Pod Insights The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch 20VC: Why Signalling Risk is Real, What Founders Need to Know About Taking Multi-Stage Money vs Seed Fund Money, Lessons Scaling to $600M AUM, The Secret to Hiring in VC; Hire People with No VC Experience & How Venture Will Be Disrupted with Rob Lacher About this episode Rob Lacher founded Visionaries Club in 2019, in just 3 years he has scaled the firm to $600M AUM and backed some of Europe's best including Xentral, Personio, Miro, and Ledgy. Prior to Visionaries, Rob founded the fashion platform AMAZE in 2014 which he sold to Zalando, and founded the European seed and growth stage venture capital fund La Famiglia in 2016. In Today's Episode with Rob Lacher We Discuss: 1.) From Novice Tennis Player to Investing on a Global Stage: When Rob realized beating Federer wasn’t an option, how did he make his way into the world of venture capital? When did Rob know he wanted to be a VC? What did Rob learn about himself after leaving La Famiglia? What characteristics make business partners compatible? 2.) The Secret to Building a Fund? Hire People With No Experience: What does Rob think is the hardest element of building a firm? What advice would Rob give to emerging managers when starting their firms? What is the single biggest mistake that Rob sees hiring managers make? Why does Rob prefer to hire people with no VC experience? 3.) The Red Ocean of European Venture: Does Rob think the Series A product in Europe is any good? How would Rob advise founders debating a US multi-stage fund or a European offer? If Rob could choose one European board member, who would it be and why? In Rob's dream, what would the Europe venture ecosystem look like in 2028? How does Rob think Europe’s family institutions can become Europe's Google? 4.) Lessons on Investing From a Pro: Where does Rob think VCs, founders, and boards are misaligned? When Rob invests, how central of a role does price actually pay? What is Rob’s single biggest investing mistake? How did it impact his mindset and approach? What are the three ways reserve management strategy has changed? What does Rob absolutely hate about VC?
Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:00 Speaker 00 That's something I hate about VC. There are a thousand ways to be a great entrepreneur. In the VC space, there is too much hype about what's right, what's not right. As a founder, just think totally independently, how much money do I need? Which people do I want to hire? And what are my milestones in the next one or two years? And then raise the money that you need and not over raise.
0:16 Harry Stebbings? This is 20 VC with me, Harry Stebbings. And I think there are not enough firm managers who are entrepreneurs in terms of how they think about building their firms. Today's guest is a dear friend and an incredible firm builder, Rob Locker. So Rob founded Visionaries Club in 2019. In just three years, he's scaled the firm to $600 million in AUM and backed some of Europe's best, including Central, Pigment, Personio, Miro and Legit, to name a few. And before Visionaries, Rob founded the fashion platform Amaze in 2014, which he sold to Zalando. And then he founded La Familia, the European seed stage venture firm in 2016. But before we dive into the show's day, you've heard me talk about Coda being the docs that brings it all together and how it can help your team run smoother and be more efficient.
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3:41 Speaker 02 You have now arrived at your destination.
3:45 Harry Stebbings? Rob, my friend, we have been friends for quite a few years now. So thank you so much for joining me. Thanks for having me. It's my honour and pleasure. I spoke to so many of your friends and they all told me about your ability to dominate the tennis court. But how did you make your way into the world of venture once you realised that heating federer wasn't an option?
4:01 Speaker 00 Good. Well, I wish I was more talented in tennis than everything would have been much easier. Look, if I have to put it into one sentence, it's always being honest to myself to do what I love doing and really not compromising on it. So when I finished university, I was actually about to start a company and then got talked into Boston call starting group by a certain Johan Engert. And maybe you know Johan, he ended up being the founder of Flixbus, which is now the biggest bus mobility company globally. So he's a very close friend. He was my mentor back then, is also part of Visionaries. I was again the mentor of Max Fisman, who was on the total other side of entrepreneurship. So Max inherited a hundred year old family business with fourteen thousand employees, four billion in revenues and had to take it to the next level. And the thing that we found out back then was that there is absolutely no connect between older new economy entrepreneurs,
4:43 Speaker 00 even though ninety percent of European companies are family businesses, right? So we always thought bringing those networks closer together because we think it unlocks a lot of power in B two B. Took a little until we did this. So I started my own small company in the mobile space, which I sold to Zalando. And then ended up doing angel investments. And from those angel investments, we said, why don't we pool our money in a small seed fund? So that's how I started La Familia with a group of friends, which was a small forty million angel fund back then that we invested into thirty B two B companies.
5:10 Harry Stebbings? Did you know at that time you wanted to be a VC? You've done some angel investments, you know, I enjoy doing this, I want to be a VC.
5:15 Speaker 00 Yeah, the first time I heard of venture capital was when I was twenty two at university. And I thought after the lecture, in fact, this must be the most amazing job on earth. Because you're looking into new companies every day, speaking to young, smart people, which are building the biggest thing in their life. And you have the privilege to choose who you want to work with and work with an array of people and not just focus on one idea. So I thought maybe when I'm fifty, sixty and in case I succeed, I could become a VC. But I never thought that I would become an entrepreneur in VC in the middle of my twenties without any experience. So I stumbled into it over angel investing, but I figured out it was my biggest passion.
5:46 Harry Stebbings? You mentioned La Familia there and you obviously left La Familia to start Visionaries. What did you learn about yourself from leaving La Familia? I think I learned about myself from leaving Strive with Fred, which is actually, he was fantastic at so many things. But it meant that I didn't have to do them and actually I should have been doing them. And I was just comfortable and so I didn't force myself to be uncomfortable. And that's why I run every day, because I like to. Feel uncomfortable. What did you learn about yourself?
6:15 Speaker 00 I'm still managing the first La Familia fund and I'm incredibly proud of what we've built with the team. And believe me, it hasn't been an easy decision then saying if you've put all your energy in something, building it, if you invented it, if you've put risk in it. Contrarian thoughts to say you want to continue in a different setup. But I was at the beginning of my 30s. I realized that it's my biggest passion to be an entrepreneur in VC. And I wanted to do this for the next 20, 30 years. So the one thing you shouldn't do is compromise on the partnership setup. Because it's a very long term game. And with Sebastian, who I founded Visionaries with, he has been a long friend. So we've worked on many deals together. He was my first LP in the first La Familia fund. When he became available after selling Amo Valley after six years, it was basically a great setup to team up.
6:58 Speaker 00 And on the other side, you know, with Jeanette, I really loved working with her and we started the La Familia idea. But we're also incredibly different on how we look into deals, how we would run a company, how we would take things to the next level.
7:08 Harry Stebbings? Is that not a strength? I'm always hiring team members now and I'm trying to figure out the right composition, to be honest. Is that not a strength that they come from a different perspective and look at deals in a different way?
7:18 Speaker 00 It is. The best thing you can do when you're a partner in a founding team is take risks with someone that is a totally different ingredient than you have. And that's what we did. And the fund is now at 10 times the money that we invested in, it's doing well. But if you want to be in the setup for 20, 30 years, you need to have a certain overlap of how you work together. I think my synthesis is take risks when you go into those setups, but also be 100% brutally honest to yourself. If it's sustaining and if it's the right setup for everyone. I think it was a great decision that we took that way because now the first fund, we're still managing it together. It's a success. We've built Visionaries within three years.
7:51 Harry Stebbings? I have to ask, final thing, and then we'll move on to some quite meaty topics. When you get asked advice from managers raising today and who are starting partnerships today, what advice do you give them on the partnership dynamic? Having experienced what you have now with different partners and having founded two funds, what should all partnerships consider before becoming partners?
8:11 Speaker 00 I think you should really spend time together about the truth of what's your purpose and what you really want to do and why you're doing it together. And be super honest about your strengths, your weaknesses. Weaknesses, what excites you and the reason why you're doing it. The more complementary ingredients that you can find in a person, the better it is. But you need to be aligned on the core on how to do everything. The best thing how I did it with, for example, Sebastian, was we really went to the deepest level of what we love doing. And we were super aligned that being an entrepreneur in VC, having all degrees of freedom to build this and doing this for a period, hopefully of twenty, thirty years, was really what excited both of us.
8:47 Harry Stebbings? Do you consider yourself an entrepreneur or an investor?
8:49 Speaker 00 That's the daily balance. What gets me up in the morning is basically on the one hand side, we're entrepreneurs. We need to build the company that we're investing with, right? And that's like just building any other company. There's no team, there's no strategy, there's no office, there's no website. It's basically just like any other company, you can spend hundred fifty percent of your time doing it. And on the other side, we're doing investments and our job is to find the best companies. That's why we never decided to become partner of another fund. But having those degrees of freedom to build it the way you think it's right, it's what excites me. It's what gives me energy and I think it's what makes me a good investor for founders. Because I have an entrepreneurial passion of building something and not just an abstract investor.
9:25 Harry Stebbings? I think it's what investors don't anticipate though, when they spin out. Like the firm build aspect is fifty percent of my day or more, and I'm sure it's probably fifty percent of yours. Everything around team management and everything we discussed. I think people forget that. Can I ask, you've founded now two firms with visionaries, as have I. What's the fucking hardest element of building a firm?
9:42 Speaker 00 I think it is this balance of being an entrepreneur, being a VC with all the things that you have to do at the same time. It's all about the team then that you build that really unlocks the power of the company and what you can get out of it. Adventure Capital is incredibly difficult to hire people because they need to be hyper smart, humble, visionary at the same time, nonlinear thinkers. So it's hard to find them, but the way we decided to do it is basically not hiring experienced people who have been in VC and who just apply the logic that they've learned at another fund. But go for incredibly young, hungry, hyper intelligent people that really want to go exponential in their development.
10:16 Harry Stebbings? Man, I need, again, the reason the show is as successful is because I literally just use it to learn myself. My question and concern there is I don't want to hire someone with no experience because you can't just give them a check, but you need to put mechanisms around them to learn, to grow. We don't have the time or space to do that. You need to just run from day one. So did you put the mechanisms in place? And if so, what are those mechanisms?
10:39 Speaker 00 Look, in the beginning, you're doing everything, right? So it was just Sebastian and I starting the fund. And your CFO, your chief media officer, your chief investment officer, and you just cover everything. I think it's also important to give the DNA of what you think you want to do differently to that company. But then it's also important to not micromanage the whole time, but really, in the best case, find people who are so much better than you are in each of those dimensions to really take things to an exponential development. And that's the balance after a year. In the beginning, it's easy. You don't have a portfolio to cover. You have enough time to look how you design your office or website. But you start doing investments, and then you have thirty companies in the portfolio. And then you don't have time to do this anymore. You can't be everywhere. So that's why the best mechanism that we put in place is that we hire people that we give fifty percent
11:23 Speaker 00 a job description of why we need someone. And fifty percent, we give them the degrees of freedom to use their time to really unlock what they love doing, what they're good at, and what really, in turn, brings our company to the next level.
11:34 Harry Stebbings? The thing I'm struggling with is actually this entitlement. I want five hundred K salary. I want five hundred K bonus. It's all I want, I want, I want. And there's this real entitlement, I find, in twenty-five to thirty-five-year-old venture hiring. How should I deal with that?
11:47 Speaker 00 It's, I think it's an adverse selection. Like, those are not the people that we want to get with Visionaries. It's the other way around. So if someone is asking for a high salary, that person is not willing to take risks. It's not believing enough in the entrepreneurial spirit to build something. We don't pay high salaries at Visionaries. I think if you go to some of the multi-stage funds alone, maybe you get twice the salary. But we're pretty generous with carry, and people know that they can build a career faster than at other funds if they perform extraordinarily well. And if they're great co-entrepreneurs, building Visionaries. These are the kind of people that we want to take on board. And if you look at Martin, he became partner just after three years of joining Visionaries. But he's a co-entrepreneur already leading the seed funds. So I was doing the same for the growth fund. He's always doing the same for the platform. These are incredibly young, hungry, hyper-intelligent people
12:32 Speaker 00 that haven't been in VC before. I think that's the beauty, you know? You can do it super easy and say, look, I just poached from other funds. I hire people who have been three years in VC. They have the networks. They know how to look at deals. You just get an average index of all the other funds if you do this. I think if you want to build a contrarian only on A, Need to go for people that are unbiased, that wanna grow exponentially themselves and that have the trust that over time this will pay out and not the people that say, look, I know finished Harvard and now I wanna have a 750K annual salary, otherwise I go to Goldman. Finally, they should go to Goldman because then it's the better, safer environment.
13:07 Harry Stebbings? I think hiring is where a lot of people go wrong. When you think about biggest mistakes that other managers make that you see around you, what do you think is some of the biggest?
13:15 Speaker 00 Maybe the first thing is that not having a clear differentiation about your proposition, why the market needs you. If you wanna be a new fund for a cap table of a founder, you need to be a painkiller, not a nice vitamin. If you don't have this value proposition that is new for the market, that's something difficult. Same thing is, I think many new managers start investing into hype deals because it's nice to sneak into things that are validated by other funds. But again, you just build an index of what's already there.
13:40 Harry Stebbings? I think, you know, I don't mean pushing that, but it does help with LPs. Like being able to get into hype deals bluntly shows access and it shows ability to an allocation and the best of the best real time with no data deals. If we operate in a world of no data, the hypers deals would seem to be the most attractive at this real time moment.
14:00 Speaker 00 I think it's fair, maybe build a blend, right? If you show that you can get allocations in some of those great hype deals, it's fine if it's 20% of your portfolio. But I think it's so much more impressive if you have chosen companies that others haven't seen and after five years, it turns out to be one of the most successful companies in the market, I think that's it.
14:17 Harry Stebbings? This is interesting. I actually spoke to a multi-stage GP earlier this morning and they said the interesting thing with visionaries is when you look at their early-stage practice, they believe that actually you generate returns at early stage by picking when really everyone else is much more focused on breadth and volume. How do you think about the picking at seed and whether it's really possible to honestly do a concentrated strategy at seed and pick well?
14:41 Speaker 00 I mean, I think on the extreme, either you run the Y combination or seed can kind of model where you're just basically building a broad portfolio and the likelihood to have one or two of those amazing. So where the eye path kind of outliers is almost given. So you're basically building a seed index on the really best of the best founders. But then you can't get your ownership. If something is really a crazy home run, you get to 20x your fund or 25x. So you'll have an incredibly good performance and those funds are doing super well. That's the one game and the other one is building a more concentrated portfolio where.
15:10 Harry Stebbings? The truth is you won't even get that though. If you look at doing 100 to 250K or even 400K in a UI path at seed, that will do unbelievably well. But if you have a hundred million fund and you did a 250K check, 100x is 25 million. 400x is your fund. Do you see what I mean? Like 1200x would be three times your fund.
15:30 Speaker 00 It's hard, but look, I think, and then the other model is that you try to build a more concentrated portfolio of 25 companies where picking is more important. So you can get it wrong and the fund is zero or one. But if you get it right, then you get it very right. If you have two or three companies where you have your 10, 15% ownership, let's say you have 100 million fund, company is 10 billion. If you're 10% right, it returns your fund a few times. If you have two or three of those companies.
15:52 Harry Stebbings? Can I say it's 10% your threshold?
15:54 Speaker 00 We say 80% of our seed portfolio is 10 to 15% ownership. And 20% will leave room if there are exceptional teams where there's maybe another setup is more interesting for them teaming up with a multi-stage fund. Or it's just a different round setup. Or maybe we're not 100% confident about the space, what we want to learn, then we keep 20% for.
16:11 Harry Stebbings? You worry that then like light speed or Excel or Index will say to entrepreneurs, oh, we're in another deal with Robin Visionaries and they only have 3%. So actually in this next one, we can cut them down. My worry is that if you do do those, you allow yourself to be pushed down in others.
16:27 Speaker 00 No, so we're pretty clear about that strategy. And I think as long as you get that message across to the founders and also get that referencing on how you work with them. I think it's a fair value proposition where founders, they need to decide, look, either it's a good partner to take visionaries on board with 10 or 15% or not. With this 2 or 3% deals, we're doing it with maybe two or three deals of fund. And we're pretty clear about the strategy and we don't make a difference than how we work with the founders.
16:51 Harry Stebbings? Well, I think the interesting thing here that I want to discuss next, because it's important for both of us actually, you know, fund strategies. Because we both do the barbell approach, unlike just a seed only strategy. I think there is a strategic reasoning as to why. Can you just walk me through the two funds and how it's a little bit different than maybe just a traditional fund setup? How does that work out in terms of fund sizes, just so everyone can understand?
17:11 Speaker 00 Yeah, we think if you look at Europe, when we started Visionaries, we thought Series A was pretty crowded. You have credible amount of funds with 100 to 700 million in fund size that typically enter Series A. But then has been bloody red ocean. And I think valuations have been quite aggressive compared to the traction that the companies had. And at the same time, it's not yet a space where we can add so much value with our network. So we said, we're good at pre-seed, seed. We've all been entrepreneurs before and we will love working with founders really at those dirty early stages. And then we leave out Series A, so there is no signaling risk for the founders. And they can choose from those amazing funds out there, whether it's an Excel, a Sequoia, an Index or you name them, or amazing lead investors. And then again, for us, it's really interesting at Series B when B two B companies start hyperscaling. They need to build a customer base across Europe.
17:54 Speaker 00 That's where our family business entrepreneurs can be interesting. That's also where founders, if they want to get go to market advice, they better want to speak to like Hannah Renner from Personio, who has just got the company across Europe. Or if they want to have more product advice with Andre, who founded Myrow and not just with average advice. So that's where we think we can bring in a lot of value at Series B stage. On the other side, we thought the best product we can offer to founders is not another one billion fund that competes with those funds out there. But complementing great multi-stage US funds and those funds with a five to 10 million investment.
18:24 Harry Stebbings? You mentioned the red ocean there, we're going to get to that. I just want to ask quickly, you lead rounds at pre-seed and seed. We're seeing a totally different fundraising environment now where you remember before when it's like, do you need your Prorada? And then they're like, oh, everyone else wants to be like, great, okay, take it in like every company. And so my question to you is like, how does your reserves management change today versus years of old? Because it's shifting for sure.
18:48 Speaker 00 It's actually not in the current fund. We have 60% reserve in a seed fund to follow on. 40% is initial reserve, the latest one is 150 million.
18:56 Harry Stebbings? Wow, so you've got like 70 million for initial chase or 65 million for initial chase? Wow, that's no money.
19:01 Speaker 00 We're trying to build a focus portfolio there. And then, you know, typically you can follow on in Series A and in Series B, you can do either full or half parada. It depends a little on the price points of the companies, round sizes. And while we haven't made a change in the current fund, I mean, what drivers do you have that would change your strategy? Either you have a momentum market, which we had the last two years. But we try to avoid investing into momentum companies. I think we have done none of them. And we try to be incredibly disciplined with our founder to raise what they really need to raise and what is necessary and not go into momentum fundraisers where you basically just put in more money without knowing what it is. Second reason could be that you have not good companies in your portfolio and you still send them to family offices to raise money. You're writing off those companies and with the founders deciding not to continue
19:44 Speaker 00 if the model doesn't work, why should we encourage them to raise more money to just postpone the decision? And the third reason could be that you're such an amazing picker, that you have so many companies in the fund that are outperforming, that you not have enough money to put into that. And that's something where typically opportunity funds or the late-stage fund could then come into place to take care of it. So long story short, with our existing fund, we haven't made any change to the reserve minute. But we've done the new fund. We've increased the fund size to 150 million because the initial check sizes are just getting bigger.
20:13 Harry Stebbings? So I've done three seed deals in the last two months. Three seed deals, all tier one US, all beaten tier one UK and Europe. And then I spoke to an LP and they said, why don't I put money in European funds at the A? Because I'm just betting that they will get something that a US fund missed. Do you think that's short-sighted and unfair? And do you think you'd be worried if you're a Series A fund today when the US guys are coming in harder than ever and winning?
20:39 Speaker 00 I think those founders that we want to back are those guys that really do deep referencing on the funds that they want to work with and have a super clear impression why they want to work with which fund. It is like a wedding, you can't get divorced. And I think those founders that are just hyped by US brand putting in three million in a seed round or five million without thinking about the so what are not the founders we want to back? Because that's not the long-term thinking. Those founders that really go deep into referencing, we see actually many conversations where they might go rather 4.9 or Visionaries or 20VC or whoever for the seed stage because they're closer. To those partners, working with them, they are meaningful check in our funds because we're smaller funds. We work hard, we want to make everything. And they're independent in this US era and to really choose from a great fund with a significant check, a board position from a partner, not an associate.
21:24 Speaker 00 Long story short, it's self-selection. Those founders that go with US funds, either they want to go into the US market or they have a certain alpha in whether it's gaming industry or something. I see two thirds of the founders at seed stage that have those term sheets, rather going for European seed fund setup because they want to keep the A round open to choose from those funds.
21:43 Harry Stebbings? How do you advise founders when they have a US multi-stage fund? And they're debating that or European offer?
21:50 Speaker 00 There is no right or wrong. I just want to advise them to make a very active choice about the sort of the setup. And the cons of doing a multi-stage fund setup at seed, you're a very small check of a huge fund. The moment you sign the term sheet, you need to ask yourself, did they just buy an option to lead the next round? Or does the partner really, really go all in, go on my board and spend the time with me? Because such multi-stage funds can't do 150 seed rounds a year and keep that quality. Second thing is they need to be aware that the signaling risk if that fund doesn't lead the next round.
22:18 Harry Stebbings? Do you buy that? I just had David Tish on the show from Box Group and he was like, nah, signaling risk is the biggest load of BS.
22:23 Speaker 00 I've seen it many times in our portfolio. We team up a lot with multi-stage funds at seed. I'd say 20% of our deals are like this.
22:30 Harry Stebbings? And so when they don't come back, it does look bad.
22:32 Speaker 00 It is terrible for you as a founder if things don't work out. There are three scenarios. Either you kill it and everything is amazing, then it doesn't matter. Then everyone wants to do your A round, it doesn't matter. If things go pretty good, but not like incredibly great, likely the multi-stage fund wouldn't preempt the next round and just see how things go because they got their ownership. They make a new decision with a new investment committee at this US A stage, whether it is a great investment or not, and they likely stand on the sidelines. And if things go bad, then they wouldn't pick it up. And believe me, behind the scenes, every fund knows exactly if partner X of multi-stage fund Y is not leading the next round, that there's a reason for it. Really good companies that have good metrics, but maybe were not killing it yet. They had trouble really getting great funds, I sees from other multi-stage funds because they do referencing with the partner.
23:16 Speaker 00 And it's just not true if a partner then says, look, it's a great company and we have our core. Ownership and that's fine and someone else can do it because everyone knows if the deal is amazing, they bloody preempt it.
23:26 Harry Stebbings? But also, actually, the hard one is the messy middle, which is a company going actually pretty well. But it's not enough where you're like, we're going to preempt it aggressively because then everyone else goes, oh, why aren't X actually being so aggressive? If it was really good, they would be. And so even good isn't good enough. The other thing I always think is price optimization and founders don't think enough about this, which is just knock it out of the park. Yes, they'll aggressive preempt, but you are misaligned because they're already in. They do not want to optimize for pricing on the next round in terms of getting the highest price possible. They want to crush your price, whereas me and you are totally aligned with founders because we just want the best price on the next round.
24:04 Speaker 00 Exactly. But look, there are many pros also going with a multi-stage fund. Some have forty, fifty years' experience of supporting companies. Some partners are incredible to have on your board. But just make sure as a founder to challenge that and to ask the partners, will you be on my board or will you just send your associate on my board?
24:19 Harry Stebbings? Or if you could choose one European board member, who would you choose and why at the Series A?
24:23 Speaker 00 I'd choose Johann Butting, who is Global SVP Sales at Slack. And he's built Slack in Europe, Dropbox in Europe, and he's a board member in our portfolio company, Xentral, where I'm on the board with Luciana from Sequoia and Mark from Freiguis. And he's spending so much time with the founders to really build a commercial team, build a go-to-market team. He has done it for the last twelve years, but not on a VC high level. This is the kind of sparring partner you want to have as a founder if you build a SaaS company, not just high-level Butchering on some generic advice by really going deep.
24:52 Harry Stebbings? Do you think VCs aren't valid?
24:53 Speaker 00 It depends on how they operate. I think small boards are great because it forces everyone to work hard. Because if you just have two board members and you don't work, then it's obvious. Second thing is the best board or role that you can take as a VC for a founder is not trying to influence any decisions or to think that you have better ideas than the founder, but to be the best devil's advocate that you can with opening up the option space for the founder. And that's mostly not yourself having an opinion. It's mostly bringing in people from your network. In our case, it's founders who've gone through that journey, who have solved that problems to really provide the best possible devil's advocate's opinion so that the founder can choose what's the right decision to do. I think those kind of boards are exceptional in giving the founder stability. But I think big boards can be very difficult if you have ten board members with ten opinions, which are all high level.
25:38 Speaker 00 And then the founder doesn't really know which direction to choose. And then maybe the most dominant board member is forcing more the direction which the company needs to go. Then a board is a negative and terrible thing.
25:49 Harry Stebbings? Where do you think VCs and founders are misaligned? We sometimes see boards being misaligned with founders. They want to sell, they don't want to sell. Where do you think that boards and VCs and founders are misaligned?
26:00 Speaker 00 I think it's opportunism. As a VC, you can invest in 25 to 30 companies per fund. And you really see who's a VC keeping the word when things go negative. And if they still spend time with the founders, it doesn't mean they should spend all of their time. They should focus on the winners, also on the portfolio, but they should also be there when things go negative. But I think VCs can always opt out or be opportunistic to just focus on what's going well and where they see value in their portfolio, where founders have this one shot at that moment in time that they need to get right. That's a bit of a misalignment.
26:28 Harry Stebbings? I don't know about you, but I think a lot bigger now that I don't worry about losing everything, which is nice. Now I go for bigger swings. How do you think about your relationship to money? Do you think about it?
26:39 Speaker 00 As odd as it sounds, I don't want to say that I'm absolutely not interested in money. But I think my North Star is if I do what I love doing every day. And typically, that's also the intersection of what you love doing, what you're typically good at. Because otherwise you don't love doing it. I'm taking a very long term perspective of what we're building. We didn't do many secondaries, for example, in our portfolio, which would have been maybe attractive because we still believe those companies have such a great journey ahead of them.
27:01 Harry Stebbings? What was your biggest mistake of 2020 to 22? Mine was not doing secondaries in companies that I probably should have done secondaries in. What was yours?
27:10 Speaker 00 Got so many. I think the biggest mistakes, if you're referring to market, that some of the really great winners in our portfolio, maybe we should have backed at later stages even more aggressively, but we thought they were pricey. A mistake on company building, maybe starting to hire a great team a little too late.
27:26 Harry Stebbings? We mentioned kind of relationships to money, we mentioned price. When you're like investing in state initial, how central a role does price actually pay?
27:33 Speaker 00 That's a great question because I can always have this argument, oh, great founders, you need to back no matter what price point. And they go up. I think that's not the right way to approach it. The right way is we've never had a negotiation at the seed stage with a founder about price point because we wanted to have 1% more or 2% less. Our dialogue is always, do we have the same understanding on what we think are the next steps to build a great company? If you have that alignment with the founder, you want to go for a healthy journey that feels right for the company. To do a seed round, to have Enough runway to have a great position and optionality for a series A round. And if it's an incredible serial entrepreneur that has built the product already 10 times, maybe a five million round is fine, even though it's expensive, because you know they will have a product live in the next month. And maybe they can raise the next round with two million ARR.
28:15 Speaker 00 And on the other side, if you have a team that is building a productivity tool for the first time, raising five million on 25, and they say, look, in one and a half years, we want to raise 30 million on 150 million. That's not for us, because we think it's not a healthy setup for them to build a great company, because they don't have any optionality for the A round. So we're trying to figure out what's the right strategy to move forward. And we are very passive. We are not doing pricey deals. We've passed on many companies that were doing those US rounds, because US funds for them, it's easy. You can pay six, eight million on a seed round, fine, on good teams. We like to go a little deeper and understand.
28:46 Harry Stebbings? I think for me, the question I always ask is if we think about funding rounds as like science experiments, and they have a hypothesis to prove out, what is the hypothesis we're looking to prove out, which when proved, we will be able to raise the next round? And I think saying, hey, we will be in 10 large enterprise accounts with more than 25 seats, who will have 25% upsell from there, that makes me really comfortable. It's when it's like, I had, I'm not so sure. And I think clarity around what is required, and it will change. Markets change, but just some sense of direction around how I need to scale traction wise. I always find that crucial.
29:20 Speaker 00 I think it's, as a founder, exactly, I would 100% agree. And we've now 50 SaaS companies in our portfolio. And we've seen different pathways, but any company that is doing great has had great times and terrible times. And I think at the seed, the first decision on pricing, on the optionality that you have for the A. So if you do a three million seed round with a healthy setup, and things don't go that well, it's fine. You can still raise a great A round, because you're sitting on a valuation where you can grow in it. If you're doing a ballsy seed round of five to 10 million, and if after one and a half years and two years, and that's happening with 80% of the companies, if you're not there yet, you either have to bloody raise a down round, which you don't want to do, or you're in a momentum market like the last two years. But then it just takes maybe one or two years later, until you figure out that you're then at a 500 million valuation and still can't raise anymore.
30:02 Harry Stebbings? But I also lay between it, because I think the biggest crime that Europe does often is we underfund our companies, or in the past, we have done, not last two years. But in the more distant past, we have done where it's like you get a million and a million gives you a chance to V1. You don't get V2 with a million in most cases. And most things we set need the V2. They have some fail, they need iteration, it's on the second or the third thing. And I think the US is brilliant at giving you large enough runway to have V2, V3, V4. But then also I go back to, fuck, I'm just oscillating between the two. Like Toby at Shopify said to me the other day, that the best businesses are built around constraints, whether artificial or real.
30:35 Speaker 00 It's not about the exact answer, but it's about the truth. Looking at a company, we take a 10, 15 year perspective and exclaim any cycle thinking or whatever, just think about what is healthy and what makes sense to build a great company. That's something I hate about VC. There are a thousand ways to be a great entrepreneur. In the VC space, there is too much hype about what's right, what's not right. As a founder, just think totally independently, how much money do I need, which people do I want to hire, and what are my milestones in the next one or two years, and then raise the money that you need and over raise a little bit to have a little more runway. It will always put you in an incredibly good position to raise the next round if you do well. And I think you can optimize so much for ownership in the later rounds if you really kill it and the company goes through the roof and you have great metrics. That's when business models start to be predictable and that's where you can really optimize solviation and kind
31:20 Speaker 00 of protect ownership. But it's not at the seed or A stage, raising too ballsy.
31:24 Harry Stebbings? You mentioned the family offices. There's many great entrepreneurs with incredible family offices and institutions built in Europe. You said before to me that they can become Europe's Google. How can they become Europe's Google, Rob?
31:36 Speaker 00 We always complain that we don't have a Google, Facebook, Amazon or Tencent who are the most profitable companies in their clusters and they're the biggest tech drivers next to VCs. But what we have in Europe is 90% of our companies are family businesses. They are highly profitable. They are run by entrepreneurs that can make fast decisions, take more risks, think long term, that have an incredible alpha knowledge in their domain and that own global supply chains. If you take those family businesses together, I think this is our Google. If we unlock the alpha domain knowledge in those verticals, if we unlock the profitability, if we get that into the VC ecosystem, this is how we can build our Google together, combining the domain knowledge and the capital available. I think we have to serve our ecosystem the way our ecosystem is built and not copy Silicon Valley.
32:19 Harry Stebbings? Activising those units in the way that you said, and is that done by a supranational government body, organisation, institution? Or is that done by a private institution like Visionaries?
32:30 Speaker 00 Those companies and those people need to be entrepreneurs and go back to their roots. If you look at those family businesses that are a hundred, two hundred, some fifty years old, they used to be risk takers. They used to be contrarian. That's what made them successful. But some of them are now in their high ages and they're not taking risks anymore. They're just stagnating. They need to get ahead of the wave again, unlock capital, take risks again, investing into really new topics. What is their business model otherwise in ten years? That's the first thing. So who can catalyse it?
32:56 Harry Stebbings? A final one. If you have a dream and you can cast yourself out till twenty twenty eight, where is your ecosystem for you in your dream?
33:03 Speaker 00 In my dream, venture capital itself got disrupted for the first time in history because VC are investing in disruption, but have been the least disruptive industry themselves in the last fifty years. If you ask me what it needs to unlock the European ecosystem, it's the domain smartness, taking risks in verticals, and it's the capital. And I think we have a first generation of billionaire B two B founders, like the founders of Adyen, of Checkout, Gulyum, all those people that reinvest in the ecosystem. And we have the Google, the family entrepreneurs. If things go right, do we really need the traditional VC funds anymore? Or can we build a smarter approach, unlocking the domain knowledge of those people and the capital that these people has to back the next generation of B two B entrepreneurs?
33:44 Harry Stebbings? You're not dissing me. I totally agree. My job is to build the next great venture firm at the intersection of venture and media and to leverage media products to allow me to be better investors. I tweeted this the other day, but I don't think twenty VC is a media company. I think it's a data company. Before the show, you spoke to eight founders that you work with and now have thirty two pages of notes on you.
34:05 Speaker 00 Nice. Can I buy them?
34:06 Harry Stebbings? What do I need to do next? No, ironically, no, you can't, but we've got this over three thousand shows. And so you just have incredible data. I want to do a quickfire round. So I say a short statement, you give me immediate thoughts. Sound okay?
34:18 Speaker 00 Trying to do my best.
34:19 Harry Stebbings? So we messaged about this one before and you said, oh, I can't think of them. I'm like, oh, well, you have twenty four hours. So good luck. If you do invest in one European seed firm other than your own, which would it be?
34:28 Speaker 00 I'll pick two. Beyond Capital and Kukoa because they are both micro funds. I believe in those young managers that are hungry, hyper smart, talented and still have this ambition to win.
34:38 Harry Stebbings? I'm in Kukoa too. I think Carmen has done unbelievably well in terms of visibility. Every deal that we meet at seed, they've always met. A series A fund in Europe, which would you invest in?
34:48 Speaker 00 Felix Capital is a great company because that's an entrepreneurial run venture capital fund with a great focus value proposition. They are doing incredibly well on getting new partners on board like Julia recently, who has been an angel investor in Pikmin, Central. I like him a lot. I think he's an amazing partner. And Felix is an entrepreneur in VC.
35:05 Harry Stebbings? I love the fact. I just get to ask these questions. I didn't have to ask. He has such a good job. Tell me a growth fund.
35:11 Speaker 00 Difficult because I think they're by nature more global, but if I had to pick one, I still your favorite one, eighty three North. They're super humble, very domain specific.
35:20 Harry Stebbings? Concentrated fund size as well.
35:22 Speaker 00 Concentrated fund size. They go deep. They don't make a big show out of it. They work out with the founders. Love them.
35:28 Harry Stebbings? What if you changed your mind over the last twelve months?
35:30 Speaker 00 I think growth is not the right North Star, like economic growth for our Western economy anymore. Because, I mean, in venture capital, we are investing in growth and that's my biggest passion. But if you look at the Western world and we're always striving for growth, it has to be economic growth. It has to be the North Star for each country, each company then and for each employee. And I think our Western economy, I'm not talking about all the world, but it's so overdeveloped in so many areas of the society that we are so far above the peak of what is really healthy in terms of growth. You see whether it's energy, whether it's climate change, all those topics you can't solve anymore with just our stupid North Star of we have to economically grow. And you see this society partying. It's not the right North Star anymore. We need a different value system, a reinvented, adjusted value system for our society.
36:15 Harry Stebbings? What was the craziest thing that happened in twenty twenty to twenty two?
36:18 Speaker 00 I think Justin Bieber moving into crypto, buying one point three billion JPEG that is now maybe worth ninety percent less.
36:26 Harry Stebbings? What one word would be on your tombstone and why that word?
36:30 Speaker 00 It will be something in the direction for Kate, love of my life, because family for me, as much as I love venture capital and tennis, even though I'm not talented enough, is the most important thing in life. And if I had to put one thing on my top, so it would be related to that.
36:42 Harry Stebbings? Oh, that's so sweet. Use your investing mentor.
36:46 Speaker 00 I have great respect for Doug Leone for the fact that met him so many times last year or the year before. He was back then a sixty five year old or sixty four year old person that was still.
36:57 Harry Stebbings? So fast.
36:58 Speaker 00 One hundred fifty percent hungry. He was working incredibly hard, like any of us would work in our age. Keeping that hungriency, keeping that discipline of working one hundred fifty percent hard still at that age is something that I think is very inspiring. We discussed about being an entrepreneur and investor at the same time and how he's balanced it. Building Secor as a company with Michael Moritz, but also being an investor. I think in VC, and it's again discussing about our future of when do you want to retire or not. I think it's an either all in or not business, because the moment you start hanging out maybe in Southern France at your holiday home and only working three days a week, I think that moment you're not a good VC anymore. Because every founder will say that person is not hungry anymore and is not the spring partner I want to have on the board.
37:40 Speaker 00 Going all in with me. Not many VCs I've seen that have died until that age.
37:44 Harry Stebbings? That's unwavering commitment. I totally agree.
37:46 Speaker 00 What is yours? Who's yours?
37:48 Harry Stebbings? Who's mine? Mine's Mark Evans. Mark Evans is, I think, probably one of the greatest jewels of European venture that, you know, I think few people know about. That's mine. The final one for you, my friend. With twenty twenty eight, is Visionaries the name of Blackrock in venture? Is it a boutique? Where do we want Visionaries to be in twenty twenty eight?
38:06 Speaker 00 I don't want to think that way, because then it's a linear goal. So I don't want to retire yet. I'm hungry and I want to build Visionaries to endure the next thirty or forty years. The ingredient is the network that we build of those great entrepreneurs, because the likelihood that something great will come out of those people that have already built something great in their life is always very high, no matter if it's a seed fund or an early growth fund or another pre-IPO fund. We'll see. That story will be written by our co entrepreneurs that we hired in our team that have this degrees of freedom to build it. And we always say, calling a dream crazy is not an insult, it's a compliment. And we have many crazy dreams, but they will be coming out of this setup in the next five years. And I can't tell you yet what this will be.
38:45 Harry Stebbings? I love that. Rob, thank you so much for doing this. I've loved this, my friend, and I so appreciate your friendship.
38:49 Speaker 00 This was awesome, Harry. Thanks so much for having me again.
38:52 Harry Stebbings? You're a star, man.
38:55 Harry Stebbings? Such a joy to have Rob on the show there. As I said, he's been a friend for many years and just so inspired by all he's built with Visionaries. If you'd like to see more from us behind the scenes, of course you can on 20vc.com or search YouTube 20vc. We'd love to see you there. But before we leave you today, you've heard me talk about Coda being the doc that brings it all together and how it can help your team run smoother and be more efficient. I know this because Coda helps me and 20vc. We have a team of amazing researchers who do 10 reference calls before each episode. With Coda, that reference process and team runs so much more smoothly and they're just so much more efficient. Coda allows your team to operate on the same information and collaborate all in one place. So by putting all of that data in one centralised location, regardless of format, it just eliminates so
39:40 Harry Stebbings? many roadblocks that can stop your team in their tracks. With Coda, you'll never ask, "Where are the latest project updates? Anyone know what the performance stats are?" This is really what bogs down teams and slows their productivity. With Coda, your team can operate on the same information and collaborate in one place to get projects across the finish line faster, help your team run more smoothly, more efficiently with Coda. Get started today for free. Head over to coda.io/20vc. That's coda.io/20vc and get started for free. As always, I so appreciate all your support. Have a wonderful Easter with your families and we look forward to bringing you some pretty awesome shows next week.
Previous 20VC: The Memo: Scaling to $600M Revenues with No Venture Funding, The Most In Detail Breakdown of Consumer Subscription Unit Economics & Why D2C and Consumer Subscription is Not a VC Backable Model with Mike Salguero, Founder @ ButcherBox Next 20Growth: How AI Will Change the Game For Content Creation and SEO, The Secret to Mastering SEO, When and How To Invest in SEO Most Effectively & The Best and Worst SEO Strategies with Joost De Valk, Founder @ Yoast Page updated September 29, 2026 · transcript and summary are machine-generated
