E290: How LPs Underwrite Venture in 2026

Why does today’s venture market feel increasingly untethered from historical precedent? David Weisburd speaks with Narayan Chowdhury about structural shifts in venture capital, the limits of data-driven decision-making, and how founders and investors navigate an unusually noisy and fragmented market. Narayan shares how access, trust, and long-term relationships are becoming more important as traditional signals lose reliability.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00David Weisburd?

  Ryan, you're a co-founder and a partner at Franklin Park. Tell me where Franklin Park sits at an AUA basis today.

• 0:07Speaker 01

  We are about a $21 billion AUA, AUM firm based out of Philadelphia.

• 0:14David Weisburd?

  And you said, last time we chatted, you said it's the most confusing untethered sentiment today, investing in nature that you've seen. That's quite the statement, given that you've been in the industry for a while. Why did you say that?

• 0:26Speaker 01

  Every week, there seems to be some event, some pricing, some scaling thing that, you know, I can't, I had, there's no basis for, no precedent for.

• 0:40Speaker 01

  So, you know, things like a single person getting a $1.5 billion comp package to leave a company that he just co-founded months before. That's, these things have never happened, you know? Trying to figure out trillion dollar spends on data center build outs.

• 1:03Speaker 01

  The, the sort of growth and death and retention metrics of some of these companies that are just, you know, a few engineers are, are creating incredible products for enterprise and consumers.

• 1:22Speaker 01

  It's, it's just unprecedented. I'm, I'm, I'm in awe.

• 1:28Speaker 01

  The amount of options founders have, seemingly many, but when, when it, when it gets down to the nitty gritty of, of those financings and those fundraises, the, the haves and have-not stories are, seem so insane to me. The, it's just such a very bipolar market, all these, all these little niches. I can't imagine how confusing it is for all the market participants when you have all these really, really spiky events. Our, our ground truth has always got to be, why do, why do founders want to give up part of their, their precious life's work to somebody else?

• 2:11Speaker 01

  That's, that's kind of at the heart of the, the venture equation, right?

• 2:16David Weisburd?

  Adding to this complexity, there's companies like Midjourney. Some report they're at 500 million, half a billion ARR with no outside capital raised. So they've scaled without outside capital. So VCs aren't even getting to those opportunities. Then there's people, I had the founder of HF Zero, which is a 12 week AI accelerator in San Francisco. It's one of the most interesting podcasts I've ever had. And they put people in these monk mode modes for 12 weeks. And these companies go from 500,000 to 10 million ARR just in just focused work and development for 12 weeks. They take away all the distractions from their lives. So there's the, and now they've actually evolved. They used to give a million dollars for a 20 million, take 5%. Now they've evolved, some people don't even want the million dollars. They'll just take 3% for just the services. So they're basically being paid in services.

• 3:00David Weisburd?

  There's so many different models emerging.

• 3:02Speaker 01

  There are. And so it's in that backdrop that, you know, we're trying to think about what's going to endure. How should we build our portfolio? What's the value of legacy brand? So I'd say the other confusing thing is there's a temptation. I think a lot of investors have quant data analyst sort of mindsets. You want to dig into the data. You want to be, have some grounding for, for your beliefs in data. And I think the scary part for, as I look at it, is the data is very often plagued with holes. Non-reporting, self-bias reporting.

• 3:45Speaker 01

  It's lagged and so, you know, the, the slice of data we get to look at is either just not relevant for, for this current market. Or the thing that it tells you might be, was relevant for a prior regime. And so there's been a regime shift or there's been a underlying firm shift such that the conclusion you draw from the data is not helpful. So what I, what, look, let me mention some examples of this, like. You might, you might look at a data set of, say, uh, I, this isn't, this isn't analysis I've done, but you, you could look at, say, first time funds out of some data set that you, you're,

• 4:26Speaker 01

  you're, you've paid for, maybe your own data, you know, after 23 years for us, for example, we have a lot of, we have a rich data set of our own to mine from. But you, you draw some conclusion. Well, what confidence do you have that it's representative of, of a population? There are some data sets where, you know, I'm looking at these vintages and it doesn't include this fund and this fund and this fund, like 40 really compelling funds that are just not in the data set, right? And you might be led to believe that first time funds underperform or have more risk or have less risk. But the, the paucity and/or the N in a particular, the number of observations in a particular year are like four, because you were looking at,

• 5:12Speaker 01

  say, Israeli infrastructure as your slice. And so very hard to do data analysis when the data, I'd say, is problematic.

• 5:19David Weisburd?

  There is some good news on that front. I interviewed Professor Steve Kaplan from University of Chicago and also Professor Gregory Brown from University of North Carolina, two of the leading researchers in the entire world in the space. They both use the same data set, which is the MSCI Burgess, which is LP-driven data. So in order to get the ground truth, GPs, there's going to be, GPs are only going to report their best funds, or some GPs are only going to report their best funds. So you have to go to LPs for ground truth. And most interestingly, when I interviewed Professor Steve Kaplan, he had just gotten a look at the Adipar data. So Adipar now is somewhere around seven trillion in, in assets on their platform from a, from a data standpoint. So they're actually getting very similar data to MSCI Burgess. So completely independent data set is getting to similar ground truth. So that was very promising.

• 5:59Speaker 01

  I hope that's published soon. I'd love to see that. Yeah, things like that would be, would be great. And, but obviously you don't, it'll probably be anonymized. Which has its own own issues and that and then there is that still there's a bias of well, you have that it's nice to hear that there's an independent correlation because you're still going to then deal with the fundamental LP bias that is driving those portfolios. So for example, let's, let's just say you, you, you got an LP submitted data set, but the underlying LPs were very large FOIA based investors, right? They would have different access than either the broader market or say best in class access.

• 6:42Speaker 01

  And access of course is a, is a huge deal in venture. So that there are still some, some problems, but then there's also the problem of, okay, you make a conclusion about, wow, this, this group or this segment is interesting. Well, okay, it was interesting then, but that this, perhaps this group that you've identified, they're, they're 5X the size of when, when their peak performance happened, right? So they're essentially competing in a new market. So is, is the, you know, the, the dangers of being backwards looking on that data analysis within either, it could be that maybe the sector has, has completely gone away or it's overfished.

• 7:21Speaker 01

  And so the magic was you were, you were on the front end and the valuations were two times revenue and now they're 20 times revenue or whatever it might be.

• 7:32David Weisburd?

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• 8:15David Weisburd?

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• 9:00David Weisburd?

  And I'm wondering whether it actually is untethered maybe on the past, but it is tethered to the future. What does that mean? Meta today is a $1.6 trillion company. When they're going out and giving these billion dollar signing bonuses, which they're reportedly not doing anymore to start their team. They're acting from some pretty interesting first principles. Obviously, I'm not in the boardroom. I'm not, I'm not talking to Mark Zuckerberg, but it seems like they've embraced a couple of principles. One is that the best teams and the best, you know, 100x engineers, AI engineers want to work with the best people. This whole concept of talent magnets, some organizations just absorb this talent. And if you take that to be true, which is a pretty non-controversial truth, then paying three to $5 billion on these three to 500x engineers in order to bootstrap a company and a team

• 9:45David Weisburd?

  for a market cap that could go from 1.6 trillion to $10 trillion if AI plays out. It becomes highly irrational, but only when you tether it to the future, not when you tether it to the past.

• 9:54Speaker 01

  For me, untethered just means when I would think about, you know, I was very fortunate. I've said this before on some different podcasts, just being very fortunate to meet Josh Koppelman in 05. And, you know, the beautiful thing there was meeting somebody who had some insights that not a ton of other people had and getting into that first mover community of micro VCs like an Ida and Senkut or Mike Maples or Manu Kumar or Steve Anderson. Like they were all kind of seeing it. And it didn't, it didn't really get overfished, become ultra obvious. I remember a lot of the larger cap VCs at the time really dismissing that strategy. And so.

• 10:40Speaker 01

  You could really, there was a kind of a good first principles approach that wasn't being overfished. And so it felt like a very underwritable thesis that didn't, did in fact work out. Here, it's, it's, it's, it's, it feels like the consensus happens very quickly. And so even if you feel like, okay, that, that is the future, perhaps, well, everybody has, has coalesced into that, that feeling. And that's where it feels, you don't, you don't feel like you're always, always making a unique insight that has been, has been culled from a massive primary research effort like, like we did back in oh, five, oh, six. It's just, it's just noisier. That's another way to say it's just extremely, extremely noisy.

• 11:23Speaker 01

  Right? So we have to kind of go back to our, that, that, what I said earlier about, we still have to answer that question at, at the, at the, at the crux of the, the problem. An entrepreneur has to give up some equity for capital. And what's going to motivate, motivate that person to give up that, that equity ownership?

• 11:45Speaker 01

  And I, I think what we're, what we're feeling now is that it's going to be a couple of things. So you assume, you assume a high degree of noise and uncertainty. I think that's going to be our, our, our operating framework. Okay.

• 11:59Speaker 01

  It's very uncertain. It's very noisy. What's the response to that? We think that groups that have engendered a lot of founder love by virtue of being in the market, having board seats, being in the trenches for decade, two decades, has a lot of merit. They've essentially created a federated network of founders for them that are helping them look around the corners, that are giving them some insight into interesting use cases, interesting go to market, interesting spin outs, whatever it might be. They're giving them a little bit more heft, credibility, access into, into a next generation company. But importantly, they, you, you have to marry that with, okay, they've been around for a

• 12:42Speaker 01

  very long time, but they staying somewhat disciplined in terms of the stage, the type of founder request that, that has worked for them. What I, what I mean by that is, okay, so let's say you've been around for, for 20 years, but that 20 years of history and that, that great trust and those halo deals and all the great things that, that happened are not as relevant because that, that all happened when you were. First finding companies, helping to build culture, helping to make key hires, making those key initial business introductions. But now your business is, we got to figure out how to get into the series D. What's the maximum we can pay? There's five other exploding term sheets.

• 13:23Speaker 01

  How do we, you know, it's a different, you're now in a different business than what the founders knew you for, how you competed. And so it's that, that question of regime change.

• 13:33David Weisburd?

  And what you're really saying is top test all investors that have kept their AUM consistent and have not grown.

• 13:38Speaker 01

  And the team, and they've continued to build that alumni network. Then, and the alumni networks feels very positive towards them. Like it's one thing to have just funded a hundred things, but you know, and we all know groups that have been high velocity investors, but totally forgettable on a cap table. Right? That doesn't also mean much. It's, it's, it's those folks where, again, I kind of use USV, you know, they had conviction, they, they, the founders feel a certain way about them. So all of those things kind of have to, to work in concert. The, the other thing that will, will undoubtedly work, I think are more emerging, opinionated,

• 14:21Speaker 01

  thesis driven, basically they're the non-consensus and right, but new things. And so we have to also be, be thinking about those opportunities.

• 14:31David Weisburd?

  So the next generation of Josh Koppelmann's D-Ma News, but today in 2025.

• 14:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, but those, those were, those were for the most part, generalists. If we, if we look at new managers and again, crudely bucket them into specialists and generalists, I think the newer generalists are a challenge for us because we're, we're wondering why they might be a sustainable brand in this market where there's 3,000 options for, you know, first checks.

• 14:58David Weisburd?

  There's a meme in the market that today, more than ever, it's about product and distribution. Peter Thiel, this is his paradigm. He calls himself a distribution maximalist, meaning the best example in the last couple of years has been this company, Cluley, that learned how to go viral without necessarily having a worked out product, which is quite impressive in today's world. To what extent is that what founders should be looking for, which is can this VC help me with my product, which really is upstream of that in terms of recruiting? Some people will work on product, but that's not very scalable. Or two, can they help with distribution? And just to add to that, so many of the top firms now are investing heavily in media. Andreessen Horowitz, Eric Tornberg, who co-founded this podcast with me, now has their media strategy.

• 15:40David Weisburd?

  And talk to me about media and is media becoming a core part of a value proposition for venture? Or is it just some headline grabbing thing that VCs are doing?

• 15:48Speaker 01

  When we think about success or what works is we tend to forget about all of the failures along the way that had the same strategy. You know, it's all anecdotes, right? So if you remember the summer of Turntable FM, right? That was hottest company in the entire universe. I don't know if you remember this company. I was obsessed with it. You'd go into a room, you'd DJ some music and people would, it was joyful. It was, it was fun and it grew like crazy until it didn't, you know? And they, the narratives there, they were doing everything right and this was the formula. And here's how you build until you didn't.

• 16:29David Weisburd?

  When you're in this time period with so much froth, so much activity, so much noise, as you mentioned, and you're picking the top funds for institutional investors, that's what Franklin Park does.

• 16:42David Weisburd?

  One of the principal agent issues that I see is you may be reluctant to pick a very potentially high expected return fund that may end up going to zero. So you have this headline risk that a principal investor would not have. How do you make sure that you're staying cutting edge and choosing those funds that may be a 10x half the time, might be a 1x the other half? How do you, how do you make sure that you stay cutting edge?

• 17:07Speaker 01

  It's funny to think about the real disaster funds because there aren't that many. I think the, the interesting thing about power loss is one investment can often save.

• 17:19Speaker 01

  Save a firm. I'm actually thinking there's actually a buyout fund, or they started life as a buyout, pure buyout metal bending fund. Had some luck in the venture space that really saved a fund of theirs.

• 17:33Speaker 01

  And then they pivoted to become a venture fund very successfully. And I always think about that as, you know, risk saved that franchise. Interestingly, we worry more about the ultimate operations and behavior of firms. I think that's part of the reason we've been a little bit reluctant on the solo GP front. And that is not a, that is not a return optimizing.

• 17:59Speaker 01

  Statement, right? Meaning going back again to like K nine and Manukumar. There's been fantastic Steve Anderson, been fantastic solo GP funds and there will continue to be. And absolutely it works for certain, certain VC profiles. What we have, we have noticed is that they, they can, they can endanger, engender, excuse me. They can engender some operational friction, let's call it. Whether it's subsequent fundraises are a bit more challenging. And so they're out of the market for a while, or there's other reasons why they're out of the market for some period of time, the reporting, the portfolio management.

• 18:42Speaker 01

  Perhaps it's a little bit more loosey goosey amendments. Just it tends to not be quite the institutional quality that, that we'd love to see.

• 18:57Speaker 01

  And then, and then frankly, we're doing a ton of references on, on how they behave in tough times through our, through our back channel network, which we've been cultivating now over really 25 plus years, going back to our prior employer. So, you know, knowing who, who those people are, how they behave. How much are they committed into that fund? That in our mind, some of these softer things are going to help mitigate disaster.

• 19:23David Weisburd?

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• 20:07David Weisburd?

  Their revealed preferences, not what they say they're going to do, but what they actually do when the shit hits the fan.

• 20:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. And I think that that is probably where we've avoided issues more so than Fund One or Fund Two or small fund size, that sort of thing.

• 20:25David Weisburd?

  An odd question, perhaps taken to the other extreme. I'll reveal my bias. I think references are the greatest source of alpha and GPs. And I think what truly separates the top LPs, one of the things is that they just do more references. So that's my bias. But just as a thought experiment, taken to the other extreme, most people are so set on their gut. I've never met somebody that didn't say they're not good at assessing people. Never met in my entire life. Is there ever, once you reference, you do your 20 references or whatever number of references you do? Do you still have a feeling in the beginning? Or is that feeling a bias? And most specifically, in this highly sophisticated world of VCs, you know, top 1% people in society. Do the best people, are they able to really fake their actual behaviors versus their revealed preferences?

• 21:06Speaker 01

  I have very few really bad meetings. To your point, these are all fairly accomplished, articulate. You know, for the most part, unlike I'd say other segments of finance, you usually get into venture because you want to make an impact. You love company building. You love that time of whiteboarding and thinking through difficult personnel, product, go-to-market problems with a small team. You know, there's a certain attraction that most of the folks I meet are pretty awesome. So the bar is very high. Still, you do have, I'll say two things about kind of. Referencing and funnel building. And that is that for us, it has to be continuous.

• 21:51Speaker 01

  Meaning like we, we really, it happens, but we really hate to be in situations where we hear about a platform or a team or some, some opportunity really completely out of the blue. Usually you would have liked, oh yeah, you know, we knew they were spinning out or yeah, we knew their deals. We knew that she, she led Pinterest when she was, you know, we knew some of that person's work here. One of the harder things in venture is you really can't be reactive. You kind of always have to be every day in the market, talking to your founder friends and your VC friends about,

• 22:32Speaker 01

  you know, interesting product, interesting spaces, what, what events, what hacks. I'm like, tell me, I, I want to soak in all of this, see these disparate pieces of information about how things are being built and how things are growing, attaching names to those stories. And you build this giant graph of, okay, I, I'm waiting for this thing to happen. And there's, there's actually a very recent concrete example of this. With a group called Brightmind in the cybersecurity space where we knew that we've, we, we've been feeling for a long time that cyber is a space that, that benefits specialists. The way the, the founder, those founder communities, the way they're sold. It's, it's not, it's not as accessible to generalists.

• 23:16Speaker 01

  I'm sure, sure there are some, but even, even at the generalist firms, there tend to be partners who specialize in, in cyber.

• 23:22David Weisburd?

  It's idiosyncratic. You can't just apply a generalist framework into cyber.

• 23:25Speaker 01

  There are people preferences in, in, in cyber, kind of like how there is in, in drug discovery as well.

• 23:33David Weisburd?

  What, what do you mean by that?

• 23:34Speaker 01

  Meaning I'm used to working with these sorts of.

• 23:39Speaker 01

  People, I'll overweight somebody who's taken a drug through, or somebody who's sold a CIM product that I know has worked in product. You know, there's a, people lean on heuristics, I would say, which are, which are self reinforcing then for the, the type of people involved in those, in those spaces.

• 23:56David Weisburd?

  So in another way, there's not many 18 year old VCs in cyber.

• 24:00Speaker 01

  And so we had, we had built a list of these companies that were just tracking at an incredible rate. And this is, you know, a while ago, you know, Wiz and abnormal security and, and Cribble and a bunch of others, Huntress and blah, blah, blah.

• 24:15Speaker 01

  And then, and then it's easy enough, I mean, the access to data now and through our network, you start having these conversations, well, tell me more, tell me about these other companies is how competitive is this space? Who's doing this? And we kept hearing this entity called Falcon Fund, either, either through data analysis or people flow that was showing up in these companies, these, so I said, well, you know, what's Falcon Fund? So again, more, more back channel investigation. Falcon Fund is the captive fund inside CrowdStrike. Okay, that's, that's interesting. I kind of loved immediately that it wasn't on offer, you know? But there's, there's people obviously behind that. And through some other relationships, we, we got to know who those people were.

• 24:57Speaker 01

  And then sort of said, let's, let's just keep an eye on that, that the progress of those people. And so much of, I think, I think VCs do the same thing. They, they plant a flag on a person or an idea and like, all right, I'm going to track that. And this was, this is, that's so much of the business is you start with a germ and then you track that over, over a period of time. And then it, that opportunity meets.

• 25:21David Weisburd?

  I've noticed this as well, and like, I think this originally is an avalism, but the people that are successful, that are hardworking and smart and high integrity, that end up staying at it for a decade, almost all of them succeed. So it's very hard to predict on specific venture or two ventures, or maybe even on a third venture. If you could own equity in that person, they're going to be successful. And I've often times thought about, and I've noticed that in my own network now, you know, also going a couple of decades, going back to 2008. So many people either flame out, burn out, change careers, and so few actually stick with it. And I'm wondering whether that's like a bias, which is the people that stick with it end up being successful versus the people that are successful end up sticking with it. Wondering your, your thoughts on that.

• 26:00Speaker 01

  The people who flame out or the people that we tend to not or lose, lose track of, they often presented a very transactional, they, they had the reverse appreciation saying it's, you know, we had a good conversation. It didn't work now, but I'm also opting in to be tracked, to, to stay in touch and to, to collaborate on what's may not seem like an immediately fruitful idea now. So they tend to also, if you, if you get what I'm saying, kind of opt into the long road. And so if I, if I think about, you know, Franklin Park's broad universe of, of friends of the firm, they also kind of have that, hey, it may not work out now, but I'm

• 26:45Speaker 01

  gonna, I'm gonna call you when our, our company has a fundraising need and I, I, I trust you to help me think about, even if it's not for my immediate benefit or your immediate benefit, somebody who's thinking about blood, blood, brain barrier, technology, solutions and, okay, well, I happen to know somebody. So let's, let's get them on the phone and talk about it. And these sorts of not immediately obvious transactional sorts of things, there is a kind of a mutual opt into that style. So I think there is something to the style begetting success, I think.

• 27:24David Weisburd?

  I think that's one of the hidden luxuries in venture and private markets is that if you're naturally a long-term relationship building person, the model works. If I was selling a product that's a thousand dollars, I couldn't spend 15 years building a relationship with you, even if I, even if I loved you. It just doesn't work. The business model doesn't work, but it's, it's such a luxury to be in an industry where you could spend 15 years, 15 years with somebody and then they end up writing a $20 million check. Rahul McDowell, I don't know if you know him, he's one of my favorite episodes, episode 199, and he builds these decades-long relationships. And I've seen it with, with my own eyes. He sends me these handwritten cards, which is epic. I don't even get cards, period, let alone handwritten cards. But it is one of those hidden luxuries where the stakes are so high. At least the business model works.

• 28:08David Weisburd?

  Then it's a question of whether you have the patience and the stamina to stay in there. But the business model rewards those people that are long term.

• 28:14Speaker 01

  Which is interesting, right? Because, gosh, we're going to circle back to the regime question. When you look back to people who came into the industry, again, I'm painting with a very broad brush here. But in that 1920, 21, and perhaps we're back into it. But the period when capital deployers really scaled like crazy in terms of their AUM and the velocity of how many deals they were doing. And they reengineered their orgs to be high velocity. Like, hey, we can't be diligencing this opportunity for a month. We're going to be, that's now a competitive disadvantage, perhaps. And so we're going to reorient our firm to be hypervelocity. You reorient to get money out the door.

• 28:59Speaker 01

  And then the people who come in, of course, they love this because it's just option value, right? It's just if I can early in my career make 50 bets and they view them as bets. If one of them, now I have a halo deal, now I have some credibility and now I have something I can take to my next position or that's my track record, right? So again, beauty of parallel is that you, some subset is going to have something interesting that's going to come out of a not great process.

• 29:32David Weisburd?

  To your point, if you do that 50 times today and one of those bets was 200 million at $5 billion and you made 50 of these bets, you put out $10 billion and now OpenAI goes out at a trillion dollars. So let's say it's 15x on paper because a lot of these companies that end up scaling, they dilute less than the typical company. So you still, you might be at a 2x even if everything else goes to zero. And it's so hard to internalize that idea because if you don't have an OpenAI, then you might have a zero with everything going to zero. But then you have a 2x, which is somewhere around top 33% for a venture fund on that basis.

• 30:06Speaker 01

  Is that talent? Is that great process? Like going back to the thinking about the process rather than the outcome. That that person, that strategy feels really hard to underwrite for future

• 30:21Speaker 01

  success unless you believe entrepreneurs value that as well. That's that has to, it has to come back to that, right? If the, if, if entrepreneurs are, we don't think they're that naive. Put ascribe a lot of value to that work. Then, then yes, it'll, it'll pay off. But if they don't, it won't, it won't mean anything.

• 30:42David Weisburd?

  One other ground truth that both Professor Steve Kaplan and Gregory Brown, other researchers believe in venture is that it's idiosyncratic in the way that the founders are actually the ones picking the VCs. That seems to be ground truth as well. It's not actually VCs that are going out and picking. The returns go from actually being picked and these kind of post C.

• 30:59Speaker 01

  That, that's an interesting question. I would love to have a chat with them. I feel like that's, that's there's, there's a correlate of time and company progress.

• 31:12Speaker 01

  When it is, when it is, say,

• 31:18Speaker 01

  like you've, you've heard stories of companies that, that start with one idea, completely pivot from a, from a consumer app to an enterprise, you know?

• 31:27David Weisburd?

  The most common from elite seed investor mistake that they make is that very mistake, which is I was bullish on the person, thought the idea was bad, didn't realize he would have iterated one, sometimes two times into success. That's a number one. It's not actually picking wrong. It's not picking the wrong company. It's the person was right. The business was wrong. I should have invested anyways, knowing that was wrong. And, you know, there's, because the power laws are so great, because a great person can return 100x. If only 20% of times they end up iterating, it's still like a great investment, which is also a hard thing to put your head around.

• 31:57Speaker 01

  Right. And so I don't know. It's kind of the question of what is knowable at the idea or pre idea, even at the wireframe stage. And so I wonder about the, the, if the VC, the VC founder mutual opt in. I'll, I'll mention another story, kind of again, going to our ground truth exercises. We, we, we like to, we love to interview founders just about what are their priorities? There was, there was a time. Where we wondered, you know, would the whole industry move towards kind of platform service companies, meaning everyone would look like an Andreessen. And to some extent, the, the service offering at, at, at big scale, that, that has kind of

• 32:42Speaker 01

  played out a little bit, probably not at the Andreessen scale, but offering talent partners, media strategy, capital markets, professionals, that, that kind of has existed, but they're, they're all playing at a, at a, at a different stage. At the earliest stage, founders keep telling us, and hopefully, you know, we keep asking and we keep engaging and we keep refreshing this, this, this research, but they keep telling us that they care about sort of a, a minimal brand, firm, brand viability. So they're not optimized, like there, there isn't a, a list of five companies or five VCs that they, they think about. But they do want to know that there's some stability, that as I talk about my cap stacked

• 33:22Speaker 01

  with either of the customers or hires, no, you know, it, it recedes into, and it's not, it's not an issue. So there's some minimal threshold. But then beyond that, it is, are you gonna, are you gonna run a sane and, and be respectful of my time process as we court each other? Am I gonna, are you gonna, is your money good? Are you gonna, I, I gotta, I gotta pay these people? Are you gonna fund me in a timely manner? And you're good for your, your capital? And then are you gonna, can I stand to talk to you every day or every week for the next five, six years? You know, it doesn't get too much more complicated. And so I don't, I, I think part of that, and that goes back to kind of that, that unicorn category of VCs with, with a established, a federated founder network that, that really

• 34:07Speaker 01

  cares about them, that they've demonstrated a lot of care and love for them at the very earliest, most difficult, unknowable parts of their, of their company. That's a really fascinating question of how much, how much is the VC picking and how much is the founder picking? And I'm sure it's very founder dependent as well. The founders that have had good success with a, with a VC partner, more, more than likely are gonna go back, unless, here again, we go back to an earlier statement about regime changes. We were talking to a few, few groups, I'm sure you've seen.

• 34:42Speaker 01

  They've really developed a thesis around backing repeat founders. And they'll have some nuance to it. It's not just, you know, you founded X, you had a above 100 million outcome or whatever. And therefore you're funded. They often have things about where were you in the org? What did you, what did you run? Do you still have a chip? You know, they have all these, these, these things. One of the questions we'll often ask is, well, the, the, these, these founders already took capital. By definition, they, they already have some, some venture relationships. Why aren't they just going back to them? And one of two things have happened. One is they didn't have a good experience with that, with that VC. Or interestingly, they did have a good experience.

• 35:24Speaker 01

  They would have loved to have continued the relationship, but they have moved to a different part of the market. They can't justify a one to $2 million equity outlay anymore. And that's all that they're, you know, they're, they don't want to raise a 10 million out of the gate

• 35:44Speaker 01

  chunk of capital. And so it, it gives them the opportunity. And so it's the, they're offering a, a capital.

• 35:52Speaker 01

  There, there's a capital offering that has been abandoned. There's a, there's a vacuum for some of these groups to come into. But otherwise, yeah, you, you, you, the, the repeat founder is something that I'd say most VCs, it feels fairly orthodox.

• 36:07David Weisburd?

  There's so many unknowns in the market. What, what is one thing that is knowable in the market today that you believe with high conviction?

• 36:17Speaker 01

  Well, oof, not on the venture side, but the thing that I, I'm, I'm pretty convinced about. And mostly because I've been, I've been building with, building software with it. The, the two things are happening right now. The ability to build and the ability or the, the willingness for buyers to think about, or think about swapping incumbents, I think are both at all times high, which is, which is a very exciting space for venture. I don't know if I've been clear about that, meaning like a small team. This is, this is, this is sort of dumb and obvious. A small team in a, in, in less time is getting a lot done. Great. But complimentary to that.

• 37:03Speaker 01

  Buyers are saying, I think more than ever, I'm willing to consider swapping out big iron for something new because the offering is so different, right? The utility from these agentic, this class of software is so different.

• 37:24David Weisburd?

  It's an order of magnitude better.

• 37:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, that so, so like willingness to change plus ability to change are so I, I'm definitely convinced that amazing value is going to be turned over.

• 37:38David Weisburd?

  On that note, Ryan, it's been absolute masterclass. Thanks so much for jumping on the podcast and looking forward to continue the conversation live.

• 37:44Speaker 01

  Well, I look forward to having more, more questions and queries with you anytime.

• 37:49David Weisburd?

  That's it for today's episode of How Invest. If you're a GP with over $1 billion in AUM and thinking about long-term strategic partners to support your growth, we'd love to connect. Please email me at [email protected].