20VC: Raising A Solo GP Fund & Why They Are So Prominent Today with Charles Hudson, Managing Partner @ Precursor Ventures

Charles Hudson is the Managing Partner with Precursor Ventures, an early-stage venture capital firm focused on first check investments in strong teams developing innovative hardware and software products and services. Prior to founding Precursor, Charles was a Partner with SoftTech VC, one of the most active seed stage investors in Internet and mobile startups. Prior to SoftTech, Hudson spent time at Google, IronPort Systems, and In-Q-Tel. In Today’s Episode You Will Learn: 1.) How did Charles made his way into VC from working with the CIA? What were Charles biggest takeaways from his operational experience? 2.) Why have we seen the rise of the solo GP fund? What tools and services can be used by solo GPs to make their lives easier? 3.) Chris Sacca said, 'you have to be a moron to launch a solo VC fund'. What does Charles think about this and what was it about Precursor that made him want to leave SoftTech? 4.) How does Charles' market requirements change now as a pre seed investor, a 100m exit is excellent. Do you you still need unicorns? 5.) How does Charles look to differentiate with Precursor in the sea of emerging VC funds? What is the most important thing for him about pr-seed investing? 6.) What is Charles' vision for Precursor? What would success look like for him? Items Mentioned In Today’s Episode: Charles' Fave Book: Alec Ross: Industries of The Future Charles' Fave Blog: The Information As always you can follow The Twenty Minute VC, Harry and Charles on Twitter here! If you would like to see a more colourful side to Harry with many a mojito session, you can follow him on Instagram here! The Twenty Minute VC is brought to you by Leesa, the Warby Parker or TOMS shoes of the mattress industry. Lees have done away with the terrible mattress showroom buying experience by creating a luxury premium foam mattress that is order completely online and ships for free to your doorstep. The 10 inch mattress comes in all sizes and is engineered with 3 unique foam layers for a universal, adaptive feel, including 2 inches of memory foam and 2 inches of a really cool latex foam called Avena, design to keep you cool. All Leesa mattresses are 100% US or UK made and for every 10 mattresses they sell, they donate one to a shelter. Go to Leesa.com/VC and enter the promo code VC75 to get $75 off!

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

• 0:00Harry Stebbings?

  Now, I start most episodes with "Welcome back to the 20 Minute VC", but I want to change it up, so hit me with some suggestions for how better to intro the 20 Minute VC as a podcast. And you can find me at HStubbings on Snapchat, and I'd love to hear what your thoughts are. But back to the show today, and I'm so excited for this one. The guest today was recommended by some stellar names in the business, including the likes of Jeff Klavie and Andy McLaughlin of Softek. And he was actually introduced by the main man Brad Feld at Foundry Group. Huge thanks to Brad for that. Therefore, joining me in the hot seat today, I'm delighted to welcome Charles Hudson. Charles is the Managing Partner with Precursor Ventures, an early-stage venture capital firm focused on first-check investments in strong teams developing innovative hardware

• 0:45Harry Stebbings?

  and software products and services. Prior to founding Precursor, Charles was a partner with Softek VC, one of the most active seed-stage investors in internet and mobile startups. And prior to Softek, Hudson spent time at Google, Ironport Systems, which was acquired by Cisco for 830 million, and Incutel. And before we dive into the show with Charles today, we have to thank our sponsors. And each new sponsorship segment is going to contain a "Did you know?", so you can always be learning. So, "Did you know, according to the trusty Google, it is illegal to buy a mattress in Washington on Sunday?" But I'm not so sure about that, if you buy your mattress from the best, and that is Leesa. Their mattresses are crafted with three unique layers, one of which is memory foam, perfect

• 1:29Harry Stebbings?

  for when you get to my age and your back is not what it used to be, and another of cool latex-like foam, designed to keep you cool at night. And I have to say, they really are the comfiest, and it is more of an issue of getting out of bed in the mornings now. And all Leesa mattresses are made in the US and the UK, and they can be delivered to the US, UK, and Canada. So get yours by heading over to leesa.com/vc. That's L-E-E-S-A dot com forward slash VC, and enter the promo code VC75 for a whopping $75 off at checkout. I'd also like to suggest that you all sign up for Matamark Daily, curated by the wonderful @Thinker on Twitter. It has all the best startup and VC articles curated daily.

• 2:10Harry Stebbings?

  But now it's time to head into the show, and I'm so thrilled to welcome Charles Hudson, Managing Partner at Precursor Ventures.

• 2:23Speaker 01

  You have now arrived at your destination.

• 2:26Harry Stebbings?

  Charles, welcome to the 20 Minute VC. I have to say, I absolutely loved your episode with Eric on Product Hunt. So it's great to finally have you on the best tech podcast there is.

• 2:36Speaker 02

  I've been looking forward to this. Thank you so much for having me.

• 2:38Harry Stebbings?

  Uh, now I'd love to start by hearing a little about you and how you came from the world of entrepreneurship to now being managing partner at precursor. What's the kind of brief synopsis?

• 2:49Speaker 02

  Yeah, the brief synopsis is, you know, my first job out of college was as a venture analyst for Incutel, the CIA's venture capital group. And that really gave me some early exposure to venture and it taught me a lot about the job and the career. But it also kind of humbled me and made me realize that without kind of a deeper set of business experiences, there was limited value I could provide to the companies that we had funded. So took a, took a stint in, in the operating side, worked at Google and a handful of games companies. Learned a lot about business development, was a founder myself, raised some money for a venture backed startup myself and really felt like I wanted to have the full suite of experiences as a founder and exec before I returned to venture.

• 3:34Speaker 02

  And then I was fortunate enough to reconnect with Jeff in late 2009. And we started talking about sort of his future vision for soft tech and taking it from a solo GP shop to more of an institution. And I really liked Jeff's vision for what he wanted to build the soft tech. And so we started working together, worked together for about five years. And then I think like many of the micro VC firms of that vintage, soft tech's had a tremendous amount of success backing companies like Shippo and Fitbit and Poshmark and Postmates. And in the venture, when you're successful, you know, LPs trust you with larger and larger amounts of capital. And so I've been really impressed with the way that Jeff has sort of scaled soft tech.

• 4:17Speaker 02

  But like many kind of entrepreneurs, I had my moment where I looked at our model and thought about kind of some things that I was seeing in the venture landscape, and we can get into this later. But it really gave me the impetus to think about branching out on my own and starting my own fund.

• 4:31Harry Stebbings?

  And I have to ask that, going back to the operational days that you had at Google and at the gaming companies, what were the biggest takeaways for you from those days?

• 4:40Speaker 02

  I think the biggest takeaway, and I encourage a lot of my friends who are in venture, who haven't had as much operating experience, to try it. Because I think as a VC, it's easy to sit in the boardroom and see strategically that there's something off with the business. And to kind of dictate, hey, we should fix sales. Or hey, we've got to fix marketing, we've got to fix product. But until you've actually been in an organization and seen what it actually takes to change the way that a company or a group of people behaves, it gives you a much better sense of just how hard it is to tell a founder that like, hey, we need to fix marketing and fixing marketing is probably a two quarter project. Or hey, we've got to, we've got to revamp the product. Revamping the product probably is going to take an entire year.

• 5:24Speaker 02

  I think it gives you a much better nuanced sense of the interdependencies that happen inside of companies, because most venture, most venture funds are small. You've got three or four people, so there you don't have a, maybe a sense for the coordination costs or the internal machinations that have to happen in order to make change happen.

• 5:40Harry Stebbings?

  Going back to now, your, your managing partner role at Precursor, and we mentioned the changing kind of evolution of the venture environment. So I want to do a little background on solo GP funds. And why we've seen this massive increase. We said, obviously Jeff was a, was a solo GP fund with Softek before it obviously enjoyed massive success. Why have we seen this massive increase in the last 10 years, do you think?

• 6:03Speaker 02

  I think that there's two reasons that it's happening. I think one is that because the micro VC folks like Jeff and Iden and Mike Maples and Steve Anderson and Michael Deering, and I think that first wave of micro VC pioneers, they created an environment where it was okay to raise an institutional fund of less than a hundred million dollars. And to have that thought of as actually a viable venture model. So it's really hard to go raise a hundred million dollars as yourself for a solo GP. So just the kind of entry table stakes of raising a fund kind of meant you had to have two people, just in order to get to what was thought of kind of as the threshold level of capital required for the business.

• 6:44Speaker 02

  I think the other thing is that there's just more third party services and things you can use to make your life easier as a solo GP. So for example, I don't have an in-house CFO. I have a third-party firm that does all of my kind of fund administration and back office for me. I have a large chunk of my portfolio companies on eShares, which simplifies kind of keeping track of cap tables. I use Angelus. So there's a bunch of tools that have been developed that mean as a solo GP, you don't have to own all of these things in-house. And that has tremendous implications for the management fee overhead you need to run a fund.

• 7:20Harry Stebbings?

  Do you think then that there's a lower threshold for the fund size because of the decreasing cost of starting up itself?

• 7:26Speaker 02

  I think that's part of it. I actually think that there's a lower threshold because people like Jeff, Steve Anderson, Chris Sacca and others showed that you could take a small amount of capital and actually turn it into meaningful returns. I think the fact that they proved that those early micro VC funds from the early vintages were really strong. It gave LPs the confidence to say, hey, maybe there's another wave of folks with this strategy behind the first wave that we backed that maybe we should, you know, think of that as a new sub-asset class in venture.

• 7:57Harry Stebbings?

  And I'm very glad you mentioned Chris Sacca there because now we've covered why they've risen. I want to talk about you with the solo GP fund. And Chris Sacca said, you've got to be a moron to launch a solo GP VC fund. Now, naturally, I disagree with him, but I'd love to hear what you think and why he's wrong on this one and what attracted you to leaving Soft Tech for precursor.

• 8:19Speaker 02

  I think the thing I've come to appreciate is that there is no right and wrong and an absolute basis for venture as to whether it should be a team sport or an individual sport. I think there's a class of people who deeply believe that venture is a team sport and that firms with a variety of viewpoints and partners will make better decisions than a single individual without any checks and balances internally. I'd argue that that's possibly true, but then I look at a handful of people. Chris was very successful before he added Matt to his firm and they've continued to be successful since. Mike Maples was successful before he added Ann and I think Ann has done a lot to grow the footprint and returns profile at Floodgate. And I can look at people like Steve Anderson and Michael Deary and

• 9:04Speaker 02

  Manu Kumar who've continued to be successful on their own. And I think part of it just comes down to culturally, how are you wired? I've met a bunch of GPs for whom the idea of starting a fund on their own. Was something they never considered because they deeply felt like they wanted a partner. They deeply felt like they wanted a partner from day one, so there was no question as to kind of whose firm it was. And they also just felt like it would help them make better decisions. And when I look at the way that Satya and Hunter interact and Josh and Dave at Freestyle, like those to me are examples of partnerships that are really healthy and functional, where people got together kind of from day one and decided we want to build something together. I think that can work. For me, though, I invested at the really, really early stage.

• 9:47Speaker 02

  And for me, with Preseed, I really feel like one of the key vectors is speed and the ability to kind of process opportunities quickly. And I don't have any coordination costs at the firm. I don't have a second partner who needs to sit in on the meeting. I don't have to deal with the second person's schedule. And do I think a second perspective at times could be helpful? Absolutely. But I'm dealing with companies where there isn't really very much in the way of data to analyze. It really comes down to perspective on the founder and perspective on the market.

• 10:18Harry Stebbings?

  And how do you implement a sense of checks and balances then on your own internal investment decision making? Just to make sure that sometimes you're not seeing it through a San Francisco lens or an early tech adopter lens. Do you ever implement a kind of wider advisory strategy?

• 10:34Speaker 02

  Yeah, so I have a handful of advisors that I tend to run things by before I do them. I actually write myself investment memos.

• 10:42Harry Stebbings?

  Okay.

• 10:42Speaker 02

  And I try to stand back and read them and say, does this hang together? Does this story I've written on this page, do I actually believe what I just wrote? And more importantly, are there parts in the company's story that I have trouble, where I have trouble connecting the dots? And I think last but not least for me, I have to syndicate everything I do because I don't write large checks at the firm. And so eventually I have to convince at least one or two other people in the ecosystem that the company that I'm interested in has merit.

• 11:09Harry Stebbings?

  And so will you invest then before you've kind of, not when I say co- us, but when you, before you've persuaded someone else to come in with you?

• 11:16Speaker 02

  Absolutely. I am not afraid to be the first commitment. I do that quite often. I find for founders, the first commitment is the hardest one to get. And having a committed investor makes those other conversations much easier. And I think that's part of the role of really early-stage capital is to signal your belief with a check.

• 11:40Harry Stebbings?

  And I'm really intrigued. You said about tying the dots together there. And how often does it happen that you do have a failure or a chink in the dots? And where does that often occur? Is it with the technology, the team, the go-to-market strategy? Where's often the problems that you see in the tying together?

• 11:57Speaker 02

  Oftentimes, it ends up being the connection between the product that they're building and the way that they want to market it or launch it to the public. Sometimes I'll write, I'll start writing about the business model and say, hang on, this isn't quite as clear in my head as it was when I was sitting in that meeting. Or hang on, I guess I don't maybe have as clear a perspective on the competitive landscape as I thought I did when we were in that conference room talking about the product of the market. And so it tends to vary. It's rarely about the people. It tends to be about some nuance of the market or some nuance of the strategy that upon reflection isn't as clear as it was when we were together.

• 12:36Harry Stebbings?

  And I'm intrigued. You spoke about the market there. At the pre-seed stage, often the market is very undetermined. And, you know, to many extents, the company will pivot into potentially different markets. So how do you approach that as an investor with the inflexi- with the flexibility that can occur with markets?

• 12:54Speaker 02

  Yeah, markets are, markets are really tough. I mean, my, my basic investing thesis is sort of team is greater than market is greater than product, which to me means I have to have real conviction about the people and their ability to execute. And then the next thing of almost equal importance for me is the market. And by definition, like, I'm usually looking for markets that don't yet exist. Or that aren't yet quantified or quantifiable, but where I think in the next 12 to 18 months, there's going to be some inflection point that causes them to happen or causes them to become more interesting than they used to be. And for a lot of that, I always ask myself, well, what do I have to believe to believe what this company's telling me? And is their general worldview consistent with where I think things are headed? You know, when I think back to when

• 13:38Speaker 02

  we first invested in Postmates, Postmates did not have meaningful delivery volume at all, but this was sort of in the shadow of Uber. And I think the knowledge that, hey, a subset of people are comfortable ordering a car from a stranger using an app gives us confidence that the core behavior here is not truly novel.

• 14:00Harry Stebbings?

  So was the change in consumer behavior the inflection point there?

• 14:03Speaker 02

  Yes, it was. In other cases, it's a technology platform. In some cases, it's a hardware platform. The ones I like the most, though, here are the ones where I feel like a bunch of different trends come together at the same time, like computer vision, robotics, GPS, low-cost manufacturing of hardware. Like, to me, those are kind of powerful mega trends that when they come together, you get kind of these unique sets of circumstances where you can build really, really interesting companies. And so I think with market, I always try to figure out like, what is it that I believe? And what's my point of view about why this market will exist? And will it achieve? And will it produce a company that has decent gross margins at scale?

• 14:41Harry Stebbings?

  Does your market expectation and demand for market size change at all, considering your status now as a pre-seed investor? You know, $100 million exit is a very, very good exit for a pre-seed deal.

• 14:53Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 14:54Harry Stebbings?

  Or is it still the billion dollar?

• 14:56Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think that's, that's something I honestly struggle with. And I'll tell you the way I think about it. I don't know that I'm very good at predicting whether a market will be a billion dollars in size. What I do think I can predict is, do I think there's a sufficiently large pool of buyers to help the company that I'm working with get to 75 to $100 million in revenue? At scale. And to me, scale means the life cycle of a fund. Because for me, if you start planning for M and A exits from day one, they never end up, in my experience, being quite as large as you would think. Because you've kind of engineered all of the upside out of the company in kind of trying to tailor make it for M and A.

• 15:40Speaker 02

  So I accept that there will be some companies that I back that get acquired early for meaningful amounts of money. But I try to go into this saying, what would it take for this company to become a public company? And can I envision a scenario in which that happens? Now, like most VCs, I'll be wrong more often than I'm right. But I think if you come into it with a lens that I want to back companies where I believe there's a path to becoming a publicly traded company, it really does change the way you think about what interesting looks like.

• 16:08Harry Stebbings?

  Absolutely. And kind of going back to the venture landscape as a whole and the ecosystem. As we said, there's now a plethora of solo GPVC funds. So how do you look to differentiate in this sea of emerging VCs?

• 16:22Speaker 02

  Sure, you know, I think there's a couple of different ways one can differentiate. I'll tell you the things that I think about. One, I know this sounds maybe a little too touchy feely, but I think not every entrepreneur is for every VC and vice versa. I think there are sort of personality types, market spaces, worldviews that tend to cause people to gravitate towards people who have shared views. And so I think, I think that can be hard for LPs to understand sometimes, but people are looking for that human connection. Two, you know, I think the other question is, you know, what's the value prop to the companies that you back? You know, there are some people who say, I do a very small number of investments. You will get deep engagement from me, but I'm super picky. And if you get chosen, you'll get this kind of bespoke white glove service.

• 17:07Speaker 02

  I think there's sort of the other end of the spectrum, which is we're fast. We don't have a complicated diligence process and we can make decisions quickly. And we can signal to the market that we're interested. And we can tag along and create value that way by adding capital to help you close out a round.

• 17:24Harry Stebbings?

  Like 500 startups.

• 17:25Speaker 02

  Like 500 startups or SV Angel, there's a lot of different strategies that can work. I think the question is like, what strategy do you believe in? And what I've, what I've told folks is my goal is to have a portfolio that's large enough that allows me to take risk on an annualized basis, but that's small enough where I know all the founders by name and have the opportunity to have a real relationship with them. Which is different than kind of a high conviction, two to three investment a year model. And it's also different than a sort of fifty to seventy five investment a year model.

• 17:57Harry Stebbings?

  And I'm really intrigued then to hear how the fundraising process for you was with precursor as a solo GP. How did you find it?

• 18:04Speaker 02

  The thing I will say is the questions that you've asked are very much in line with the questions that LPs ask.

• 18:10Harry Stebbings?

  I'm not an LP Charles, I'm afraid.

• 18:16Speaker 02

  And the thing, the thing I would say is that I think when you're a solo GP fund, there's a set of, there's a set of investors who, they just don't like the single key man risk of a solo GP fund. It just doesn't fit their model. It's not how they like to invest. That disqualifies a certain set of people. There is a set of people out there who have a lot of exposure to micro VC already. They were early on the trend and they've, they've got a fair number of relationships and you know, to add another one means that someone else needs to be displaced. And third, there's some people who have, you know, different preferences for generalist versus, you know, vertically oriented, theme-specific funds. So what I would say is, my experience is the fundraising for a venture fund is kind

• 19:00Speaker 02

  of like the fundraising for a tech startup, but a little bit slower.

• 19:05Harry Stebbings?

  And you have no product, essentially.

• 19:07Speaker 02

  And you have no product.

• 19:11Speaker 02

  And so you, you have to find people for whom your strategy and, and mine's been pretty simple. I'm a generalist investor in hardware and software and it's, it's a solo GP firm. That's a very specific set of investors who can look at that model and say, that's something that I want to be a part of because it's worked for me in the past. Or that's something I want to be a part of because I believe that that type of model, given the stage at which Charles is investing, can work. And so I think a lot of it is this sort of you're getting your own kind of product market fit as a VC fund and realizing that there's some traditional institutions for whom small solo GP funds are just not a great product.

• 19:52Harry Stebbings?

  And, and I'm really intrigued there. Now you've got the new fund and you can kind of, you know, it's completely yours. You can choose the weighting in terms of follow-on to initial investments. So how did you choose that fund structure and what kind of thesis did you lend towards in the end? Did you go very follow-on heavy, quite initial funding heavy? What's your thoughts on this?

• 20:11Speaker 02

  I've been influenced by a lot of people that I've co-invested with in my time at Soft Tech. And I also try to apply one additional lens, which is stage. And the way I think about it is pre-seed is generally the lowest possible price at which you can get into a company. At the end of the day, my job is to produce returns. And for me, the best way to produce returns is to have the most money in at the lowest dollar cost average. I'm not trying to deploy a billion dollars and turn that into two or three. I'm deploying a lot less capital. So my view is, given that pre-seed companies will have a higher failure rate than series A companies, it's better to have more first check investment debts on the table.

• 20:54Speaker 02

  And it's better to be more aggressive in getting into companies. And for those that graduate to the next level, make sure that there's appropriate reserves to at least do the next round. Beyond that, it may or may not be appropriate for a small fund to stay in that company. Or there may be other structures like SPVs that provide a better mechanism for continuing to participate. But for the main fund, my view is that the LPs I've talked to, their goal is to have me deploy that capital against really early-stage, high-potential new companies. And to get into as many winning ones of those as possible as opposed to accumulate ownership in a relatively small number of names.

• 21:34Harry Stebbings?

  And I spoke to another solo GP the other day, and he said that it's important to be very rigid on your check size. So he always went for a hundred K every single time, regardless of the company. Do you agree with that? And how do you approach this theme? Because you can't always do exactly a hundred, that might only be seventy-five. Or how do you approach that?

• 21:53Speaker 02

  I generally agree with that strategy. I think having a pretty consistently sized check makes life easy. A, it makes life easy for your co-investors because they always know how much money they should pencil you in for. Two, it also takes away this question of like. Let's say you write a 500K check and a million dollar check. You don't have to ask yourself, do I like this 500K or do I like it a million? There shouldn't be that kind of conversation. Like you either think it's a great company and you should invest in line with what you typically do, or you don't think it's a great company and you shouldn't invest at all. So I'm a big fan of having a pretty narrow check size range, or having a pretty narrow, if you're ownership driven, ownership target range.

• 22:35Speaker 02

  I think it helps keep you having your own set of checks and balances and not falling in love with something that you think is amazing, and writing a gargantuan check.

• 22:44Harry Stebbings?

  Absolutely. And I'd love to dive into a quick fire round with you now.

• 22:47Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 22:48Harry Stebbings?

  So let's start with one of my favorites. You can tell I need to read more. Your favorite book and why?

• 22:52Speaker 02

  Boy, my favorite book. Big, that's a good one. I can tell you, the book that I've read most recently that I really enjoyed is by Alec Ross, Industries of the Future.

• 23:05Harry Stebbings?

  And then what does success look like for you with precursor?

• 23:09Speaker 02

  You know, the thing I enjoy the most about precursor is I get to work with people from effectively day one of their company. And if I can do a good enough job with the fund in terms of providing returns for my LPs, that I can work with brand new teams every year and be kind of the person who first believed in them for the next 10 or 15 years, I'd be really happy with that.

• 23:33Harry Stebbings?

  And then which sector are you most excited by? Obviously, you know, you're sector agnostic, but do you have any particular learnings?

• 23:40Speaker 02

  Um, I really like robotics at the moment. I've spent a fair amount of time looking at that space and it's one that I think is is very, very interesting. I continue to be interested in core consumer. I just think consumer internet usage patterns are just not stable. And every three to five years, there's an opportunity, largely because of hardware improvements on smartphones, to rethink many core experiences on the phone. So those are two areas where I've been spending a lot of time. And I think the third one is kind of consumer facing digital health. I'm not a med tech, deep health tech person, but I've certainly been seeing some really interesting companies that bring the power of digital health to the consumer.

• 24:21Harry Stebbings?

  And then your favorite blog or newsletter, what's your must reads?

• 24:25Speaker 02

  You know, I really like reading the information. I've been a subscriber of the information for a while and read it every day.

• 24:31Harry Stebbings?

  I just had Jessica on the show. Absolutely amazing.

• 24:34Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 24:34Harry Stebbings?

  Now, this one is an interesting one because we're recording this uh just before eight AM Pacific Standard Time. So what's your morning routine? Come on, Charles, tell me, what's the magic?

• 24:45Speaker 02

  I get up very, very early.

• 24:47Harry Stebbings?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 24:50Speaker 02

  Like, like four thirty-ish early most days.

• 24:52Harry Stebbings?

  You were replying to an email at like four. I was worried for you.

• 24:56Speaker 02

  No, I get up very early. Uh, I have a very specific coffee ritual I do at my house every day where I make myself uh some coffee with some, some fancy gadgetry I've assembled. I spend about ten or fifteen minutes in the morning looking at my to-do list to kind of rearranging things to make sure that I've got the right stuff at the top. And then I try to get thirty to forty minutes of just uninterrupted work done from around six to seven and before the emails start coming in. And I usually try to pick the two or three stickiest, thorniest or thought-intensive things I have to get done that day and get them done before I head out the door. That's my typical morning.

• 25:34Harry Stebbings?

  And then I want to hear about your most recent investment and why you said yes.

• 25:38Speaker 02

  Wow. So I just made a commitment the other day to a team. I can't say sort of the name of the company. But I, one of the founders has worked for three people that I've known very well for a really long time. And all three of them tried desperately to retain this person uh before he quit. And they all had sort of remarkably similar commentary about his leadership and vision around product. And so I'm really excited to work with that team.

• 26:08Harry Stebbings?

  Well, Charles, thank you so much for coming on the show today. It's been absolutely fantastic to hear yours and Precursor's journey.

• 26:13Speaker 02

  Thank you so much for having me. I really enjoyed it.

• 26:17Harry Stebbings?

  What a fantastic guest Charles was today and such exciting times ahead for him and precursor. And again, a massive thank you to Brad Feld for the intro without which the interview today would not have happened. And if you love the show with Charles today and want to stay in the loop with more shows, then you can follow me on Snapchat at H Stebbings, that's Stebbings with two Bs. I'd love to see you there. You can also sign up for the newsletter on the20minutavec.com so you never have to miss an episode or an update from us. And before we leave you today, the 20 Minute VC was brought to you by Lisa. They are the Toms or the Warby Parker of the mattress industry. Why? Well, not only are they an awesome brand making the best products at affordable prices, but they're also doing good.

• 26:59Harry Stebbings?

  And for every 10 mattresses Lisa sells, they give one to a shelter. And these mattresses aren't just any mattresses, they truly are incredible. So reassuring that when you buy a Lisa mattress, they offer a 100-night risk-free trial and so you can make sure that you have the perfect mattress for you without the worry. Also, the mattress is delivered in a matter of days to your door, completely free, and all the mattresses are made in the US and the UK. So check it out by heading over to leesa.com/vc and enter the promo code VC75 for a whopping $75 off at checkout. Really is a must, do check that out if you want to sleep well. As always, I'd like to say a huge thank you for all your support. We so look forward to bringing you Wednesday's episode with Matt Clifford, founder and CEO

• 27:43Harry Stebbings?

  at Entrepreneur First, one of the world's most exciting accelerators who accept founders pre-product. I can't wait to bring that to you, stay tuned.