Building a firm to last, lessons from nearly three decades of investing, and the path to hiring great venture teams with Glenn Solomon of Notable Capital (FKA GGV Capital)

0:00Welcome back to another episode of Venture Unlocked, the podcast that takes you behind the scenes of the business of venture capital. I'm your host, Samir Khadji, and today we're thrilled to be joined by Glenn Solomon, managing partner at Notable Capital. Along with Granite Asia, Notable was formerly part of GGV Capital, which recently split into the two groups, with Notable based in Silicon Valley, New York, and covering companies in the US, Israel, Europe, and Latin America. Glenn brings nearly 30 years of venture experience to the table, and it was fun to talk through his view on firm building and investing.

0:32We really hope you enjoy the episode, and let's get right into it.

1:02third parties or securities mentioned in this podcast. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon as a basis for investment decisions. Glenn, it's great seeing you, man. Thanks for being on the show. Samir, it's exciting. I've been a longtime fan of Venture Unlocked. Very excited to be on the show. You and I were talking about this right before we got started of how long you've been in venture and how long I've been in venture. You got me beat by three years to 28 years in venture. But I always love to hear the origin story of what got you into venture and maybe give us your background, the non-LinkedIn version and the path into starting at Portech, I believe, almost three decades ago.

1:42So you are aging me, but I ended up at Stanford back in the late 80s, early 90s, primarily to play tennis. That's how I ended up at Stanford. And it was a great experience out in the West Coast. I'd grown up in New York. You know, the technology boom, it was more of a hardware boom at that time. And so there wasn't a lot of consumer technology. You know, people had PCs and email was a thing that was sort of starting to take hold when I was in college. But the Internet hadn't yet been born. And so technology, as most people know it today, was really non-existent. And I was lucky enough to come back.

2:23I was working in finance and was back in San Francisco doing an investment job shortly after college. And I determined, like, I absolutely love looking at companies and investing in companies. I was mostly doing public equities and some sort of what you'd consider like Warren Buffett, like deep value private equity work at that time. It was very early in my career. and in 1994, I'll never forget, I went home to my apartment one day in San Francisco and a friend of a friend was there and he plugged his computer into what then was a phone jack and showed me the internet for the very first time. And it was like a seminal moment for me.

3:03I thought to myself, wow, like this is really slow, but this is incredible. Like computers are going to be able to network, companies can start talking to consumers in a very different way. Like I was, I remember distinctly having that thought in my mind. And from that moment forward, I wanted to get deeper into technology. And when, and then I was lucky enough to shortly thereafter, end up back at Stanford for business school. And I spent basically two years devoting, I'd never heard of venture, the words venture capital strung together before I went to Stanford for business school. But at school, I delved deeply into combining this interest I had in investing with technology.

3:45And I came out the other end of venture capitalist, amazingly. And as you mentioned, I spent the first almost nine years of my career at a firm called Partec International. And then joined what was then Granite Global Ventures in late 2005, early 2006 timeframe. and it's been a long road since then. But here we are at Notable today and I've really enjoyed every minute of my venture career. It's an amazing story. And I am old enough to remember Partech from my early days working at Silicon Valley Bank. One of the questions I had for you is I look at venture firms very similar to companies. As a company, you have to form, you have to have a thesis, you over time are gonna evolve to stay viable.

4:32And certainly that's very tough. And there's very few firms that have lasted the test of time. The Kleiners, the Sequoias have been around for 50 plus years. But for the vast majority, there's a lot of challenges, whether it becomes keeping the culture, the generational succession, and really evolving with the times. Before we get into some of the things that you guys have done over the last two decades, maybe Glenn, we can talk a little bit about what drew you to, at that time, GGV, as it was called. The decision to join and then the way we intentionally grew the firm over the past couple of decades started with, in my mind, a view that the world of technology, technology was flattening the world.

5:21When I entered the venture business, the best firms in the world were very proud to tout that they would only back founders within a 20-mile radius of their offices. And somehow this was a good thing. It was a very Silicon Valley-centric, I think, view of the world. And I had, for a variety of reasons, developed a very different perspective on how technology was going to grow over time. And I did not have the foresight to understand exactly the incredible paradigm shifts we've seen over the last few decades in technology. Back when I was entering the business, the big thing was client-server. Client-server was going to take over the world from mainframe.

6:05So it predated internet, as we discussed, and the importance of the internet in the evolution of technology and then mobile and then cloud. and here we are today with vast improvements in AI and generative AI. But all the way through, all these trends have made the world flatter and have increased both the size of the opportunity in technology because markets are inherently global, have also democratized where great opportunities will be born and where they can develop. And so my view from early on was, hey, being global is really important and actually can give you a big advantage in technology and therefore in venture capital.

6:50You know, from its earliest days, Granite Global Ventures, then GGV Capital, and now certainly our firm with Notable are very global in our orientation and how we think about the world. Building companies is very much a local process, but attacking markets is a global opportunity. So in terms of prosecuting on the opportunity, which of course your thesis was proven right, it did become an entirely global and not only global, but technologies looked to and started to infiltrate every sector in the world. Of course, AWS was a big driver of that in reducing the cost by 10, 100x, depending on the type of company, because you didn't have to buy those databases, you didn't have to buy those servers.

7:32But let's talk a little bit about thinking about building a firm that can execute on the thesis in a highly differentiated way. Talk about the early days of, again, let's call it Granite Global at the time you joined. One of the things that attracted me to move from Partec to Granite Global, then GGV, was I thought that the firm was very scrappy and had an orientation around doing things differently, not just doing things the same, you know, the way that every other firm did. And I saw an opportunity for me to make a big impact. Those were, you know, exciting attributes that led me to make the shift.

8:11The firm also from an early, you know, from its earliest days was very global in its orientation, recognized that Asia was a source of a huge amount of opportunity. And, you know, the firm had invested early, even before my time in Alibaba, which obviously was an incredibly early stage investment to make. You know, I think it was that willingness to try new things, to recognize that, like Wayne Gretzky says, you know, the technology market's always moving and you better be skating to where the puck is going and not to where it's been. If you want to be successful, it was the way to go. And it reminds me of a conversation I had shortly after joining with a person who I won't name, but who is a very esteemed and successful partner in the VC industry, who at the time was a partner at a very well-known firm that is still well-known and has done very well.

9:06He's since moved on, but at that time anyway, had said to me he was lamenting that the venture industry was getting more and more promotional. And firms like Sequoia and Andreessen had pushed the envelope in creating brands. And he was very dismissive of this as an approach and felt like it wasn't the way venture ought to be practiced. I listened and realized, okay, this is an industry though that is going to keep shifting and changing. And if you don't make the necessary changes. You won't keep up. Although there's been a lot invested in building brands, and I'd love to talk more about Notable and what we're up to, there's not a lot of barrier to entry in investment businesses.

9:54And so capital will flow. If it looks like there are good returns, capital is going to flow to a various asset class. You need to figure out how you're going to be different. Inevitably, things are going to change. So this is a good example of, I think, why I was attracted to at the time Granite Global Ventures, now GGV, then GGV, now Notable, just because there was this desire and willingness to look at the model and break it and change it and keep iterating. And I think that's still part of our culture today at Notable. So let's talk a little bit about Notable. So the firm itself has been around for 25 years.

10:34you know, it's founded in 2000. Next year will be the 25th year anniversary, but now it's under a different wrapper with notable. And you talked a little bit about brand. So maybe talk about some of the unique challenges and opportunities of actually creating a brand new name and how you think about now the next chapter. I think most of your listeners may be aware, uh, GGV in September of last year, we announced the world that we had decided to split, um, with our Asia colleagues, global, you know, geopolitical global dynamics being what they are. The tensions between the U.S. and China and related areas is bigger than any of us.

11:14And it wasn't a problem we were going to solve. So we decided what was best for our employees, for our LPs, and the future of our business was to split. This wasn't an acrimonious divorce of any type. And I still have a lot of respect for the folks who've now rebranded as Granite Asia, who are my partners for many years. and with whom we continue to manage our existing funds and will continue to do so for many years. This gave us the opportunity to come up with a new brand and rethink from the bottoms up how we wanted to build a business at Notable Capital. And it started with, I think, our view that the successful companies that we work with, they operate with velocity.

11:57The best portfolio companies that I've had the opportunity to be a part of have incredible product velocity and they've really oriented the entire company around moving quickly and iterating fast learning and very short feedback cycles learning and moving and continuing to drive excellence over time they've also i think operated with steadfast core principles where the vision and culture remain constant despite kind of this rapid iteration on product and meeting the customer needs. So we thought, hey, can we fashion notable in the same way? And we really do try to think of ourselves as an operating company.

12:40Our product is the experience that we deliver to our founders and the executive teams that we back. Sure, we sell money, but really at the end of the day, this is about a founder experience and working with us. And we want that to be very unique and different. I think for us, what that means is when we thought about what a founder's need, they need speed. Their most important resource by far is time. And there are a lot of VCs out there who are very happy to waste founders' times. We really strive not to. We strive to move quickly from the ground up, design the process, then when we're working with a founder, for it to be a delightful experience for them and one that really fits with their need for speed.

13:24And that goes all the way from first meetings, if we're meeting a prospective founder, to how we work with them, to being ready and prepared when we spend time with founders, to giving them rapid feedback if we invest to a structured onboarding process. And we'll talk more about what it's like to work with us, but we've been very intentional about really trying to match the speed and intensity that founders need. Part of the way we've done this is I think it's hard, but we have stayed very, very sector focused. We don't want to be everything to everybody. In fact, we know that if we try to do that, we'll fail and we'll waste people's time.

14:07If we can make decisions quickly because we are very focused, though, we can win with speed. And look, there are lots of great firms with whom we compete and also collaborate. But I'd say where we try to differentiate is winning with speed, winning with know-how, and by being very focused. In order to optimize on that speed, we've built an organization that's very flat. There's really no hierarchy internally. Everybody in our firm is empowered. We want everybody in our firm to be operating like owners. In exchange for that, we've pushed economics. Everybody in our firm has economics in our fund.

14:43We think that that's a fair trade. We have very high expectations for everybody at Notable. We want people thinking like owners, like treating and understanding the mission and treating every founder interaction with the highest regard and the absolute most important priority that can be put on each interaction to make sure that founders really have that experience that we're pushing for. Let me give you an example. One of the more recent deals that we did was sourced by the most recent addition to our investment team, who's in a junior investment role. I mentioned that we're very flat. We don't really have much of a hierarchy, even though she had just joined, was part of an offsite we did to focus on a specific area, in this case, AI.

15:31out of that offsite, we came away with a couple of different thrusts that we wanted to go after. She took ownership, saw an opportunity, and sourced a deal that quickly made its way up the food chain that we recently closed. I think at most firms, that does not happen. I think it's a good example of how we want everybody at Notable Thinking all the time, focused on both finding the best opportunities, thinking like owners, recognizing that every interaction had with a founder is important and that our existing portfolio of founders is really going to benefit from that culture of ownership as well.

16:13And so far, so good. So you've touched on a few things that I do want to unpack and extending the analogy of a venture from. And I love the fact that you said we think of ourselves as an operating company, because the parallels are unmistakable. So when I think of great companies that are durable, or think about great venture funds that are durable, there's typically three things to build this great reputation and brand. So number one, a product that your clients and customers love. Number two is people that can continue to evolve, iterate, and improve the overall state of the franchise. And third thing is being well capitalized.

16:52We've touched on two of those things, which is people and also the product. So I want to talk a little bit of the product. So when you think about venture capital today, you talked a little bit about sort of the early days and venture has grown so significantly as an asset class by dollars, by the number of firms, mid 2000s, we had hundreds of firms. Now we have thousands of firms. So you have to iterate your product to be more meaningful to, in this case, your founders to be able to win deals. So maybe give us the bottoms up of how you built this product and what is your viewpoint of what is meaningful for a founder where you can deliver something that actually matters?

17:33Because we think of ourselves as an operating business, we have to make sure that our product, you know, that we have strong product founder fit, right? If our champion is a founder, we had to think, put ourselves in their shoes and really make sure that we're hitting the mark on what their needs are. You know, I mentioned speed. One way we accomplish that is by staying very, very sector focused. So I give my partner Hans Tong a lot of credit for recognizing that sector focus was one way for us as a firm to really differentiate ourselves. That I think is pillar number one. Pillar number two, and I give my partner Jeff Richards a ton of credit here, is recognizing that building companies, as you know, Samira, is really difficult.

18:20When you're a startup, there's nobody on your side and nobody's waking up in the morning cheering you on. Nobody's there to help lend a helping hand. If you ask founders, what is it that they need help with? You're going to hear talent, right? They need to build their team. They need to go hire great people. They They need to go get customers. They need to shout from the hilltops that they exist. They need to have marketing and communication strategy to get the word out. They're probably going to need help with technology in one way or another. And we've hired black belts in all of these areas to help our company.

19:01We call this our platform team. I know we're not the only venture firm with a platform team, but I think our approach is different in that if you ask any of our founders, what's it like to work with Notable? Our goal is to have them say, when they think of Notable, they think of it's a team that they work with. It's not a person. It's not one or two people. It's a team. That team is very cohesive in their approach. They probably know by first name, five, six, seven, eight people at Notable. and that when they talk to one person at Notable, it's like talking to everybody on that team. We all in the background are syncing constantly so that we know what the priorities are of founder XYZ or company ABC and what we're working on, what we've been able to accomplish to date and what are the next key sets of priorities that we need to help with.

19:56This is very comforting and helpful to the founder right? Because they don't want to waste their time. It's great that, you know, a bunch of firms have lots of people on staff that want to go help, but they don't want to be the ones having to synchronize that help. They don't want to be the ones that have to like remind people to go do their, you know, do what somebody else has promised they would do. So we're very careful and intentional. We've invested heavily on our backend technology to make sure that what we can deliver feels very cohesive and does not put any of the burden of delivery on the founder.

20:30That burden rests with us. You know, a pet peeve of mine I see with other firms is oftentimes firms who, you know, many of whom are great firms who've invested heavily in platform teams, you know, have kind of a steady stream of people that show up at board meetings. One month, it's, you know, one set of people and the next month it's another set of people and And they never really seem to know what each other is doing. And that is not how we operate. So I think that's another big piece of what we've tried to build. And it's working. Like our founders are our best calling card. Now at Notable, we have committed to our first three companies under the Notable brand.

21:09And each one of those was a very, very competitive situation. And we're betting 1 ,000 so far, which tells me. And the reason is because it's the founders that we work with who are going to bat with us for the next set of founders. And they're obviously saying, you know, telling, they're speaking honestly about what it's like to work with us and comparing that with other firms, many of whom, you know, are great firms that we have a lot of respect for that you've interviewed and, you know, are on the Allocate platform. But, you know, we, as my old college tennis coach used to tell me, respect everyone and fear no one.

21:44And we, we fear no one. Something that I think is worth double clicking on is the notion of what actually matters to a founder and how do you build a venture product and service around that. And you host a podcast called Founder Real Talk where you address not all of the good things that are happening, but some of the tough challenges that founders go through. Drew, you've been on the board. You've probably seen, even with the most successful companies, the many ups and downs. Through those different conversations, whether it be from your podcast or being on the board, what are some non-obvious inputs that you've taken in that have helped shape your product as a venture investor?

22:24We're a learning organization. That's one of the things we look for in founders. We know that the quality of founder is by far the highest correlating factor to success in our investments. So we care a lot about the founders that we back. And when we're evaluating new opportunities, one of the things we really look for in founders is, can they learn? Can they learn quick? Because no one's born, no one knows everything they're going to need to know to grow a company. And the same is true in the venture market. You better be always learning and humble enough to realize you don't know everything.

22:54So I love the question. One of my other partners, Oren Younger, I give a lot of credit for, for recognizing that, hey, if we're going to be focused as a firm, that's part of the battle. I'll pick on cybersecurity, which is a space that Oren came from and is a space that we've, I think, really built a very, very strong wedge in. What his contention was is, look, I'm an expert sitting here in that I was recently a chief security officer, but that market's going to keep changing as well. My skills are going to decay and we need to have, if we're going to really match founders and match their intensity, match what they need in this space, we can't just rely on like what I knew.

23:38And as it, as it decays, have it less and less valuable. So he came up with the idea that we've and we've supported in building like an army of chief security officers and align closely with them and having them help companies that help us by identifying opportunities in the market and then sourcing companies and then evaluating those companies and then offering to help those companies all in ethical ways. Like we can't promise that anybody's going to become a customer. But this group that Oren's put together is called SVCI, Silicon Valley CISO Investors. It's a group of 60 chief security officers.

24:23They're from amazing companies. Like, you know, these are folks from very innovative companies like Postman and Robinhood and Twilio, but also, you know, larger, more established companies with big budgets. and they convene regularly. They care a lot about being part of SVCI. And the reason they do it is, you know, they're excited about staying on the cutting edge of technology. And obviously because of who they are, they get to see everything early on. And so by definition, we at Notable get to see every startup in the cyberspace. The reason why entrepreneurs want to get to know SVCI is because they can be very helpful, right?

25:02I mean, getting feedback, real-time feedback on product, on messaging, on go-to-market from an army of security officers who really are going to be potential customers is great. Who can provide testimonial is amazing. We've replicated SVCI in the data space. We have another group that's very similar in the data space called IID, Invest in Data. That's about 40 chief data officers from large and small companies. And when we activate these groups, it's just amazing for us. We think it helps us define where we want to spend our time. So again, we want to operate with speed. We don't want to waste any founder's time.

25:46And it helps us add a ton of value to founders when we interact. even in the process of just getting to know them before we invest, we're routinely able to introduce five to 10 prospects right off the bat for them to get good feedback from and for us to get good feedback from. And then we take it from there. Customer introductions, even if it's from a learning perspective, is one of the most valuable things. Yes, you can provide these great networks, but you really need the people within the shop at Notable to be able to deliver this consistent experience because any brand is as strong as its weakest link.

26:20And if it's not consistent from you to the, let's call it the 30th person. And of course, you mentioned this earlier, you do provide economics for everybody, but still you need to have a cultural ethos that is ingrained in everybody. Like at our company, for example, the two things I really care about is an insane amount of curiosity and ambition. Those are the two things I really index heavily on. What is it that you index on in terms of creating this consistent experience for these founders? What I tell people is what I look for in founders, you just hit the nail on two of them, right? I said learning.

26:54So curiosity, they have to be learning machines. They have to be like, I have to have an inhuman level of ambition because starting a company is a crazy thing to go do. And there's so many forces working against you, that if you don't have inhuman amounts of ambition and perseverance, you just won't make it. You need to be able to sell. You need to be incredibly persuasive as a founder, right? Because you're constantly selling. You need to sell people to come along with you on the journey as employees, customers to take a risk on you. You need to sell guys like me and you to help finance these companies.