two and 20 that's the standard what is there is there a standard for fund of funds it depends some don't charge carry um some just charge management fees on the underlying fund size um but i think again the best alignment of interest is carry and i would say 10 is pretty typical 10 so if a if a lp does choose to do this or an endowment let's say they are paying maybe 30 carry net net but they don't have to manage all of those smaller relationships and do that vetting.
39:27You abstract all of that for them. Correct. And again, our first fund is better than most venture funds on a look-through basis. Yeah. So that, and how do funds make that decision? How do endowments make that decision? Do they choose to go with a fund of funds only typically, or do your investors typically do fund of funds and do some directs? And then does that create any kind of tension in how you manage it? it's a combination. You have large foundations and endowments who need to write a$50 million check. So they're not going to write a$50 million check to a$50 million fund. Our median pre-seed fund is$50 million.
40:06So they won't do it, but they'll do the funds when they graduate from what we focus on. Then we have other foundations and endowments who are looking to build out a direct portfolio. So we work with them and introduce them and share all of our investment memos research network and they go directly into the funds as well so it depends on the foundation endowment um i'd say there's not as many foundation endowments who love to do first-time funds um and so yeah and i sort of speculated on that a little bit in the previous panel but why is it why do they not want to do that you know that that's hard because even David Swenson said, you know, it's intuition and going back to Mars.
40:50If you're looking for this track record, then you've missed the earliest funds. And there's venture, there's research that says funds one through three outperform. And we can debate on why that is. Is it the fund size? Is it you fish the low hanging fruit in your network? Is it the timing? Is it the conviction? We can debate on why first time funds outperform, but there's research to prove it. But, you know, What does your intuition tell you? Does it have something to prove? High energy, not rich yet? I mean, if a founder, hungry, yes. There's a lot of the hunger and drive. But I do think if you're a founder and you're leaving a company with a stable salary to start a job, it's the same thing as a GP starting the fund.
41:36They're taking the risk and the bet on themselves, and they have that whole heart that the timing is right, that they've built their career to this point that they can do it. And so it's this opportune time. And Samantha mentioned finding Australia. So they find niches where their experience and their networks is the right time. And again, it's Goldilocks. There's a self-selection process there. If they're deciding to take that path to do the incredibly hard thing of starting a fund, they're probably high performers or insane or have something to prove, chip on their shoulder, not yet rich, or not calling in rich.
42:10All of those things, yes. Calling in rich is the joke instead of calling in sick. Let's start, I guess, Paige with... I have a question. Okay. What do you look for in a fund manager? I feel like for everybody in the room who's maybe thinking about starting a fund at some point, that's something we would want to know. It's like, how do you evaluate a fund manager? Is that okay? Yeah. I mean, you're a great moderator too, so let's... I've already... There seems to be a theme today that I went from the world's great moderator to number three, so... It was a soft now, but I need to know exactly. I mean, so asking for a friend, asking for a friend.
42:45LPs look at, you know, if you fit their portfolio, you're not going to go and convince an LP that doesn't invest in emerging managers to invest in a first time fund. So if an LP does invest in first time funds, it's really is the thesis is the ecosystem, the broader picture of where your networks are, does that fit? And then you get to the discernible edges. And the discernible edges really focus on what do you do as a fund manager? You have to source, pick, win, and support, right? And so back to the Mars presentation of yesterday of the rational thinking versus intuition. The rational thinking can help you with the sourcing and figuring out somebody's networks and the support.
43:28You can diligence, you can talk to founders, talk to the ecosystem. But it really is the picking that you have to have an intuition on. I mean, you can have somewhat of a track record, but then is that repeatable? So I would say there's intuition and rational, but it's those four things that we spend a lot of time and a lot of time with founders and co-investors and the perceived reputation in the industry. So Paige, tell me about your fund, when you started it, and then your process for raising funds. And then Sophia, we'll go to you. You're doing a public raise like I am, and we'll talk about the public raising.
43:59Did you choose to do public raising as well? I actually didn't do a public raise. Didn't. So I'm 506B. And I can talk about, like, if you're thinking about starting a fund, there's a delineation between raising in public through a 506C fund, which Sophia and Jason have both done. And then a 506B fundraise, which I've done while building in public, which comes with certain regulatory lines that I've spent a lot of time with lawyers going through in specific. But, yeah. So I started my fund when I was 22. in 2021 uh i got into venture because i was binge watching silicon valley and i was like this is the best job ever how do i do this um and that's a fiction-based show just yeah it's a level set here it's not a documentary yeah despite it's yeah well yeah it was funny i thought it was like it was so like hilarious and outlandish and now i watch it and i'm like this is this kind of my day to day in like a weird way.
44:58But I just like I fell in love with venture and the opportunity to support and pick amazing founders building the future that I wanted to see for myself for like the next generation. And then as I was going along in my journey of learning about venture, I thought it was really opaque. So I started building all these resources on Twitter, helping other people break into venture. I was working in an early stage startup by day and And then by night, I worked on a children's book called Seed to Harvest that explains venture capital in 40 pages and a lot of colorful illustrations done by my brother.
45:33So my first fund was a$5 million fund invested in 27 pre-seed and seed stage companies. Twelve of those raised fall in financing. I'm pretty heavily involved in introducing founders to downstream capital. And our LP base is quite strategic in that sense, a lot of founding partners. And then my second fund, which I launched late last year, actually, Sendana Capital is our anchor. So I'm excited to be on stage with Kelly today. But yeah, that's kind of like how I got into venture and a bit about the firm. And I focus a lot on like what are the demographic shifts that are happening within my generation and what are the different like softwares or connected hardwares that enable that to be democratized to a broader group of people.
46:22Did it turn out making that piece of content, this children's book about venture capital, which is just such an amazing, clever idea. Thank you for doing that. That's when I discovered you on Twitter. Did that turn out to be like the wedge strategy that got you attention? And then social media then had people say, oh, well, if you're starting a fund, maybe I'll put 25 or 50K in? Yeah. I mean, I think like for any of you raising a fund, like our first fund was like 1 ,700 cold calls. And I was like DMing everyone who followed me on Twitter. like, Hey, you said 1700. Yeah. 1700. Yes. Yeah. We have 120 LPs in our first fund.
47:00So I think like if you're raising a fund, it, it will, it will be hard. It gets, uh, easier along the way and then it gets more challenging in some ways. But, um, yeah, the children's book actually led me, I set up this community number, uh, where I could like text out updates, uh, for the book. And that's how I met the first founder that I invested in. His name is Kai Han. He's the founder of a company called Palette, which is community job board infrastructure.
47:31I remember like being on the phone with him and just being like, holy shit, like this is the founder that I need my name on this cap table. And then after that, I asked him for allocation. and then I think I asked on Twitter what syndicate platforms I could use they ended up using Assure. I think you made a recommendation about Assure around that time. Sorry about that. Can't win them all. Yeah, and ended up investing in his company as my first investment. We ended up doubling down through the first fund and he's an LP in our second fund. So that's been a really cool full circle moment. But yeah, the book directly led me to meeting the first founder that I invested in.
48:14Sophia, tell us a little bit about the origin story of TrustFund. I know you had done some angel investing. Obviously, you're an entrepreneur and people love operators as investors. Why'd you decide to start a fund now? So I've started a company. I don't know. I won't do the introduction thing because we've talked enough about it on This Week in Startups. So I've been angel investing for mostly the last four years. I invested in first dibs in like 2012 or something like that. But yeah, over 20 companies at all stages, all sectors, not trying to do a fund zero, just really enjoy working with founders.
48:52And after I built my second, I guess, venture-backed company, realized I don't like building companies. I really like being in the weeds. I don't want to hire executives to do the stuff that I enjoy doing. And it feels much better to harvest what it is that I've learned building massive companies and flailing and you know messing up and falling on a public stage and all of the above um just to kind of i guess use the word harvest again everything that i've learned for them which is just like i would do it for free but you know i can hustle advisory shares and roll them into the fund so um so i went on a listening tour in 20 i guess last year um and just like talked to a bunch of early fund man like emerging fund managers and pretty much everyone gave me the caveat that's like you never stop fundraising you're not like spending time with founders it's like miserable you never even when you close your fund you're just you're always fundraising for fun too and I was like Jesus Christ but everything I've ever everything I've ever done like I've been thrown a bunch of I'm just like stubborn and so I'm like well maybe it won't maybe maybe I'm special yeah it'll be different no I don't know I mean maybe a little little bit.
50:02But I decided to do it anyway. You know, I decided to do a$5 million fund and raise in public. Last year, I just kind of went out and quietly emailed my network and you're one of those people and Mark Andreessen and Chris Dixon and all these awesome guys signed up Jeremy Lou to be LPs because I had met them in like 2012 when I was fundraising for Nasty Gal. So I've had you know relationships for like i don't know how i don't people are asking like how i met you do you know how i met you yeah like 10 years ago we've like played poker at cds and whatever um so that's like that's pretty awesome to have those guys show up because i've actually pitched andreason in the room for a company and been turned down which is still one of the proudest moments of my career um just getting in that room i guess um so decided to go out with a five million dollar fund and just like okay i'm gonna raise in public like i had raised a little bit at the end of last year heard about this 506c thing and I think Ryan Hoover at Weekend Fund and a few other folks had done this and done it really well and published a lot of content about how they did it and he's also an LP and a friend so I was able to ping him and ask a bunch of questions about how this worked and just like I don't know went to TechCrunch and was like hey I'm doing this fund I want to tell you about it and maybe I'll do something interesting and I'll let people who anyone who's an accredited investor apply to invest in the fund because you know typically you can only have 99 lps in a fund um i have a parallel fund where i can have like 2 000 qualified purchasers which are like super rich people and then accredited investors i can have like 249 yeah um up to 10 million dollars up to 10 million dollar yeah um and so i made this really does solve the cold start problem doesn't it yeah and it created so much groundswell so i announced that only TechCrunch picked it up and I talked about it on my socials or whatever and I got a thousand applications from people between two and 20k and over six and a half million dollars in people who were applying to be LPs in the fund and there was a big air table that was like how could you be helpful because it's an opportunity to you know for a broader set of LPs to evangelize the product, send deal flow, possibly help and have a variety of domain expertise that they can contribute to the portfolio companies.
52:25Even their teams can possibly beta test stuff that my founders are doing. And so that was really exciting. And I don't, I still don't have a hundred LPs. I'm still kind of, and I'm almost, I've like, I have like five committed, but I'm almost closed up, which is pretty cool. And I've written three checks. I don't know. I mean, I could keep going, but. No, it's absolutely fantastic. If you think about the previous way to do this you would have like a benchmark or a sequoia you know they they've had you know six or nine lps of you know 20k each 20 million each and that was their first funds and this was not democratized in any way and you just have to i guess build relationships now with all of these people to a certain extent i guess some of them just want to put the check in and i mean For a$2 ,000 check, I'm really clear that you're going to get information that everyone else gets.
53:19You don't get special information. You're going to get quarterly updates. You might get free stuff for early access to the companies we're working with. But here's what you don't get. I can't have coffee with everybody. My job is to invest your money. That's an email that goes out before they write a check. Right. Because I literally can't. I don't want to disappoint people. So I try to be really clear up front. Yeah. Yeah. So Kelly, let's talk a little bit about what you think of this. You're seeing a lot more startups, startup funds, let's call them. These$5,$10,$50 million funds. This didn't exist, I think, when Michael started his fund of funds, right?
53:58So now you have many more choices, is that correct, in terms of early stage funds? Yeah. So we did, to make our lives more difficult, or we started a nano fund so we started anchoring sub 20 million dollar funds we added it as a product we rolled it into our current fund but we think you know I know the LP said something different on stage but it really is fund size and venture returns is really about portfolio construction and appropriate fund size and so the small funds just have an outsized chance of returning multiples of capital and so we think it's a great opportunity for performance and so So we've always, 95 % of our capital has gone into fund one or two.
54:44Like we started all relationships at the beginning. So that isn't new. But we just saw, again, more were subsized. And so we put a direct focus there. How do you sort through so many of these new funds? And a lot of them seem like side hustles. So maybe it's become too easy to start a fund. Maybe people are doing it for fun or for status. and maybe they don't know what they're doing. Yeah, I think 2021 was tourist founders and tourist managers. And I think, you know, you get a good sense of why they're doing it. If you talk about, we really focus on a narrative when we talk to people. So what is your background?
55:26What have you accomplished in your career? And why are you doing this now? And you get a really good sense of what their drive is. Do they like the early stage, right? Or is this, you know, we focus only on pre-seed and seeds. We do it even with core bigger funds. Like, what is your focus? You want to be an AUM gatherer. You don't care about, you know, the early stage. We want somebody passionate about helping the companies. Because again, that goes back to the best referencing and sourcing you can get is from other founders. So we spend a lot of time, the GP market fit. Just as you would look at a founder, why are they starting this company?
56:01Is this truly a passion? Are they doing this because it's cool to be an entrepreneur? We do the same thing. Do they have to be full-time? It seems to me like the concept of having a part-time venture fund is kind of strange. So how do you think about the side hustle specifically and people doing it while they're running a company? This has become a point of contention for a lot of VCs. We're investing in your company, but now you're starting a side hustle fund to compete with us as investors. Does everybody have to have a podcast, a fund, and a startup? I mean, it's at a conference, asking for a friend, do they have to do all of these things or can they just shut the f*** up and do one really well?
56:42Jason, when are you starting a company? I have inside.com. You need it simultaneously. Yeah. But it's a serious question because it can become overwhelming. Yeah. I think a current operator, I think one of the knocks, we love operators, right? We love people who have been in the weeds and can be empathetic and know the journey. But I think one of the knocks is your products and tooling and understanding gets dated, right? Because with AI, like what tools are you using now? And so being current and in the market, you get different deal flow because you're one of them. You're a peer and your knowledge is current.
57:22But should you be leading deals? And probably not. Most founders that have had success are angel investing. So if it's a small fund and a step up and it's just writing a little bit larger checks, I think it works. But I think if you're trying to lead deals, that's a different beast. Is the thesis of a fund of funds that you'll keep going with the manager indefinitely or there is a graduation point? And do you hit that often? And then also, are you looking to maybe look deeper into what they're investing in and have the opportunity to direct invest into those? a lot of the sovereign wealth funds or endowments or family offices are like, hey, we want to be in an early stage fund like yours, Jake.
58:02But hey, what's the opportunity for us to meet the companies and then maybe we can invest in their Series B? How long do you keep investing, et cetera? So do you do the follow-on investing in portfolio companies of your fund-to-fund? Okay, so there's two questions there. The churn of the portfolio and then the direct investing. So portfolio churn, I think most fund-to-funds raise on the Sandhill names and they keep the roster. That's never been the way we invest. We want a fresh roster. We want to know what's going on in the early stages, capture the alpha. So we do have churn. I would say that we view ourselves as a lead investor, like a VC views themselves.
58:43And so we do monthly calls with our managers. We have a Slack channel. We bring in a monthly expert and the monthly calls are one-on-one. And so it's for them to come to us if they're thinking about hiring a partner, or if they're thinking about parada decisions, reserves, anything about fund management, we want to be a resource to them. But through those calls, we hear about companies that are tracking really well that they want to boast about, companies that are having a hard time they need help with, and we capture all of that in our database. So we do have a very small direct fund, but we don't want the tail to wag the dog, meaning we don't want to choose a manager because we're going to get direct deal flow.
59:21So we also have strategic LPs that want the follow-on or to lead the next round. And so that is General Atlantic, Tiger, and Sequoia Capital are actually invested in our fund. And so we will highlight companies to them for follow-on. So you become an early warning system for, you know, hey, here's some stuff that could be interesting to take a look at. Correct. Yeah. What's your best advice to fund managers on the table in terms of what's important to do every day and to just do really well? Because you must see some patterns emerge of where new fund managers kind of drift and get distracted and don't succeed.
1:00:01And then you must see, you know, some patterns of what results in outsized, you know, long-term growth of funds and multiple funds and outlier returns. So things to avoid, things to focus on. I think discipline. I mean, knowing your lane. I think kind of 2021, nobody had a lane. But I do think the people that stayed in the lane, that's going to stand out. And I think, you know, understanding your lane and your strengths, right? If you're good at early stage, that's where you should be focused, not leading a series B or worrying about parada even in a B. I do think the thoughtfulness, I mean, that's a personal bias.
1:00:38I think that you can really see it with people when they're thoughtful and authentic, when they're so self-aware that they know their strengths, they know their weaknesses, and they're building to a north star. So, you know, I think Michael was an early investor and forerunner. She has been so thoughtful and methodical about how she's built that firm. We have Ali Partovi in our portfolio, Neo. He has been so thoughtful. He founded Code.org with his brother. Then he founded Neo Scholars. Then he launched a fund on top of it. Everything has been patient, methodical, and slow to build to the North Star.
1:01:11And so I think it's just the discipline, patience, and thoughtfulness. Sophia, how are you dealing with, you've got a bit of celebrity, obviously, and you get a lot of inbound. But you have to say no now. and you have to say no to 99 out of 100 deals if you're going to be good at this. How are you dealing with, as an entrepreneur, a founder, somebody who is very optimistic, a just constant barrage of having to say no to everybody? I've gotten really good at saying no, I think. You know, it's like if there isn't, and I've never really been a follower in my career, but as someone who's new at this job, I'm going to invest in people who are at least one degree away from somebody that I know.
1:01:56Ideally, somebody that I know is also investing or if they can't or aren't, it's because they write too big of checks or it's outside of their thesis. I'm not really looking for diamonds in the rough. I'm not looking for people with my story, the community college dropout who like didn't know shit and like raised money and bootstrapped and like whatever. Maybe if there's some wild advantage and they had some, you know, but it's like I'm really looking for for founders who you know ideally like I love second time founders so I can just look at like a team slide and a deck and be like meh you know no like I don't I don't need to take a flyer on someone with someone else's money and I've got like a little you know it's like I now have a much narrow narrow thesis it's not a narrow thesis but I'm not investing in consumer products so it's so easy to be like sorry no cpg non-alcoholic wine company i mean i did well with liquid death but the other two cpg brands i did have like gone to they're not zero but and they were small checks um but and i've marked them down but um yeah i don't know i'm i it's like a nice little script that's like hi i don't invest in this or it's outside of my thesis or you know i'm busy fundraising or i'm focused on this other thing there's always some really polite way to say no and often i mean you hope that someone is asking if you're if someone's sending you a deal they're asking for you to opt into the introduction so it's much easier to just write that person and say like thank you so much please keep sending me deals i don't think this one's right for me and some people will just send you shit to be to like prove that they're helpful and that's just such a like then you're just then it's just like some weird it's not a it's like a weird expectation of a quid pro quo that I don't like.
1:03:46This is the worst advice ever given. I don't do. I don't do. Yeah. No, the worst advice ever given to founders was when you get a no, ask that person to introduce you to three more people. Because now you've literally got a person who did not see an opportunity sending you to three more people saying, there's no way I'm putting my money in this, but here's the deck. Good luck. You have to decode that. Yeah. Because they want to seem helpful to the founder and they want to yeah that's not helpful to founders i think it's different on the lp side though because i do think that there's certain things that won't fit us like if you're series a fun if you do biotech you know it might not fit our thesis or maybe we already have two fintech funds and we aren't doing another right but we can still introduce you to other lps so i do think even the nose from lps it's different than founders Totally agree with that.
1:04:33Thank you very much for doing that. I mean, Paige, tell us about how many people contact you a week for funding. And then, you know, with these small fund sizes, you don't have huge management fees, which means you don't have a huge staff in all likelihood. I was able to build a large staff off of the profits of this week in startups. Basically I was like, well, I'll just take the profits and hire people to sort through all this deal flow. So like literally I was the management fees. And then in the first fund we had no management fees. Yeah. And on a$10 million fund, it's 200k a year so it's not even enough to sustain the partner yeah so talk a little bit about how you manage how many people contact you and then how you manage that yeah sure i'll take the i'll take the second part of the question first so the the question was like how how do you think about running a small fund in a way that's sustainable so i think there's been like a lot of there's been a lot more public writing on this um but front loading your management fees while keeping them still blended, like 2 % over the 10 years is a really smart way to think about building a firm versus a fund.
1:05:35And so for us, like I front load, like the first three years are 5 % and then it steps down after that over the period of 10 years. And the way that I think about that is I want to build the firm like through these different funds and that enables me to hire a part-time like podcast editor since I run a weekly podcast called Seed to Harvest. I also have a part-time investment analyst who works at a family office as his day job. And I think one of the reasons why I hired him was, as you were saying, I get like an increasing amount of inbound through, you know, being like a semi-public figure on Twitter, which is, and I think, as Sophia was alluding to, I think like the longer that you invest, the more familiar you get with your own set of no's.
1:06:22So now it's like, okay, I look at a company, if it's not in the U.S. or Canada, if it's not domiciled there, it's a no. If they're raising at a ridiculous valuation, it's not going to be a fit for us. I would say I'm very disciplined around ownership, which is something that Kelly and I have talked about a lot. But I want to get between 1 % to 3 % ownership in the companies I'm investing in, which is not tenable with a company that's going to be, you know, over 30 million posts. And then beyond that, I look through, as our portfolio has grown, are there any conflicts within our portfolio? So now I have 36 companies, and I invest pretty heavily, especially in the creator tool space.
1:07:01There's usually some level of overlap, so it has to be a really unique value proposition. It doesn't conflict with existing portfolio companies, and hopefully complements them in some way. And then I think, like beyond that, I think about investing from a very first principles approach. So after someone's passed those steps, I'll usually take a call with them. And as I'm on the call, I'm thinking through like the three different axes that I think about as a fund manager. So very founder focused. So the first is, are they a compelling storyteller from a quantitative and qualitative perspective?
1:07:40because this is important whether you're selling to customers, whether you're raising capital, whether you're retaining employees based on an incredible shared fiction that building a company is. The second is do they have a strong mission? I think what I've seen from people of my generation is they want to work for a mission-driven company that's really important and drives shared action. And the third, and I would argue one of the most important components of my investing work that I look at, is execution velocity. So I'm an engineer by training, and I think about velocity as a vector being speed and direction.
1:08:18And I think this goes to if you think about fund managers or founders not having a track record before. I've got a lot of first-time founders. And I look at in their past, how have they been able to decide a direction? And then how quickly have they been able to iterate and move in that direction with what speed? and I think those three components are things that I've identified in myself that have helped me become like relatively, I don't want to say successful because everything's still on paper but have been able to grow like quickly in this field. So I feel like I'm uniquely equipped to understand those characteristics.
1:08:57Amazing. Let's give it up for Sophia, Paige, and Kelly. Well done. Thank you so much.
1:09:08Thank you.
From the publisher
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Today’s show:
The contents of this episode were recorded live at LAUNCH Angel Summit in Napa.
DoorDash Chief Product Officer and Co-Founder Stanley Tang joined Jason live on stage at Angel Summit to discuss DoorDash’s founding story, avoiding ZIRP distractions, and the cloud kitchen movement (1:23).
Then, Jason sits down with Kelli Fontaine of Cendana Capital, Sophia Amoruso of Trust Fund, and Paige Doherty of Behind Genius Ventures to chat about becoming and investing in first-time fund managers (36:49).
Follow Stanley: https://twitter.com/stanleytang
Check Out DoorDash: https://www.doordash.com/
Follow Kelli: https://twitter.com/kells_bells
Check Out Cendana Capital: https://www.cendanacapital.com/
Follow Paige: https://twitter.com/paigefinnn
Check Out Behind Genius Ventures: https://www.behindgeniusventures.com/
Follow Sophia: https://twitter.com/sophiaamoruso
Check Out Trust Fund: https://www.trustfund.vc/
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Time stamps:
(0:00) Nick kicks off the show
(1:23) DoorDash’s founding story with Stanley Tang
(11:06) Embroker - Use code TWIST to get an extra 10% off insurance at https://Embroker.com/twist
(12:20) The Palo Alto delivery experiemnt
(16:07) DoorDash’s first delivery
(18:21) The era of excess
(23:00) LinkedIn Marketing - Get a $100 LinkedIn ad credit at https://linkedin.com/thisweekinstartups
(24:23) Avoiding ZIRP distractions
(26:44) Navigating through the pandemic
(30:59) The Cloud Kitchen movement
(35:31) Squarespace - Use offer code TWIST to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain at https://Squarespace.com/TWIST
(36:49) Defining a fund of funds and selecting managers with Kelli Fontaine of Cendana Capital
(44:00) Raising a private fund with Paige Doherty of Behind Genius Ventures
(48:14) The origin story of Trust Fund with Sophia Amoruso
(53:42) The prevalence of startup funds
(59:35) Advice for first-time fund managers and having the ability to say no
(1:04:36) Running a small fund in a sustainable matter
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