#042: Jeff Truong's $30M Venture Fund Journey: This is How He Does It

The best part of what I do is I effectively try to get these startups to the front of the line with these bigger customers because I've built a good relationship with them where when I make the introduction, it's not that I'm saying, hey, take it as a favor. It's I heard that you had this pain point and I think this company can solve this pain point.

Jeff Truong, founder and managing partner of Broadway Venture Partners, is at the forefront of early-stage venture capital, focusing on the future of commerce. His transition from seasoned venture capitalist to launching his own $30 million fund is empowering and educational. In this episode, we explore the fascinating story behind Broadway Venture Partners' inception and growth. Jeff shares how he overcame fundraising challenges and built meaningful relationships with investors and entrepreneurs. Jeff's journey highlights the value of perseverance and visionary thinking in venture capital. Welcome back to Turning Pro, Season 2, Episode 5. Today we have Jeff Trung, who is a solo GP of Broadway Venture Partners. Thanks for joining us today, Jeff.

Thanks for having me, guys.

So I want to start by saying Jeff told me before we hit film that this is the first time that he's gone on a podcast.

Yes.

And I feel like you're a natural because we were talking a little bit before we started and you're just rolling with it.

I thought that was great.

I told him, I was like, we should start filming. I told him, I was like, it's a limiting belief, you're gonna do great.

Well, it's very kind of you. I think, uh, once cameras are on, I'm probably gonna now have all this like random word jumbles. But I appreciate the kind words and I hope that, uh, it goes well.

Awesome. Do you want to start by just giving us quick background on what you're working on?

Absolutely. Yeah, so I am raising my first-time fund. It's a fund called Broadway Venture Partners and we are an early-stage future of commerce fund. And so what that means is that we invest in the software and the infrastructure that enables the way we buy, sell, and transact online. And really our— the way we practice the craft of venture is fundamentally different. If you think about a traditional VC, they tend to work top-down. They think about, here's a thesis, here's a pretty-looking market map that I've created, and then I'll go and talk to all those companies. And then by the time they get to the term sheet stage, they say, can I talk to your customers? And then when they finally talk to their customers, they're like, oh well, that actually didn't go the way I thought it was. And then they're like, sorry, we're actually not going to invest. But why do they talk to customers last? It's because typically they can't get access to these customers. And so what I do is actually work backwards. I talk to the customers, I talk to these brands and retailers, and I get to know their pain points. And by understanding their pain points, I can then go look for startups that are solving them. And so really, as, as much as I'm a venture capitalist, I also think of myself as a matchmaker of sorts because I'm trying to match Brands and retailers that are feeling pain points with actual technology solutions that are solving them. And so when I'm trying to make these introductions, it's not that I'm saying, hey, here's 5 good friends of mine that are willing to take any introduction I'm willing to make. It's actually putting together peop— 2 people that are looking for each other. And when you get on that call, it's such an amazing energetic call where they actually both wanna be there. They're actually like, I really want to learn more about your pain point. I really want to go and solve that. And they're like, I want it to be solved as well. And so that's, that's really the thesis of Broadway Venture Partners.

What would you say is the problem that's most top of mind for you right now that you're trying to find a matchmaker for? I'm going to put you on the spot.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, there's, there's a ton. I think if you think about it, there's the deprecation of third-party cookies. So for, for folks that may not know what third-party cookies are, it's that little pixel that used to be auto-opt-in. It would track you from one website to another website. And that's what Google and Facebook have built $400 billion businesses on. But in 2021, iOS released the iOS 14.5, and effectively that resulted in everybody having to opt in to third-party cookies. And I'm sure as now you go on every website, there's the, do you consent? Do you not consent? And you're trying to say like, okay, can I say no? But like, how hard are you making it for me to say no? 'Cause then I can't actually read the content or go on the website that I actually want to go on. And what's happened now is effectively Google and Facebook have lost over 60 to 80% of the data signals that they used to rely on. And that's had such a big effect on every brand and retailer in terms of customer acquisition costs. And almost overnight people saw their CACs go up like 2x, 3x, and it's already been rising over time as well. And so that's a fundamental problem that a lot of these brands and retailers are facing and they're trying to figure out, how do I solve this? I've been so hooked on this thing called digital ad, uh, digital paid marketing for so long. I no longer know how to build a real brand or, you know, get to $100 million of scale without really scaling my advertising. and it's so fun to see all these different solutions that are trying to crack this massive, massive opportunity that Facebook and Google have built. I love it.

I wanna talk about your sourcing approach just from a bottoms-up lens. So starting with customers and determining their pain points and then going from there. And we're both in e-commerce or come from e-commerce backgrounds. And I know a lot of investors in the space, especially like e-commerce, SaaS, infrastructure, and also adjacent ecosystems, like what we've talked about, like retail tech, supply chain tech, logistics. Adjacent fintech as well. And I don't think a single one of those investors was very upfront about like, this is my sourcing approach. And it makes sense, right? You say talk to customers, just see what their pain points are, and then we'll go determine a market. Almost every single one of them is just, well, you know, hanging out with other co-investors and they send me business, or I invested in X e-commerce SaaS or X SaaS company and they referred another SaaS company that's like, this person is really smart and you should go talk to them and they have a thesis about that market. But it does seem very straightforward. Why are more people not doing that? Are they just caught up in kind of the previous way of doing things?

I think most investors don't want to spend the time and invest in those relationships. They'd rather actually invest in relationships with other VCs of saying, send me your best deal, because it's a lot more fun to talk to other people who are VCs than talk to people who maybe you actually don't really want to get to know. Right? And because you don't see an end goal out of it, you don't see like, how can I get deal flow from this person? And sometimes they're also hard to access. But I took a very different approach where I really enjoy talking to these brands and retailers and the founders or the head of marketing, the head of supply chain, etc., because I look at it as I'm— it makes me so much— it makes me a better investor because I'm just learning from their pain points. And what I love about talking to these folks is they really do want to use technology. They're technologists at heart, but they're just working at brands and retailers. And when you find a solution that really just hits the note for them, they will get up on any tabletop and talk about that technology solution. That's what you want to hear. And so, for example, last week I was at a, 30-person direct-to-consumer operator-only dinner. And I was the only investor there. And I'm just like, this is amazing. This is gold. And I'm just sitting there just soaking it up. They're like, yeah, this is what I've been trying. This is what I've been using. Here's what works. Here's what doesn't. And imagine if I hear a really great company and instead of asking their VCs to make the introduction, I'm asking their customers. That's so different. Than how most founders get introduced to companies.

That, yeah, I mean, that's extremely interesting. I guess another question I have is like, do you have a shortlist of brands that you maintain really deep relationships with and they're kind of like your first layer of defense, if you will, of like, tell me all the tools you're using, like why are you using them kind of thing?

I do. And a lot of them have actually become my friends as well, which is amazing. And I'll give a shout out, Sib at Branch Furniture, one of the founders there, He is just a true technologist. He actually started in venture himself.

Did he?

Yeah. And he then he went and started a business and he is, he's my guy. He, he every time he's just like, anything you see, just like text me and I'll give you my long form opinion. And he's just, he's wicked smart. He's like 10 times smarter than I am. And it's just those folks that you find in the ecosystem. And just if you can multiply him by 10 or 20 others, you don't have to have 100 relationships. You just need to have 10 to 20 really high quality relationships across the spectrum of SMBs, mid-market to enterprise that you can really help go and do a due diligence on a really great company. And so fundamentally, I believe that for like early stage startups that are doing $500K to $1 million of, of ARR, what's the most important at the early stages isn't for you to get 100 more customers of brands that maybe no one really recognizes. It's actually getting that 1 to 2 key anchor or spotlight customer that really helps you actually snowball. Because as soon as you get a Branch, a Caraway, a True Classic, people understand the bar that these folks have in terms of what they're willing to adopt, how much they've tried, et cetera. And if you're able to create a case study with them, that really helps you snowball. 'Cause when you talk to the $50 million brand, the $100 million brand, you know, the first question they ask is, what other brands of my size have you, have you serviced? Because they don't want to be the first one. They want to know that you're ready for them. They want to know that you're ready for prime time. The best part of what I do is I effectively try to get these startups to the front of the line with these bigger customers because I've built a good relationship with them where when I make the introduction, it's not that I'm saying, hey, take it as a favor. It's, I heard that you had this pain point and I think this company can solve this pain point. The benefit that I have as an investor is that I actually get to look under the hood. I get to look at logo retention. I get to look at net dollar retention, gross dollar retention. And because of that, I actually get a better insight into how sticky is the product. Are the customers using it more and more? And so that level of insight is very helpful for brands as they're thinking about what are the, what's the best subscription solution that I should pick?

What do you think it is?

Ah, I can't, I, there's, I, I feel like it's a, it's a big, I would, I would, I would offend a lot of people if I—

Have you invested in any of them or no?

I have not. I've basically, I think I've spoken to almost all of them. There was one that I got very close to. With, and I still, I do think that they are the best one, but I will remain neutral as a Canadian should.

From a technology lens, you think they're the best one?

I believe so. I actually, I spoke to a lot of customers. I even spoke to, and you know, I think everyone knows about Recharge. I even spoke to someone very high up at Recharge saying, this is probably the best one.

Interesting. We can talk about that off camera.

Yeah.

Yeah, will you buy me a treat if I guess it?

Sure. This can be post-pod. Ben, I want to talk about your experience because early on you started with kind of a lot of smaller brands that were up and coming. And then we've known each other for like a year, year and a half, mainly getting to know each other through this podcast. And then I want to say about like 6 or 7 months ago, all of a sudden I saw one or two big logos pop up on the site. And then anytime we'd catch up, you're like, X, Y, and Z big name is coming in the door. So what was your experience in terms of like boiling the ocean, a lot of smaller ones to kind of improve the product and the tech as well? And then really focusing on a couple of big ones?

I mean, I think the biggest thing, to be honest with you, is that you need to act like you belong in the room when you're talking to large brands and you need to have conviction. And like, you can't— I think a lot of times early SaaS players, when they get their first seat at the table with a big brand, it's like nerve-wracking almost because it's like, oh my God, they're going to use my tool. Like that thing that I was building in the basement with my buddies when we first started. So I think like having a level of conviction and having momentum and having like real case studies with real brands and real numbers They might not be like those $100 million brands, but like big enough where they're not just like a random nobody and people know them. And then from there it's all momentum, it's all FOMO, it's all momentum. The same way that you like raise money as a founder, being able to build momentum on the partner and customer side is the same thing because brands are constantly looking for the newest and latest and greatest technologies in terms of how they can stay relevant. And so it's on you to kind of meet them where they're going.

From an engineering momentum lens, I guess this is a question for both of you because you're raising capital and you already raised capital but are growing really fast. Any— I feel like a lot of momentum can be engineered. Obviously, you have to have a great product or you— a great background in investing in an interesting thesis. How do you think about very tactically engineering momentum, like different systems, different owners kind of doing those moving parts?

It's a really good question. And I think if you ask myself and my two co-founders that question, we would all give you significantly different answers. I think through my lens, like my job in our business is to make sure that I'm in front of every relevant person in the ecosystem and everyone knows who we are and that we're top of mind. So it's really just like relationship building. To your point that you made earlier, it's like about getting those first couple customers that will go to bat for us, that like really truly love what it is that we're doing. And I know that it's honest and genuine. So it's like, if they're gonna serve as a reference, if we're gonna do a case study with them, there's no bullshit. Like they actually truly believe that you helped them in the way that we say that we did. And from there you just kind of gotta use that to build momentum and let it snowball. But I think it's, you gotta let your work speak louder than anything else, right? At the end of the day, results are what brands are looking for. And so it's a lot easier to have conviction as the guy involved in the business that's just really like selling the dream, for lack of a better term, when I know that the product works and I know that we have real logos with real results. It just makes it a hell of a lot easier than the first couple of months of building this company where you're truly just selling a pipe dream until you get a couple of those people to be like, you know what, I like you and I'm willing to like take a bet on this. Just don't fuck me over in the end.

Yeah, I think that's ultimately what it is. I'm curious about your experience fundraising. Right before the podcast, we were talking about the importance of honesty and vulnerability in those conversations, not just coming to a room and say, I've done the best investments and this is my really innovative thesis, but being really honest about like, this is my thesis and I think it could work. But also here are my blind spots. Like, this is what I'm not sure about.

Yeah, it's, it's really interesting. If you solve the idea of how do you actually create urgency, you know, let me know. I'll, I'll be the first to buy it. Uh, but to what Ben was talking about around allowing your, your work to really show itself. And so even before I actually launched my fund, I was able to make 3 investments. And you're probably scratching your head and you're like, how do you make investments without money? Well, if you think about capital, capital is a commodity, but what's not a commodity is your time. And I was fortunate enough where Similarly, in terms of how I think about case studies, I was trying to think, how do I create case studies for Broadway? Because I have this really great background of almost a decade in venture capital at amazing organizations. But the thing that people always ask is, well, was it you or was it the organizations that were really the ones that got you that deal or were the ones that won it for you? And so I'm like, okay, that's, that's totally fair. How about I, I prove you wrong? How about I actually go out there and do the hardest thing, which is how do you invest in a company without capital? And that's through your time. And so what I did to warehouse 3 opportunities or 3 deals into Broadway Fund 1 was I actually ended up meeting a couple of founders through founder referrals, and I was very open with them. I was like, look, I'm still fundraising for my fund. I likely can't invest in you. But then they're just like, okay, well, can I talk to you? And I keep talking to you because I really enjoy our conversations. And I'm like, yeah, sure, why not? I've got a lot of time right now. And so we keep having conversations and conversation after conversation eventually leads to, how about you be an advisor and how about we give you equity? And but going back to the very vulnerable and honest stuff, I'm saying, yes, I'd love to. But I only want to do it if it's a meaningful percentage of equity, primarily because— and very open again— I really want to show to my LPs I'm not just like every advisor that's willing to take $10,000 of equity and, and I'll, I'll, you know, dedicate an hour of my time every 3 months. It's like, I want to be there with you. You can call me whenever. I will always pick up. But I also want to be a meaningful percentage to really demonstrate to my LPs Hey, Jeff is doing something that's really different. He's doing something where people who even have capital can't get the same percentage of ownership that he's getting through this advisor stuff. And that's actually how I let my, my work really speak for itself, where I'm saying, hey, the playbook works. I'm making customer introductions. I'm doing exactly what I said I would be doing. And it's so valuable that these founders are telling me, even without capital, I want you on the cap table. So how do I get you on the cap table?

I love that. It's so funny. I feel like early stage companies, the two things that really matter is new customers and new hires. Obviously, like, great product is at the core. But ultimately, like, those are the two metrics that really matter, like the quality of the talent and the quality of the customers and their qualification coming in the door. And so many investors that I talk to are like, well, we got a great internal comms team that you can use for an hour every month. And it's like, that is helping with neither of those. Like, it's adjacent in the process of maybe getting a customer if you have slightly better comms. In-house messaging, or they're like, oh, you can use our in-house finance expert and they can help. And again, it's like neither of those things. Or you can use our recruiter part-time who will do some filtering calls for you or backchanneling, but that's not actually getting the candidate in the door. And so I remember when we were talking first, I appreciated right off the bat, it's like, those are one of the two main things and I'm going to help you with one of them. And just being very honest about that.

Yeah. The thing I think about a lot is how do you focus on focus? How do you just focus on one thing, do it really, really well? And I actually give this advice a lot to my founders. I think typically when you think of an early stage company, sometimes when you're just trying to find product market fit, you're chasing all these different things. You're chasing all these like shiny new objects. I think you're seeing a lot in AI, you know, and it's funny actually, if you think about a lot of VC funds that were, you know, crypto funds, then they turned into Web3 funds, then they turned into AI funds.

Yep.

You know, we, uh, At one of my former funds, we talked about this, this analogy called the, the fox and the hedgehog. And the, the fox is this really, really clever, smart founder that's really good at finding the next opportunity. But as soon as that doesn't work out, they just jump to the next one and they jump to the next one and the next one and the next one. They're really good at that. And, and there are a lot of foxes that have built really great businesses by doing that. But the types of founders that I love working with are what I call the hedgehogs. The ones that, you know, they don't care about what's going around, going on around them. They're not going from Web3 to crypto to, to AI. They're just saying, I really want to go and solve this problem. And if I can solve this problem in my lifetime, that's a life well lived. And I love finding these scrappy, capital-efficient entrepreneurs that are just like, this is what I want to go to solve. Like, just because there's AI out there, Web3 and all that stuff, and I could get— I could raise so much more money. But I'm not going to do that because I just want to solve this pain point for my customers.

The extent of our involvement in AI in the early days was buying the domain. I was like, it's probably good to own this just in case.

Your multiple probably went up at least 3x.

Yeah, right. That was the extent of it though. Have you heard of Platter before?

I have not actually, outside of—

So I'm not doing my job.

You got to give the round of applause.

If he's an early stage commerce investor and I'm an early stage commerce founder and he hasn't heard of it, then I'm clearly not doing my job.

I'm surprised you guys haven't We've been in touch before.

I have.

That's why when you told me who he was and what he did, I was like, I feel like an idiot that we haven't crossed paths at some point.

Well, now we have. And it's a great start to a great relationship.

Yeah, 100%. Yeah, I mean, to give you a quick— we're just going to do a pitch in real time here now.

Let's do it.

What's Platter?

What is Platter?

Our business was built on two core theses. The first one is that a lot of apps in the Shopify ecosystem are features, not products. So as brands scale, they get stuck with too many apps, too many support teams, bloated tech stacks, slower website, worse conversion. And the second piece of it is the misalignment between development agencies and brands. Because development agencies get paid for their time. So they're incentivized to make things complicated and expensive. So what we've done is built a lot of functionality into one solution, which is a theme and app bundle to unify your app stack and then layer in best practices around increasing your AOV and your conversions so we can quantify making you money and saving you money at the same time.

Mm.

You've dialed that way better than like 6 months ago when I heard of another version of that.

Really?

This has gotten much better.

Oh, great. Yeah. I mean, to synthesize that into a shorter sentence, it's like if we're successful in 5, 10 years, We've debunked this myth that building a high-converting storefront is expensive and takes a long time.

Got it.

Because now that we've built a lot of this tooling internally, we can build you a storefront cheaper and faster without compromising quality.

Hmm. That's— so you're trying to, like, combine a lot of different types of features and sell it at, like, a more of, like, a one-stop shop for all of your kind of, like, digital storefront development needs.

Yeah, because the insight that we had, which I think is an important point, especially in the context of talking to an investor, is that we found that a lot of these point solutions that brands are using, they end up actually only utilizing like the first 20% of what that offers. And then all the bells and whistles that a lot of these point solutions use to justify increased pricing, a lot of these merchants aren't even sophisticated enough to actually extract all the value out of it. Yeah, right. So like my example for you would be, is a brand using like a cart drawer on their chat, on their website for like checkout, they don't necessarily need the AI to surface like recommendations for the right products to upsell. It's like, are they just using the card drawer? Like, let's start there. Yeah. Right. And you like, you take that concept and you extrapolate that into a lot of other categories and you find out that a lot of brands are just like using point solutions because their friends said to do it. But like when we can come in and build you a new storefront, give you a bunch of recommendations around how you should be doing things differently, remove 10 apps from your storefront. And give you a cleaner infrastructure that doesn't have as much, like, I guess, like, um, like overload in terms of like too much code, too many apps integrated into it. Technical debt, I guess, is the right term. Then we're giving you a cleaner infrastructure and a better performing store.

Yeah. It's like you're kind of giving them, here's the playbook of how to actually build a very well optimized and thought out storefront without taking the path that everyone else has had to take where they're trying all of the things not working and then realizing you have like an under-optimized storefront after 6 months of time and effort.

It's like agency freelancer, 25 apps, agency freelancer, 4 years of a codebase built by 50 different people. And now I don't know what to do with it because I'm the new e-com director at this brand.

Do folks eventually say this has worked really well, but now I want to go and really own my own storefront and really bring it in? In-house or anything like that?

It's usually the opposite.

Yeah. Okay. All right.

Like, most people thought when, when I would first talk to them that we usually work with new brands.

Yeah.

But that's not the case. Like, our ICP is like $1 to $30 million.

Okay.

So it's brands that are already doing revenue that are looking for ways to improve. And the entry point is a couple different things. It's either like the scrappy solo founder that we call Founder Fred, who like, they just hit 7 figures in revenue, they're doing everything themselves, they need help like offloading a little bit of the work. Marketing Maggie is like our second persona, which is essentially like the e-com director at the brand who's like looking for ways to improve their core KPIs. And then you have Enterprise Eliza, which is like the chief digital officer, CMO, that's like looking for ways to improve their internal efficiencies, looking for ways to get rid of tools, increase page speed, and just like looking for any competitive advantage that they can get.

Mm. So would you compete against at some point like a Nostra just to say, if you're a customer of Nostra, you would, you'd stop using them?

I'm actually, I actually wrote a check into Nostra and I'm good friends with Arthur. Yeah.

So Arthur, actually, I really, I met him when I, my, my old firm and I really liked him because he, I think for me, he embodies what is like a capital efficient, scrappy entrepreneur and where he's like, you know, non-consensus thinker. He's like, I don't want to go and raise a bunch of money and go and like, you know, call ourselves AI and all that stuff, even though they have—

they did exactly that.

But he didn't raise that much. I know there is— there's a whole thing. But even before he got there, he was very scrappy. Yeah, that's what I think. So for example, Klaviyo, right? Klaviyo raised over $455 million, but it actually only burned $15 million to get to about $700 million of ARR. So no one's saying don't raise money. It's more about raise when it's actually most beneficial to you where you don't— what I see a lot of founders get, and I know we're going on a little bit of a tangent here.

No, no, I love it.

What I see a lot of founders do is that they go on this, what I call like a VC treadmill. They go, they start getting, as soon as they get on that treadmill, they just keep trying to run faster and they run faster. They raise a bunch of money, they burn through it all. And then so that they can run even faster so they can grow and grow into that valuation. The hard part about that VC treadmill is what happens when you start running slower? What happens when it stops? That's when everyone's like, oh wow, okay, well you're not worth as much as we thought you were. But what happens when you actually try to figure out how do I control my own destiny? How do I get off the treadmill? And the way you do that is actually by being super scrappy, capital efficient, and eventually a path to profitability. Because then you can control what you want to do and how you want to grow, and you never have to worry about What do the next VCs, the growth stage VCs, think about my business? And then all of a sudden you're not building a business for your customers, you're building a business for VCs. And I feel like that's a big trap that a lot of people will fall into as soon as they start raising venture funding.

Well, I think it's because a lot of founders raise money to solve problems instead of raise money to double down on solutions.

Yes, I would agree with that.

So it's more like if you're going to raise money, do it when you have like a product, product market fit or clear momentum. Don't like raise a bunch of money and and then be like, all right, now let's figure out what we're going to do with this money.

But what if you never actually have to raise money?

Or that—

I mean, that's the market pull, right?

That's the third— that's the third piece. I mean, I've, I've talked to Adrian about this a bunch. We've been preempted several times, uh, to do a seed round, and we haven't done it yet.

Yeah.

Um, more because I don't— we just haven't had to, to date. It's not to say that, like, it's my job to, like, keep all options open and evaluate every opportunity, uh, but I would say from, like, a capital efficiency perspective, it's the number one priority for us. I think our team has done a really good job of not looking at the shiny object and watching a lot of players in our space like raise a bunch of money. And from a perception perspective, it's like go faster than us. But like we've kind of just stayed at this, this consistent like mentality and pace of like knowing what we need to do in the short term, in the medium term. I feel like now for the first time we're actually starting to see it like come to life, which has been super cool.

How do you think about capital stack moving forward? Like an example, if a competitor trying to do exactly what you're doing just went out and raised a $4 million seed and they had a couple of like shiny logos that really liked them, how would you respond to something like that?

I don't think that I would. I don't think I'd be reactive based on what someone next to me is doing. I think I would want to stay true to like our, our goal and our plan with our business. I think like that's an input. That's an input to inform the discussions that we're having in terms of what we're going to do. But like, I don't think because another company does something means that you have to act on that, right? Like, I think the subscription space is the perfect example, right? There's what, 7, 8 players that have all raised at least $5 million. Like, I think there was a lot of like, what are they doing? Oh, we gotta do it. But like, I don't know. I think by nature of what we're building, there's a, the ocean is large enough where like, if we do right by our core customers, that our customer referral relationships just start to expand. And the other piece too is our business is really sticky. Like when you power the infrastructure of a storefront, like they're not really leaving unless they're like going out of business.

Yeah.

So I think in that regard, our lifetime value will be really high relative to a lot of other players in the space.

Yeah, I agree. One thing that you mentioned that I really liked was how so many funds have gone from like, we're the crypto fund to the Web3 fund or Web3 tooling fund to the DAO tooling fund to the AI fund, whatever infrastructure layer. And I swear for the past, because I used to be in VC investing in commerce specifically, both like brands and commerce infrastructure. And for the past 4 or 5 years, maybe 3 or 4 years, every investor is saying like, get out of the space. E-commerce is dead. It's not coming back. And we work, I know a lot of brand founders, I know a lot of SaaS founders that we work with. And people are doing really well. Again, like it's tighter on certain margins or tighter on certain profitability metrics. But a lot of SaaS companies are growing really quickly in e-commerce, Proxima being a great example. Mike from Prescient, who came on here before, is crushing it. Firmat Commerce is doing a great job, raised a bunch of money. You guys are crushing it with a different pathway. And that's something when we first started talking that I was like, oh, he's just focused on commerce and commerce infrastructure and commerce-adjacent tools. That 4 or 5 years ago would have been the dominant narrative, but everyone's moved on. And I actually really appreciated that you were like, No, A, I'm passionate about this, but B, this industry is here and it's still growing and I just haven't moved on to the next shiny thing.

The fascinating thing is when you think about VCs, VCs have like very short attention spans, so they jump from one thing to another thing and they think about what's, what's hot. But if you look at industries in 10, 20, 30 year timeframes, If you actually think about like the S&P is the one graph that's always like going up to the right. If you look at it in long time horizons, the other graph is actually retail. Retail has just consistently increased over time and it's because consumer consumption has consistently increased over time. And so really, I'm not, I'm not betting on anything that's going to really change in the last 30 years. I'm just saying this is what I really love doing. This is what I really enjoy. And if you actually look at a lot of the companies that have gone public already, if you look at Shopify, Shopify went public at $800, $900 million, and it's now, I think, like a $70, $80 billion company. And if you look at The Trade Desk, The Trade Desk went public at a billion. Now it's like a $44 billion company. What a lot of folks get wrong is this concept of like the power of compounding, where they think as soon as a company goes public, that's the time, like, I need to sell, like, after my lockup. That's when you know you actually don't have a really, really great business because you've just spent 10 years getting to this point where every time that it compounds even more, that's really what you're actually trying to build up to that 10 years. I'm sure you're seeing it in your business, right? When you start from zero and then from year 1 to year 2, and then the power of compounding, how you'll go from $500K, then all of a sudden you went from $2 million and then $4 million and you're like, Wow, it was so much harder to get from 0 to 500 than it was from 2 to 4. And you, you think about a lot of VCs like to talk about like, oh, I've had like 5, 10 unicorns. I backed all of these great companies. That's really not the goal. The goal is actually to find one great company like a Google, like a Facebook, like a Shopify, like an NVIDIA that you just believe in. And that thing that that company will compound over long periods of time. And so I look at commerce and you look at some of the great businesses that were founded with commerce as really their foundation— Shopify, Trade Desk. You look at Adobe, Adobe Commerce Cloud is a massive, massive business. You look at HubSpot, Zendesk, and there's so many of these massive companies that were created in commerce. And I think it's almost like when, when growth at all costs was very popular and everyone's like, yeah, you just need to grow, grow, grow. And then all of a sudden when the economy shifts, everyone's like, oh, capital efficiency is important again. And for me, capital efficiency has always been very important. So nothing's really changed for me. And what I love about commerce is I feel like a lot of the founders that have really stuck in the category as well see the opportunity. It hasn't really changed. It's just that now you have all these tourists who were interested now leave and chase the hot AI, you know, deep tech defense tech stuff, which is totally fair. That's, that's part of their job. But for me, I love, it's, it's really back to my love of talking to the ecosystem and playing that matchmaker of when you're able to connect these customers with these, with these solutions that really solve what they're trying to, what they're looking for. It's, it's truly just a, you just feel really good about making those connections.

Yeah, I mean, I think it's, it's a really interesting point watching people come and go, like, from a founder's perspective too. Like, I see, I see other founders in our space who either lose patience, so they raise a bunch of money because there's perception that you're going to get to your end goal faster by raising money, which maybe in some cases is true, not all cases. But I think that, uh, I give my two co-founders a lot of credit for, like, reeling me in, in the early days of like, we just got to stay the course on like what we're doing, and you have to trust in our vision. And like, based on the conversations we've had with customers, that like we're solving a real pain point. And I now think when you finally get over that hump where people are starting to hear about you and you start to build momentum, you're thankful that you didn't just like jump from one industry to the other, like looking for something that had a faster dopamine hit.

Totally. I think something I look for quite a bit when I'm evaluating startups is founder product market fit. And why has this founder decided to take an incredibly hard path in starting a company? And why is it this specific pain point that they want to get up and solve for every day? I think that is the, that is the hardest question to answer for anybody. But if you can find it, I think it's such a special thing that really happens. And so, you know, two folks that I look up to being Warren and Charlie Munger of Berkshire. At 99, Charlie was still super sharp. If you listen to any podcast at 99, he's more sharp than some people in their 60s. Right. And it's just because for them, they love what they do. And they actually have this, this kind of tagline. They call it tap dancing to work where they love what they do so much, even though they're walking, they're actually kind of tap dancing because they, they actually, they're so excited to get back into the office. And I think that's such, that's actually for me when I think about maybe not to get in too much into this, but like life itself, like what do you wanna do in life? And that's actually the hardest thing for a lot of people to really decide. And I think a lot of people will just do something because that's what everybody else is doing. But when you actually find that thing that you wanna get up every morning and put in the work and actually go and do it, I think that's actually the greatest gift of life that you can do.

What inspired you to make the jump to go off on your own?

Oh, it's— how much time do we have?

Let's talk about the turning pro moment.

Yeah, exactly.

Yeah, the turning pro moment. For me, it was that I've always wanted to go and start something on my own, and it really stems from my grandparents. So my grandparents, originally from China, started— were entrepreneurs on both my dad and mom's side, and they eventually immigrated to Vietnam and they started businesses there as well. Lo and behold, they were escaping China because of communist China. Then they went to Vietnam, and there was communist Vietnam, and then they— and then the war happened, and then they all moved to Toronto. And I was always just really inspired by their entrepreneurial journey of starting all these different businesses on all these different continents. And for me, I think the greatest opportunity that I've been ever been gifted was really the, the opportunity to grow up in Canada and get an education where my parents really didn't have that same opportunity. And both my parents are blue-collar, hardworking immigrants, and they work at factories, right? And I'm just sitting on a desk and, you know, talking to founders, doing well. And for me, it's just such a privilege to have the opportunity to even try to start something. And for me, it's when I think about starting a business, it was more about the freedom to go and practice the craft of venture capital the way I thought it should be practiced. Not necessarily I, I want to start a venture capital firm because that's what everyone does afterwards. For me, it's like I really want to practice this craft of venture capital. The way I think it should be practiced and with this very unique value add that I think I can really execute very, very well on. And if I can do that really well, I think I can actually have a pretty big impact on some of the founders that I invest behind. And just having those one-to-one relationships when it's not a big firm and I don't have to deal with all the, the red tape or politics, I think that's the fun part of starting your own thing where I get to really practice venture capital the way I think it should be practiced.

What's been the hardest moment? Maybe we can frame it as like highs and lows. Yeah, I'm sure, you know, you'll go from 30-minute call to next 30-minute call where you talk to an amazing founder and they just give you a fantastic reference to an LP and that LP says, I'm game, let's do this. And then the next one, it's, you know, one of your formal— former angel investments or something had a down round and they're going out of business. Were there any specific low points or even this week, this month, just kind of tough moments as you're building this thing that you can share?

Yeah, I mean, every, every week is, is there is a roller coaster. I'm sure as you both know, it's, you know, founding a business. And so there's almost too many to count in terms of, of low points. And so I, you know, when I think about low points, I don't think of this as like, wow, this is a really terrible moment that happened. I think of it as, as this is like the way I think I get through the low point, the low moments, as well as the high points as well, is when you think about progress, progress is not linear. You know, ideally, and I think for most people, people would love to have progress be linear, like every day you show up and then you see like the chart moving up into the right. It would be amazing if that was the case, right? But Progress is not linear, but the best thing about progress is that it compounds. And all you have to do is show up every day and eventually progress compounds. You might not see it in day 1, but in day 30, when you look back, you're like, wow, I did a lot during that 30 days. Okay, if I keep this up, what happens 6 months from now? And so, you know, 6 months before this, I didn't have any portfolio companies. I had no case studies. I had no references for Broadway. And 6 months later, now I have 4 amazing founders and they're really amazing people and they're really amazing references. And I've gone this— they've, they've gone on this journey with me as well. And so when you think about it, I don't think of it too much of like, oh man, this is such a bad day for me. It's more of, okay, you know, this was a day. How do I just keep— how do I analyze the day and then think about it at the end of the day? Did I make progress and did I make progress in the way that I wanted to? And if I didn't, What can I do better the next day so that I can change the way my daily habits are or whatever it is so that I can consistently show up every day? I think as a founder and I'm, you know, I'm a solo founder and you're as well. And so the hard, the hard part is like there's no one to hold you accountable except yourself. And I've always benefited from the fact that I'm probably— I'm my harshest critic. In that I always, I'm really, really self-aware. So when I know I'm not showing up when I need to, I'm like, why didn't you do that? Why didn't you put in that same amount of effort? And when you think about why people are successful and why some others aren't, the way I think about it is it's not about showing up and being super motivated every day and saying like, this is, I love it and this is awesome because you're going to have bad days. But it's actually showing up when you have those bad days and showing up with that same amount of effort to say, you know what, I'm like, I've had such a bad low point right now. I've just like, I had a down round, something happened, this company's gonna go under and all that stuff. But then how do you take all of that and still show up and give it your all that day? And so that, that next day you can do the same thing.

I love that note about not only the end of day reflection, but the end of day reflection paired with an unemotional response. And so kind of like once you've dealt with all of it, aggregating those feelings or inputs and then taking a pause, stepping out of the emotions and just reviewing it like, how did that go? How did I show up? This thing happened. It wasn't good or bad. It just happened. What are the lessons? And then how can I change inputs and habits based on the result? Is that— is that process— do you have like a systematic way at the end of the day that you're like journaling or reflecting, or is it just on your walk back home that you're thinking through this stuff?

So I tend to start the days pretty similar. So I'll wake up probably 6:30 to 7, go to the gym, and before I start my day, I'll do a 3 to 5 minute meditation. And I'm a big basketball fan, so I remember Kobe saying this, which is every day he would start off just by meditating. But the idea of that meditation was so that he could go and figure out how do I go and attack the day. Don't let the day come to you. Actually go and figure out how do I want to spend my time today. And so typically in the morning, I'll actually time box my entire day. And I'll say, this is actually what I want to accomplish. I have a window here. This is what I want to accomplish during this window. And that's really helped me be maniacal on like how I'm spending my time. That's the hardest part of actually, for anybody. It's how do you spend every day? And how do you make sure that you're spending it in the right way? And so at the end of the day, I'll— I won't— I don't— I probably should journal. I would actually love to start journaling, and it's actually something I've been meaning to do, but baby steps, because I've only started adopting meditation as well. So, you know, you gotta do one thing at a time. And but at the end of the day, I'll tend to just kind of sit in bed for a bit and just reflect on, okay, how was today? How did today go? Did it go the way I thought it went? Um, did I spend the time? Uh, did I accomplish what I wanted to? And if I didn't, why didn't I? And why am I letting that consistently being pushed to the next day or the next day or the next day? So really holding yourself accountable and just having an honest self-reflection at the end of the day, I felt was really helpful.

I have a question that's a little bit outside of this topic, but I'm curious, what do you use as your source of information inflow?

Oh, good question.

Like, especially as it relates on like staying on top of the ecosystem, the landscape, like, are you all over Twitter? Are you reading certain news publications? I'm curious what you use specifically in commerce.

Yeah, specifically in commerce, I, what I tend to use quite a bit is truthfully just conversations. So when I think about how I, uh, when I think about who I want to talk to in a given week. It's probably 1/3 founders, 1/3 potential LPs, and 1/3 customer network or brands and retailers. And why do I, like, I, again, going back to why do people like not spend more time talking to customers? You should, because that's where you learn the most, because they're the folks who are actually using the software. I'm not gonna go and, you know, create my own storefront, right? And sell widgets. So I need someone else to really tell me, Hey, this is a massive pain point. I've been using all these different disparate solutions and I've been looking for something that could actually aggregate it all so I don't have to go and, you know, make sure that I've paid for all of them. And, you know, some of them work, some don't work, and I have to kind of put one in, put one out. And so I, I, I tend to, in terms of like my information of what's going on in the actual ecosystem, is really talking to people who are living it daily versus necessarily going on the Twitterverse and hearing everybody talk about, you know, ads are going up or excess inventory is a big problem or, you know, I'm having a hard time, you know, there's too many, there's too much competition in, in Shopify app ecosystem. So I tend to really just focus on the customers and listening to them. And that really helps guide where I should be spending my time.

God, my co-founder would love him. My technical co-founder who only talks to customers all day.

I think that's, that's the best way. And like, that's actually who you want to talk to, right? It's not the, the talking heads on LinkedIn and Twitter saying like, hey, this is my opinion. And I, you know, I do admire some of them. Like some of them are really, really great content writers. And I actually do get a lot from their analysis of Amazon or Walmart or Target and what's happened with some of these bigger CPG companies. And I'm like, oh, that's really interesting data points. But for me, really focusing on the early stage, I think that's the best way to be in the flow and understanding who's, who's solving what and what's actually worth solving for. So because to your point earlier, there's a lot of features in the even just in the Shopify app ecosystem itself. And I think nothing in the Shopify app ecosystem today is going to be truly sacred forever. And when I say that, I mean, if you're doing something really meaningful, Eventually there's going to be a bunch of other copycats, right? And then it's really, okay, how do you truly differentiate yourself? Is it by slowly moving upmarket and getting out of the— or diversifying out of the Shopify ecosystem? What's that? What's that competitive advantage that you can compound over long periods of time?

I love it. Last question and then we've got to wrap. If or when Broadway is successful and you've raised your 4th or 5th fund, what does this look like in 10 years if everything goes according to plan?

If everything goes according to plan, um, what I don't want to create is the next Sequoia or next Andreessen. What I really want to build is the next Altos, the next Union Square Ventures. And when I— what I mean by that is just folks who are truly focused on early stage. They're not focused on like AUM gathering and building multiple products. They're just really focused on doing one thing and doing it really, really well. And ultimately doing it with 3 or 4 other equal partners that we all enjoy each other's time. We admire each other. We want to show up for each other. And the reason being is that I want to have this ethos of it's not the, I did this deal, you did this deal, it didn't go well. It's we all did this. And it's the we mentality of when we win, we all win. When we lose, we all lose. And so it's not your deal, it's not my deal, it's our deal. And I would love to really build a firm that has and exemplifies that level of teamwork and unity where we all just want to win together. And if you actually look at who you spend time with throughout your life and you look at any of the time charts you spent, uh, as soon as you graduate from high school and, and you move out, uh, presumably you will have spent like 90% of your time with your parents, right? That's, that's kind of jarring for a lot of people. But if you think about who you spend time with most consistently throughout your life, it's the people you work with.

Yep.

And I'm sure you've, you have friends and you've heard of other people who just show up and they complain about their jobs every day. They're just like, I do not like what I do. I don't like who I work with. And again, going back to the scarcest resource that you have, it's your time. And to make the decision that you want to spend your time that way, you want to spend your life that way, I think that's actually the greatest sin to commit. And so I would love to go and create a firm with 3 to 4 other people that I just admire the hell out of and that we just enjoy doing what we do and we have fun doing it. And yeah, we all want to be super successful doing it. But at the end of the day, it's a, it's a we culture, not an I culture that I want to create.

I love that. That's a great place to wrap. Can you talk to that camera, tell people where they can find you and Broadway?

Yeah, you can find me on LinkedIn, or you can go on BroadwayVP.com and reach out anytime. Really excited. Thank you both for having me on this podcast, and hopefully you'll see more of me.

Yeah, that was a fantastic first appearance. I think you got to do more of these.

I appreciate it. You're too kind.

That was awesome.

Thank you, man.

Thank you.