Pod Insights How I Invest with David Weisburd E149: From $0 to $1B in 3 Years: Fin Capital's Meteoric Rise in Fintech Investing About this episode In this episode of How I Invest, Logan Allin, Managing Partner and Founder of Fin Capital, shares how his firm uses AI-powered predictive models to evaluate startups. We explore how AI can assess founder DNA, predict billion-dollar outcomes, and transform the venture capital landscape. Logan also highlights the surprising traits that lead to startup success, the advantages of repeat founders, and what the future holds for fintech. This conversation offers valuable insights for investors, entrepreneurs, and anyone fascinated by the intersection of AI and venture capital.
Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:00 Speaker 00 There's a professor at Stanford named Elias Trubalab, who was one of my professors while I was at GSB. And he's spent a lot of time on this. He produced a book called The Venture Mindset. And that was coming out of a lot of his research. And he started his research by looking at what do unicorns have in common? And he started doing that research when I was there in 2012, 2013. And I kind of laughed. I was like, well, that's a fun academic exercise, but that's not how you make money. How you're going to make money is figuring out what they had in common at the seed stage, which was really two things. One was effectively who the founders were and their backgrounds. And then two was the business model. And for us, we believe, and certainly the flight's quality has demonstrated this, that software investing is where you derive capital returns within venture and then growth equity in late stage.
0:44 Speaker 00 The data is pretty demonstrable within fintech specifically that repeat founders dramatically outperform. There is an 80-plus percent correlation between over a billion dollar outcome.
1:06 David Weisburd? When we last caught up in New York, you mentioned that your AI can predict startup success to 90% certainty at the seed and series A stage. How is that possible?
1:18 Speaker 00 We are still obviously testing and refining the model. We have a pretty incredible GenAI-driven predictive model for effectively evaluating founder DNA. GenAI has changed not only what we invest in, but how we invest. And then we have a director of AI at the firm. And he and I and the rest of the team have been refining this model. We invest strictly in repeat founders and seasoned entrepreneurs. So how do you evaluate them and score them A, B, C from the attributes that we've assigned, which are about 35 weighted criteria? And from there, we want to predict, is this the type of founder that's going to generate a 5 to 10x net outcome at the earliest stages?
2:01 Speaker 00 To be insights stack ranks the top 250 fintechs every year. There's a couple of other Fortune 50, et cetera. They all have these ranking lists. Or these lists of the top 50, top 250. So we've done back testing against those. We've also done back testing against our own portfolio and we've found a number of interesting signals from that. With the G N A I teaching the model, it's refining our percentages, refining our weightings. That started with kind of multiple basis points, like three to 5% changes in weightings. Now it's down to, you know, small basis point tweaks. So we really feel like we're at a point now where we just keep feeding it more and more data. And then on the margins, obviously continue to refine it. So we've looked at in training data sets, Y C data.
2:45 Speaker 00 We've looked at pitch book data. We've looked at companies that have exited for over a billion dollars, companies that have exited over $500 million. And we've also looked at in terms of how much money have these companies been able to raise as a proxy of success? And we've used all those training data sets to refine our model.
3:04 David Weisburd? You mentioned 35 factors behind the founder DNA. Unpack some of the most surprising factors that you didn't think should really drive company performance.
3:13 Speaker 00 You know, there's a professor at Stanford named Ilya Strubelev, who was one of my professors while I was at G S B. And he's spent a lot of time on this. He produced a book called The Venture Mindset. And that was coming out of a lot of his research. And he started his research by looking at what do unicorns have in common? And he started doing that research when I was there in 2012, 2013. And I kind of laughed. I was like, well, that's a fun academic exercise, but that's not how you make money. How you make money is figuring out what they had in common at the seed stage, which was really two things. One was effectively who the founders were and their backgrounds. And then two was the business model. We believe and certainly the flights of quality has demonstrated this, that software investing is where you derive capital returns within venture.
3:57 Speaker 00 And then growth equity in late stage, number one. Number two, the data is pretty demonstrable within fintech specifically that repeat founders dramatically outperform. There is an 80 plus percent correlation between over a billion dollar outcome. And this is just pitch book data that we analyzed and repeat founder in fintech inception to date. That's a pretty good hit rate. You're going to miss some in the long. And the 20% I always hear arguments from people. Well, these founders were first time founders. And I'm like, I got that from somebody about Max Levchen at PayPal. It's like, well, no, actually, Max had a company that completely failed before that. And he talks about it. And we look for those founders that are repeat founders that are serial in nature that,
4:38 Speaker 00 you know, you can very much tell our builders and they're trying to solve big problems and aren't doing it for the wealth at this point. And that's the types of founders we back. Do it from the pre-seed through to pre-IPO across our platform. Other surprising things, university doesn't really matter. If you go back and you look at university data and Ilya has a chart that shows this Stanford, Cal, Harvard, MIT, you know, those names certainly appear repeatedly. That hasn't really factored in in terms of our model meaningfully. Whether they've been CEO before is a huge factor. I think a lot of people think, well, they ran a large P and L and they've never been CEO before. This is their first CEO seat. You know, they should be able to do that job. Turns out, if you haven't been CEO before, backing a first time CEO is a huge risk.
5:22 Speaker 00 How long they were in that CEO seat massively important. One of the most surprising factors is you'd assume that there's this trail of success and that if their first startup was successful, their second startup must have been successful. That's definitely not true. In fact, some of our best performers completely failed in their first startup and they didn't get it right until their second or the third one. So you can't look at past successes or outcomes or track record of being a founder. It's really time and seat and experience that are the biggest drivers ultimately in the model.
5:50 David Weisburd? What's the intuition behind that?
5:51 Speaker 00 A pattern recognition. Can they build and ship product? And do they have the experience of taking that and selling into the enterprise? That sales process tends to be lengthy. If you haven't done it before and you don't have those relationships, it's even longer. Number one risk to a startup is running out of cash. So have they raised money before? Have they gone through that process? Do they understand what a fundraise looks like? Do they know the VCs in the space? All those are massive unlocks. It's always funny to me when I get questioned about why we don't back first timers. And I'm like, well, here's all the things that they've never done before that they're going to do for the first time. And we're going to have to train them how to do that. And I don't really want to train people on my time.
6:28 David Weisburd? Where else at thin capital? Are you utilizing AI and in what way?
6:32 Speaker 00 There's a few really interesting AI applications around personality testing. We started to play with that a little bit, just in terms of what types of personalities ultimately correlate to the best leaders. There's been quite a bit of research done on this and there's a few companies that provide personality scores based on LinkedIn, social and other publicly available data. Not perfect, but it's interesting signal. And there's a few personality types that we've worked with historically that just have not worked well.
7:00 David Weisburd? Give me an example of one or two founder or CEO archetypes that you believe are successful. Thank you for listening to join our community and to make sure you do not miss any future episodes, please click the follow button above to subscribe.
7:14 Speaker 00 The best archetypes we've seen are repeat founders who had either a really terrible outcome in their first company. Where it was an aqua hire or it went to zero or two, they had kind of a middling outcome and they learned, in both cases, they learned a lot from it. They have to have a deep passion, expertise in our world for fintech. In other worlds, that might be health tech or biotech or the likes of domain expertise, obviously is critical. Tend to come from products and engineering backgrounds, but I would say skews product oriented. Because product, at least you're, you're sitting in between the sales and go to market function, the marketing function and the engineering function.
7:57 Speaker 00 You're the one person that speaks all the languages in the Tower of Babel, so to speak. Average age of our CEOs is 43. They tend to be in their early 40s and they're not in their 20s trying to move fast and break things. They are deeply focused on a platform play versus a feature or a product. They are just very clear that this is going to be a platform and they want it to be the category leader. They're deeply competitive, they want to win and they're very aggressive and they move with incredible urgency. When you talk to other VCs or even when I still talk to some of the older generation in the GP world, they talk about, you know, the gut. They'll meet with a founder and within the first five minutes, they'll know whether they're going to write them a check or not. A lot of that is.
8:40 Speaker 00 Is gone. There's certainly some EQ aspects to this business now. Absolutely. You got to be able to to have a judgment about the integrity and and the work ethic and so forth of somebody. But the quantitative data-driven approach is absolutely superior. And I think we'll continue to be. And that comes from a place of of the top funnel and the vastness of the opportunity set these days. Like, I can't beat with every single CEO who's in our funnel.
9:07 David Weisburd? How important is a founder or CEO's passion for a specific space? Does that play into the success rate?
9:16 Speaker 00 It does, because this is such a grind. You wake up every single day as a founder and everybody on my team has been an operator. So I've been an operator as well. And you're running through brick walls every single day. So if you're not passionate about the subject, you probably should be working on something else.
9:32 David Weisburd? You really go after stealth companies. Why do you care about companies and stealth?
9:36 Speaker 00 You go on LinkedIn right now, you type in the word stealth, there's roughly 90,000 founders in stealth. We want to get to founders before anybody else does. We think that identifying them while they're in stealth mode or is the best time to do it. We track people leaving Stripe and other companies we care about for sure. Right? And so the minute somebody leaves Stripe, we get a notification, that gets added to our top of funnel and that person gets scored immediately. The other thing we do that I'd love to see other VCs do, that's become a big differentiator for us,
10:13 Speaker 00 is we have produced a reverse pitch deck. I still haven't found another VC that does this. I have no idea why nobody else does this, but I'm giving away some secret sauce here. So we put together a deck of five fin, like, why should you work with us and take our term sheet over the hundreds of other VCs out there? We made a incredible pitch deck that basically makes that super, super clear. We think that is something that in positioning ourselves in the market is why we win so often.
10:38 David Weisburd? You also do reverse reference calls. In other words, having founders in your portfolio reach out and talk to you about that.
10:46 Speaker 00 All the time. We, we, we took net promoter scores up until we became an RIA. And that was, we just literally surveyed our founders every year and we said, hey, would you recommend us to another founder, zero through 10? And we, we had great numbers. And then when we started registering, the compliance council was like, hey, guys, like unless you can get a hundred percent response rate, you shouldn't be doing that because it just is cherry picking. You know, we had some, some marketing compliance issues around it. I wish we could still do it. And I wish I could get a hundred percent compliance and people responding to it. People are busy and we have 130 portfolio companies. So I would say the reverse has been, you know, we have advocates
11:27 Speaker 00 within the founders that we work with, even if we've had to have hard conversations with those founders, we still have a high degree of respect for each other and they'll serve as references. The best founders should be asking their prospective VC partners for references. And you should be having 15, 30 minute calls with those CEOs because you're going to learn something about either their business. They could be a commercial partner. You're going to learn something about their fundraising and, and what they did and how they succeeded. And you're going to learn something about the VCs and that's super valuable inputs and data.
11:58 David Weisburd? In addition to asking for reference, they should primarily focus on off-list references. Maybe even use the list that the VC gives as the list of not to call and call the rest of the founders and find out what happens when the company doesn't 10x or 100x. And how does the VC treat you during good and bad times?
12:15 Speaker 00 Agreed. I never asked for references. It's a waste of time on our end. We do, we can get to former colleagues, former VCs that have invested with them. And obviously we're asking them, you know, the good, the bad, the ugly. They should do the same, but you should also, as a VC, be ready to provide references and you can, we actually have references where we say, hey, in this case, it was smooth sailing up into the right. In this case, it was super bumpy and we had to have a lot of hard conversations. We're thankfully stable now, but you should still talk to them. And that's super helpful. You have to be humble about how you're positioning yourself because we're imperfect.
12:52 David Weisburd? You invested series A, series B, hyper competitive. Rounds, you're competing against the very top firms like an Andreessen Horowitz. How do you compete head to head with a firm like an Andreessen Horowitz?
13:02 Speaker 00 Our flagship fund invests from pre-seed to B, but our sweet spot is seed and A. How we outcompete the generalists, which we do every day, is through that reverse pitch, through our reputation in the market for delivering value beyond capital. But two big things, these are our two superpowers, business development and corporate development. On the business development side, Stephanie Perez, who's fantastic, leads that effort for us. And we're helping our companies connect into our strategic LPs, of which we have a large number. And we're also helping them connect into our broader network. And we know all the end customers that are going to care about in terms of banks, asset and wealth managers, insurers, fintechs and corporates, who are the five end customers that use the software we invest in.
13:47 Speaker 00 And then we have a very unique function, which is corporate development, which is run by Matthew Mann out of New York, who's terrific as well. And Matthew is helping our companies raise equity in debt. He is helping them with inbound and outbound M and A, and he is helping them with pre-IPO work. We know all the potential acquirers in this space. We know all the buyout players who play in this space. And we know all the equity analysts and public equity investors that play in this space. Specialization matters at every single step of the process. Being able to differentiate on adding active value there is huge in terms of winning rounds. Couple of other things, our founders get access to a version of Lighthouse. What are they using Lighthouse for? They get access to our Rolodex of business development relationships. So that integrates with our CRM, it integrates with our LinkedIn.
14:31 Speaker 00 So they can look up, you know, who does Logan know at this bank? Or who does Finn know at this bank more broadly? Two, they get access to our list of investors, co-investors and people that are investing in the space at every stage. And then three, they get access to actual hands-on operating playbooks and video content. We've put together on everything from go to market to how to pay your sales team to board decks. So that's kind of the how to guide or the best practices. And with repeat founders, they really know a lot of the basics, obviously, at this point. So this is higher level materials. And all of those things go into our value proposition. But the biggest drivers, I would say, are our deep domain expertise. So we know exactly what industry they're playing in, what types of tech they're building,
15:16 Speaker 00 and we speak their language. And then coverage. So we're gonna be, we're at 25 now, we'll be at 30 plus. I love Andreessen, but they have three people, give or take, that are working on fintech. Our scale of support for our founders is just dramatically 10x bigger. And you can look at every generalist and say the same, Lightspeed, Bain, et cetera. They all have, you know, a finite number of partners that are focused exclusively on fintech. And they do not have dedicated platform teams that are exclusively focused on this industry. They have generalist platform teams, and they have predominantly generalist investors. And that leads to a lack of understanding on the domain side, a lack of understanding on the business development and partnership side, and then obviously a lack of support on the corporate development side,
16:01 Speaker 00 if they even have a corporate development function. So that's how we went, and it's worked incredibly well. And we continue to invest in that platform function where we have five people today.
16:09 David Weisburd? You've really leaned into your focus and fintech, which is very idiosyncratic to your earlier point. You don't necessarily see somebody going from a consumer founder to fintech founder very often with success. So you're really focusing on that ecosystem and building this economies of scale within a very specific sector.
16:26 Speaker 00 Absolutely, and you have to have a growth mindset. We describe ourselves as fintech nerds with capital, so we really lean into that, as you said. But there's something new happening in fintech that you have to get your arms around, whether that's on the regulatory side, particularly important today, whether that's on the bank pain points, or innovation objectives, or new technologies, right? So we started investing in AI in 2018 within our portfolio. Really started building it for ourselves around that time, going into 2021, when we hired a head of AI. We were one of the first to hire a head of AI. There's all these new technologies you have to get smart on. There's new applications you have to get smart on. One example of that is we have a subsector you'll see on our website called Vertical Fintech. And this is the gift that keeps on giving in terms of growing knowledge,
17:11 Speaker 00 because this is fintech and other industries. So we've had to get smart on healthcare, where we've done a lot. A lot. We've had to get smart on energy tech. We've had to get smart on real estate, legal tech, transportation, logistics and supply chain. And the nuances of how payments and other fintech verticals are going to get applied in those industries and the legacy infrastructure that they typically have and how that's going to evolve. And so that's really exciting to us.
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18:52 David Weisburd? More about your head of AI. What were you looking for from a head of AI, being so new for this industry? And secondly, what did his first 90 days at Fin really consist of? What was the problem set and unpack that for me?
19:06 Speaker 00 He's on our website, Fanwen, he was working at Plug and Play as an investor, but had an engineering background and was building technology off to the side for himself. And I was talking to a number of different people about how I was using AI. I was working with a consultant at that time that was outsourced and had this founder DNA model. And I wanted to figure out how to refine it and really put some significant data science and data sets behind it. And his name came up a couple of different times. And so I reached out to him and had him come by our first office in Jackson Square on a Friday afternoon and he showed me what he had built just on the side. And he said, you know, I've been building this because I'm lazy and I want to find tools
19:51 Speaker 00 to automate all this stuff. And he's a very humble, terribly brilliant guy. And I said, okay, that's, that's really interesting and phenomenal. Here's what I've been building. And we realized we had been kind of parallel processing. And so made him an offer on the spot. Honestly, it was more of me knowing that this was going to be something we needed to build and leverage AI and our own solutions. We had been investing in AI and been spending a lot of time on it. I learned first about the power of AI when I was at SoFi because we were leveraging AI and machine learning in our underwriting models and got to spend time with the data science team on a day to day basis while I was running SoFi Ventures. Understood how powerful it was going to be. And it was incredibly important that we have a capability because I knew it was going to transform our industry and that we were investing in the space.
20:36 Speaker 00 His first 90 days were really productizing what we had built. We knew we wanted to make it full value chain, not just screening and sourcing. All of our investment memos, models, materials, notes, et cetera, all are going into lighthouse. And then third, on the monitoring side, monitoring for GPs is still a very manual process. You've got great companies like Standard Metrics out there, which is a portfolio company, but it's still very difficult to get portfolio companies to give you data. And so we wanted to create automation and scraping and other things around that to take a lot of the guesswork and lift off of our portfolio companies and then be able to utilize that to create signal on both asymmetric growth.
21:16 Speaker 00 Growth and companies that are breaking out as well as companies that might be struggling relative to cash burn or other dynamics that we could get out ahead of that. Asking companies for that data on a biannual or annual basis does you no good. You have to be looking at it every week.
21:29 David Weisburd? You've really been thoughtful about your LP base. Talk to me about your LP base. Why is it strategic? How did you come about building it?
21:37 Speaker 00 We're about eighty percent institutional, twenty percent family office. We have our share of foundations, pensions, endowments. But we've really leaned in to this notion of how do we derive signal from the market? In terms of our thematic thesis building, how do we de-risk diligence and and work with companies and and validate their technology works and it is going to be adopted? And then third, how do we drive meaningful commercial adoption? So I thought about it initially on those three elements, and those are still the three elements that we think about with our strategic LPs. And those include large banks all around the world. It includes large asset managers, large wealth managers, large insurers, and then corporates.
22:19 Speaker 00 Corporates are largely public fintechs for us. And the signal we get from them in terms of, hey, here are my innovation goals for the next three, five years. Here are my massive pain points across my front, middle and back office. Here are the RFPs that I have coming up. And by the way, here's access to our technology team and our business line leaders. If you need to pick their brain on specific themes or specific companies or get them to engage in some kind of proof of concept. So our mode of going to through diligence is here, we're going to introduce you to all these prospective prospective customers. CEOs love it because these are shots on goal for customers. We love it because it's massive signal on the diligence side for how they're going to go to market, how they're going to engage, and we'll often join those meetings. And so this is another way we win term sheet battles.
23:05 Speaker 00 And it gives this incredible signal in terms of their pitch, their demo, what the reactions are, what the questions are, what the what the friction looks like. And if that goes incredibly well, that's, you know, a really nice thing to lean into in terms of having more conviction and and leading that round. So the strategic LP base is fundamental. We've done a really good job of helping them get. Win wins, both in terms of financial return, obviously, but also in terms of R and D and research, in terms of commercial, digital adoption, in terms of commercial wins. So deposit growth, lending growth, investment banking business and so forth. And then lastly, in terms of demo days, events, content, beyond that, all through Lighthouse. For any specialist manager, having strategics is incredibly important.
23:49 Speaker 00 It's that flywheel effect. You have to add value to them beyond just the return. If they're going to be re-up long-term partners for you.
23:56 David Weisburd? One of the most underrated aspects of dealing with in these complex sales, whether it's to large banks or to large institutions, is actually getting feedback. It's not even just access. They'll take meetings with a lot of people, but what are they actually seeing? What do they want? What do they wish you were building? These kind of things are very difficult to really extract.
24:15 Speaker 00 We meet with management teams and boards consistently, but it's the layers down that are really doing that work, to your point. And what do they see missing on in terms of the product roadmap, in terms of the functionality? What other solutions have they been looking at in the market? And we will often get vendor lists from LPs where they're like, here's all the vendors we're using for these different functions. And they're a great source of deal flow, too, because they're out in the market. They're getting inbound all the time from startups and software companies that are selling into them. The other nuance there is competitive tension vis a vis existing players. So I talked about building platforms over products or features. If a service now, I'll use them as an example because they're terrific business,
24:57 Speaker 00 is building something or they've got an offering in market, we will usually get signal on that from our LP base before it becomes obvious. I've been on calls with public teams, obviously, who are building their own products and adding features to their capabilities. And if you hear that they're leaning into something, they're adding it and they've got a massive install base. And then you go meet with a startup and they're like, well, I'm building this. And you say, well, I think you should, you know, figure out a different angle. It's really important to be full stack from pre-seed to pre-IPO because you just get that visibility. You have to be engaging with public teams and customers because they're often, often building something and you can get run over pretty quickly if you're not keeping a pulse on those competitive dynamics.
25:42 David Weisburd? You have a lot of LPs, you have institutional LPs, you have family offices, you have different products. Talk me through your investor relations strategy and how have you evolved investor relations over Finn's lifetime?
25:55 Speaker 00 One of the biggest challenges for GPs is feeling like they can somehow get out of the IR process. I'm still the head of IR, lead all of our fundraising, I should say. I've met with a lot of GPs who say, "Well, I really hate meeting with LPs and I hate fundraising." I love fundraising. I love meeting with LPs. That is one of the best parts of my day in addition to meeting with founders because those are our clients, those are our stakeholders in every respect. And particularly when you start working with large institutional LPs, where you see the pensioners, you see the endowments, that gives you just more to play for and you want to win on their behalf. You will never get out of that seat. I tell every GP that. I say, "I love it. You need to learn to love it if you don't and you
26:37 Speaker 00 need to figure out how you do it repeatedly." I'm having thousands of LP conversations every year. The two, you got to have help. So, we today have two IR team members, a director of IR and then an associate. We're adding a senior associate, which we'll be announcing here at the end of the month, who's terrific. All three of them sit in New York. They work very closely with me on top of funnel, so net new opportunities, making sure that we're deepening our existing relationships and then running processes. You have to have really good hygiene, very clean, solid CRM, clear cadence, a clear process, great materials, great data room and so forth. That has to be married, on our end in particular as an RIA, with terrific regulatory. Being an RIA for us was about
27:19 Speaker 00 kind of table stakes, social infrastructure and compliance. I just think it's the right thing to do and I think at long term, a lot of GPs will recognize that. They'll just register it after 44 years in business or thereabout. As listeners may know, they have a 20% cap as an ERA on your secondary allocation. It's a pretty, pretty meaningful constraint. We don't have that cap, so we can do as much secondary as we want. And then the third piece is how long you hold public equities. So, as an ERA, you got to sell the minute you can after the lockup. We can hold those public stocks within our private funds for as long as we see fit to maximize returns. So, it is a significant amount of work and a lot of infrastructure and overhead, but to lease us, in terms of our long-term strategy, it was very critical.
28:04 David Weisburd? Hold shares past the lockup? What competitive advantage do you have in these companies? And walk me through that, the decision making on whether to sell or to continue to hold.
28:13 Speaker 00 We create a trading plan for every IPO. We assess based on a bear base and bull case. How many shares from what tax lot effectively vis a vis the cost basis? We're going to sell and when? And that is incredibly important to have a discipline around and have it forecasted and share that with your LPAC and the LP base. I hear too many LPs and rightly complaining that their GPs create a black box scenario when companies go public. They're like, we don't get any insight in terms of when they're going to sell that company. In some cases, that's an ERA, they're going to sell immediately. In other cases, they might be an RIA and they have more flexibility. And certainly, you know, Sequoia has talked a lot about this in terms of leaving money on the table vis a vis companies that have gone public and selling too early.
28:56 Speaker 00 Our view is that we're just re-underwriting that asset effectively on a constant basis. We're working with the bankers, working with the equity researchers who on the sell side who we know extraordinarily well. And then we hire third party valuation experts who come in and also look at the asset and give a third party view on it as well. The important thing to do is provide transparency, provide a forecast and then execute against that forecast. With the view that you're operating within a fund life constraint and you're trying to maximize returns. The worst time in the history of that stock, most likely to sell that asset is typically the day after it gets unlocked. Which is when most VCs are forced to sell. That hasn't always been the case, right?
29:38 Speaker 00 There's some outliers there, but predominantly the best time to look at selling is actually six months thereafter, right? That means that the volatility has been taken out of the stock. The unload from those that have to sell has been done. You don't have downward pressure on the stock. And so that is, you know, what we think about. So we're looking at it kind of in six, 12 months. I've heard from many GPs that they will just programmatically sell. They won't even think about the price, sort of sell it, you know, a bit of the unlock, one slug a year after, and then another slug 18 to 24 months after. If they have that luxury as an RIA, I think that's too random and arbitrary. So we really want to reiterate, we have deep expertise on the company. We've known the company in many cases for longer than anybody else.
30:20 Speaker 00 We can really confer with the management team and others that have a view. And it also is incredibly important for board dynamics, right? So I'm on several companies that are looking to go boards that are going public this year. Resigning from the board the day after the IPO and creating like some meaningful governance issues in that business is also a bad look. And frankly, for our growth equity in late-stage portfolio, where we're trying to do more secondaries and own more of the business. If we're going to the management team and saying, hey, we want to own more of the business. And they're like, well, you're not going to be on the board after we go public. If you can say, yes, actually, I will be and I'll be very thoughtful about, you know, how we transition that process. That's a much better position.
30:59 David Weisburd? You had one of the fastest starts to a venture fund. You went from zero to a billion dollars in AUM in three years. Tell me about how you went about executing this and what were your learnings from the first three years of founding FinCapital?
31:11 Speaker 00 I was a solo GP from June of 2018 to June of 2020. I didn't mean to be solo for that long. It was just this thing called COVID that made it really hard to hire. I then started bringing on my, my initial team members on a full-time basis. It was incredibly difficult, early days to raise capital as a first-time GP, new company, nobody had heard of us. And so we effectively laid out a strategy. I laid out a strategy that said, here's what I want to build. I think this is going to be differentiated in the market. I think it's going to be sustainable and repeatable from an investment process and generating alpha consistently. I'm going to have a platform team. I'm going to have an investment team and I just laid it out. And I believe that you have to show a plan and then execute against it.
31:56 Speaker 00 I encourage all emerging managers to do this. And actually, I'm an LP and a number of emerging managers. I love supporting emerging managers. And I just went, I went to a lot of LPs and I got to them through other GPs, through cold outreach, through my network. And I said, hey, we're not ready for you yet, but I want you to hear the story. I'm, I'm going to take 15 to 30 minutes of your time. Here's my presentation. Here's my data room. Here's what we're building and I'm going to come back to you in two. Three years and hopefully we'll have succeeded in building a lot of this stuff. And if we have, I'd really appreciate a look. LPs will take that call a lot. I'm not gonna say a hundred percent of the time, but it's a big number.
32:36 Speaker 00 Because they appreciate you coming from a place naturally of humility, because you're a small, a single GP shop, who hasn't really built anything yet, who has, you know, sub a hundred million in AUM. And so you have to be able to be thoughtful about looking to the future and building those relationships to the long term. And I always tell LPs, this is a lifetime perpetual relationship that I want to maintain with you. LPs will make decisions to re-up and support you for, I think, really a couple of different reasons. One is obviously your performance and what have you done for them lately? That has to be, it has to be on the merits and that's very much appreciated. Two, though, it's how you treated them and the relationship and the communications that you had with them. For strategics, that's even higher bar.
33:20 Speaker 00 For traditional endowment, foundation, pension world, that is, you know, did they give us transparency? What was the level of their reporting? What was the level of access? Did they come see me? Those types of questions, so the nature and the strength of the relationship. Thinking inherent in that also is how much co-investment access did I get? Did I feel like I got looks and shots on goal and very high quality co-invest? And what did that process look like? And then, and then third, obviously, is their own asset allocation constraints. And, and right now, that is a lack of DPI. That might be some denominator effect issues, meaning their public portfolio is drawn down meaningfully. And therefore their private market portfolio is a higher percentage than they'd like. Um, and then third is, is just liquidity, uh, in terms of operating budgets. And, you know, if they're coming out of a corporate or they're coming out of endowment,
34:05 Speaker 00 what capital have they been given on a net new basis to deploy? That third category is outside of your control. So don't worry about it. So you gotta control the first two.
34:12 David Weisburd? It's so interesting that you mentioned that you pitch and you say that you're not ready for a couple of years. Great LPs, just like great VCs, like to see progress over time. They're not necessarily looking at your metric today and saying, yes, I want to invest. Fat LPs go on this very podcast, say that there's zero percent chance that they'll invest in the first year or two. Even they want to see progress. I'm curious, A, were you on? To what you said you were going to be in two to three years? And if not, where did you divert from that plan? And or some of the learnings from that?
34:41 Speaker 00 We were thankfully on plan. For us, it was hiring is the hardest part of this business. And anybody who's who's penned in a GP managing partner seat will tell you that. We definitely made our fair share of mistakes on the hiring side. Thankfully, we've had no regrettable attrition as a firm at the senior levels. And so for us, it was about building the team in the right way for the long term. It had shared alignment, shared passion for the space and really believed that being a multi-stage platform that also added a ton of operating value and only did one thing and one thing well was was incredibly important. And there's there's this finite number of people that will sign up for that. And certainly I appreciate that.
35:24 Speaker 00 Thankfully, yes, the vision we painted for LPs, I would say, has been executed on. And thankfully, we've had great re-up support. And so clearly, there's some agreements to that. But we also looked at and experimented with a few things that we very quickly shelved. So for example, we like everybody had a SPAC in October of 2021. We got a deal done on that SPAC. It was a med tech company, but it got done. And it was important to us to deliver to our shareholders on that proposition versus just, you know, shutting it down, which which certainly many did. We issued so many LOIs, I lost count and the market clearly shifted. And the sentiment on the structure completely changed, as we all know.
36:07 Speaker 00 SEC started to strongly dislike that structure and there's a lot of good reasons for that. And so we we basically said, hey, public equities, not for us. We're going to, you know, focus on private markets. And so you have to know what you're you're good at, that you have asymmetric information in, that you have sustainable edge in and that you can do repeatedly. Because generating top quartile returns in one fund and then missing the mark in another fund means that your process is is absolutely not repeatable. And it means that you're not going to have longevity in the business.
36:36 David Weisburd? You alluded to it earlier. You're an LP and 17 emerging managers. What do you gain as a GP yourself from investing into emerging managers?
36:45 Speaker 00 It's probably close to seventeen. It's somewhere in the teens. I would say there were three things for me. One is supporting other emerging managers, frankly, because I didn't get a lot of support from other GPs when I went out, at least on a capital basis. There are certainly GPs that I love and were incredibly supportive in giving me their time and advice. And so I wanted to support other emerging managers, wanted to coach them, wanted to help them avoid any mistakes that I might have made. That was really important to give back to the community because I think the health of our ecosystem is going to depend on emerging managers who are willing to take bets that established managers might not. That's a really important dynamic to the SBA, to certainly the ecosystem that is venture and private market investing.
37:28 Speaker 00 Two is exposure to areas that would be fundamentally important to Fin. So that could be a new geography. It could be a pre-seed, seed manager that is very much earlier than we are and is going to be a great pipeline relationship for us. And being able to have this incredible cohort of managers that we work with, that's the biggest focus for us is, hey, is this manager relevant to us in terms of new domain? That could be blockchain, it could be quantum, it could be AI. Or is this somebody who is really uniquely placed to get pre-seed deal flow? And or is there a geographic reason? So we have a manager in Israel, for example. Third is the diversification mandate. So I'm an investor in a biotech fund. I'm an investor in a few funds where it is completely non-correlated to fintech.
38:13 Speaker 00 And obviously, that's important.
38:14 David Weisburd? It's good for a good night's sleep or a better night's sleep.
38:18 Speaker 00 That's right.
38:19 David Weisburd? How did your experience at SoFi dictate how you run Fin today?
38:24 Speaker 00 So at SoFi during my time and before my time, the team had to raise three and a half billion of equity to make the business work, right? And that meant we had 100-plus investors. And what I found was a couple of things. One is 90-plus percent, this isn't just SoFi, but it's certainly a lot of the companies I've been a part of, 90-plus percent of the investors on the cap table are passive capital. And I call passive capital dead capital as a founder and as an entrepreneur. Because You can get capital if you're good from anywhere. So you have to index on capital that's going to bring other elements. And so that was a big piece for me. I said, never be passive capital.
39:05 Speaker 00 And I sat down at my kitchen table in March of 2018 and I wrote down all these first principles. And I think anybody who's starting anything should do this. I wrote down a number of first principles and one of my biggest first principles is never be passive capital. And we pass on any deal, even if it's a great founder, a great business model, might even have some great investors on it. Where if I don't feel like we can add value to that founder, I'm not going to invest. Because then we're wasting their time. We are not able to materially impact the outcome in unfair ways, so to speak. And that just doesn't work from my perspective. Second is that we had to go to different investors at different stages. We had different investors we went to in the seed and then in the A and then on and on and on. There was no multi-stage fintech investor who could really support us from pre- seed to pre-IPO.
39:50 Speaker 00 And I recognize the power law return dynamics, obviously. A venture is an asset class, the ability to cherry pick and follow on your best performers, maintain per rider rates or deepen your ownership. I also had looked at and done, and so we did a tender process. So learn more about what secondary processes looks like. And there's a whole different set of investors for that. And so the ability to have all of these different tools to support founders throughout their lifecycle was incredibly important to me. And then third, I recognize that none of the other fintech specialists out there were looking at fintech software. They were all chasing direct to consumer, direct to small business and crypto. And I was, I really like this B2B fintech software opportunity. I think it's underserved. I'm meeting founders, building it.
40:33 Speaker 00 And I don't see any specialists that are exclusively focusing on that. I'm going to go do that. And so those were the three things that I really took away from my SoFi experience. My view is that fellow operators want to work with people who have been operators. So we're a firm, it's on our website, we're a firm built by operators for operators. And we want to be able to bring that empathy, the fact that we've walked thousands of miles in those shoes to those founders, to be able to have deep credibility and working with them hands-on throughout that lifecycle.
41:02 David Weisburd? Thanks for listening to my conversation with Logan. If you enjoyed this episode, please share with a friend. This helps us grow and also provides best feedback when we review the episode's analytics. Thanks for your support.
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