Chad Byers | The Life Story Behind Robinhood’s Earliest Investor

Talk us a series of events.

Why butcher My firm belief growing up and my still belief in the culture of SUSE is we are secondary to entrepreneurs. Entrepreneurs are the star of the show. Any success we have is because of them, not because of us. And like that's very core to what we believe. And I fundamentally believe that. Where do you see the next couple of decades going? I really believe every person on earth has like a way to have max impact. And the question I always ask if you really interrogated your life today, like do you actually think you're on that path? And if you're not, why are you not trying to change that?

Touch a bit more on your successes and failures at SUSE.

In November of 2013 I found Canva. So I DM'd Melanie on LinkedIn and she responded and she said thanks so much for reaching out. We're actually not raising. I was like oh she's going to just ping me when she raises. She never reached out. And that was probably a hundreds of million dollar mistakes. I think it's a $30 billion company that I can't even imagine what an Australian seed price was in 2013.

Talk a little bit more about SUSE now. You guys raised a new fund.

We got, you know, really lucky. One of my first meetings as a as a VC where SUSE stood up was actually I flew out here to meet Vladim Baiju on Sand Hill and they showed a early version of the Robinhood app. I really believe they've built one of the most impressive companies the last decade and that will be a hundreds of billion dollar company.

What's the unique story only you can tell?

I thought I already told some. Now you're making me tell more. You know.

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Yeah, I think to understand my childhood, I think you want to understand a bit about family. I think that's like roots who we are as people. So on my mom's side, my very formative experience was my grandfather. So my mom's dad, he was a lifelong educator, school principal, superintendent, ran part of the U.S. military School. So like, and he was a military person himself. So discipline rules, education is like important. And my mom is one of the most kind of high EQ people I've ever met and I think anyone in our community would, would say that she's probably the most personable person they've ever interacted with. So like that's on one side. On the other side I get a lot of my inspiration for what I do today. So my dad's family was from Atlanta, Georgia. So he grew up in the south and his dad worked for a telco that essentially became through a series of acquisitions at AND T. And their mom passed away, my grandma when they were young. So it was a life raised by their grandma. Grandfather on that side was working a lot. Not exactly an easy childhood. Growing up in Atlanta, my dad had very bad vision so he was often called Four Eyes. It was like Foley. When he was 13 he was running through a peach forest and actually poked his eyeball out. He's blind in one eye, which most people don't really know. And all that led him to saying like I need, you know, he went to Georgia Tech, studied Double E and he's like I need to get out of here. And so came to the west coast for Stanford Business School and was in the 70s. And he's the first to admit the importance of luck in life because he fell into Silicon Valley at a moment when we were laying like the infrastructure for what is now Silicon Valley from a hardware perspective and chips and silicon and stuff and by accident fell into the venture business right through what was the early people like Arthur Rock and folks like that of the day. And you know, fast forward to today. He helped start Connor Perkins. Like he's had an amazing career. What's interesting is he's known in venture for biotech. He studied Double E. He studied nothing related to biotech, healthcare, anything. He's fully self taught. Um, and I think the core lessons, in only in retrospect do you ever realize these things when you're a kid, your world is your town, it's your high school. You don't have that perspective. And I think looking back, the things I got were primarily like one, in our household, there was a reverence for founders and entrepreneurs, like they were the most important people in the world. The second was like a serious amount of humility that luck plays a huge role in anyone's life and you can put in hard work and you can do all these things to magnify luck, but like, end of the day there's a ton of chance, right? And so always have humility in whatever you do. And then the third was honesty. And so that sounds obvious, but I think, like, when you see people that truly live that to their core, in moments where like, it's easy to do a white lie or other, it's really impactful. And so he's been a huge inspiration. So I had both those sides of the family, interestingly enough, also on my dad's side, out of that, like, tough childhood. He had two other brothers. One became a leading professor at Berkeley and Stanford in entrepreneurship and runs the Mayfield Fellows, which is a big program for entrepreneurs at Stanford. And the other brother started an engineering company, Atlanta, when he was 22, that he ran for 50 years and hired hundreds of people. So it's like they for some reason pushed each other and all believed in this, like, spirit of entrepreneurship. They all did it in interesting ways. One was a founder, one was an investor, one was a teacher. Yeah, of entrepreneurs. So this is like what I grew up around and the stories I grew up around. And so for me, I think I wanted to be an entrepreneur. Like, growing up in a household where that is the North Star, you naturally want to do that. So when I was little, you know, I don't even remember these stories, but, like, even when I was 6, 7, 8, my parents said I would always try to, like, set up businesses in the house and like, sell them shit. And then like, most kids are like, oh, here's my painting. I was like, you have to buy my painting. Like, this is a trade. Um, that in my early teens, I started cutting mistletoe out of the trees in our neighborhood, which is literally a fungus that we all celebrate and kiss under for some reason. And we would wrap string around and we'd sell it at the local grocery store. Um, when I was 13 or 14. Ebay was getting going and it just. I think we're close to getting PayPal. Like payments are starting to get built in. And I was obsessed with collecting things. I collected international money, Beanie Babies, all sorts of stuff. And so I started flipping Beanie Babies on ebay and I would order my shipments a year in advance from a friend at camp who was from China. And my biggest, this is a funny story. Like the biggest load I got was these purple elephants. At the time was the most valuable one. And I got this huge stock from him and I sold them on ebay. It was like $5,000, which as a 14 year old in what is like early 2000 is like all the money in the world. I couldn't imagine more money. And the receiver got them and we got an email. They're like, these are all fake. Like there's these things on the tag that's obvious. These aren't real. And I was like, didn't know what counterfeiting was. I was like, this fucking sucks. You know, after you ship them all back. So they ship them all back. UPS loses the package. And unbeknownst to me, my parents put a insurance on the package. So UPS cut us a check for the value of the goods. So we actually got five grand from UPS for these fake Beanie Babies. And I was like, this is incredible. Cause that was like, you know, another early entrepreneur endeavor. And then I went on to do some stuff in the later, you know, years in my 20s that we can talk about. But like, in short, my childhood was very impacted by these two pillars of my family and was heavily, just like a pursuit of wanting to like, do things in the world and start things and kind of be commercial was always my interest. Was there ever anything to put a chip on your shoulder? I mean, like, look like, let's be honest, any success I have will be relatively unimpressive given my childhood situation in terms of like being born and raised from around here. But I think the chip on the shoulder was like, despite that wanting to still do awesome shit in the world, like, that has always felt very real. Coupled with that. Like, I have one brother and he's my best friend in life. We hang out multiple times a week still. We sleep each other's houses and we're in our late 30s. You know, our families are really close today, but we're also super competitive, right? And you know, he had, he is absolutely brilliant. He's had an incredible career. PhD at Stanford, graduated early in bioengineering. He's now Starting a new longevity company. Was a general partner at Google Ventures for a decade. I mean, like, it's like a hard career to try to match. And so I think there's like a serious amount of competitiveness that actually drives us both. At the end of the day, we know that family's more important, our relationship is more important. But, like, in a healthy way, we absolutely grind each other. And so to the extent there is a chip, like, I think it comes from those things. And like, and, and, and honestly, like, my motivation comes from internal at the end of the day, which is like, I'm a highly competitive person. I like moving numbers, I like being competitive myself. And that's most of what's driven my career is an internal pursuit of doing things that I deem to be worthwhile.

Are there any stories when you were younger competing with your brother as well back then?

So our primary way of competing as kids is I was in sports, he was not, so we couldn't compete on that. And I was larger than him by age 11. He's my older brother. So physical fighting got very boring, very ugly. So our battlefield was video games, which we both loved and still love. We still play, which is probably gonna have to change. We played Dota 2 a lot together is the main game. This is like a old person. League of Legends is the way I think about it. We grew up playing Starcraft, Warcraft, those type of games. And so video games is where we competed. And it hurts me to. It pains me to say this, but, like, I do think he's probably just like slightly net better at video games than I am, which is really frustrating to say out loud. But, you know, we battle on video games for like 30 years now, probably really young. There's one funny, we were also on the same team at moments because, you know, the narrative today around like kids using technology is different than back then, but it was already starting, right? And parents didn't love you spending 10 hours on a Saturday in a screen. Although again, it's. It's different today, but it was starting back then and we had had this computer lab set up in our house where we would game. And our parents are always trying to shut us down, make sure we were working. So my brother was always into hardware and he was built. He was kind of the kid who was building kit computers and stuff as a kid. So he found, I think it Fry's electronics, which, you know, this is back when we all went to retail stores to buy stuff. He found the smallest camera you could find and we Ran a cable along the wall of our TV room under the rug, and we set it up pointing down the hallway to where our parents would have to enter the room. And we had it project to a screen underneath our gaming computers so we could game. And right when we saw them entering, we would control alt, open up a word doc and start typing. And so we would just game like the majority of weekdays and anytime we were getting caught, we would just like switch to word docs and pretend we were writing essays. So like, we were also on the same team, often on scheming.

And so. And so you went from there and then how'd you end up going to college and you know, figuring out what you wanted to study in?

Yeah, I was pretty bad at school. I. In high school. Like my, I have, I have like pretty, usually pretty bad AED scatter brain. Can't stay on topic. I was terrible test taker. I was always, you know, as I said, like, would prefer to work for stuff and build things. And so I was like, you know, like, college is important. I obviously know that. I know education is important, but I want to go somewhere where like, it's primarily going to be, I'll enjoy my life, I'll meet great people. And for me, what I. My passion in life growing up was sports and the outdoors. I thought I wanted to be a park ranger. That's literally one of the jobs I had on my potential list. And so I went to University of Colorado primarily to go to ski because skiing is my favorite thing to do and that's the best place in the country to do it. You know, party school, skiing. And then they have a good environmental science program, which again, I thought I wanted to go pursue that stuff. And a lot of their courses are actually in the field. You go into the Rockies and you had all sorts of weird classes or I'm like, oh, how was your college? And my friends were like, oh, it's going great and whatever. I'm like, yeah, I was catching squirrels in bags and tagging their ears. Like, that was literally some of my college, my college courses. So I did four years of Colorado. I loved it. It was the best time of my life. Still some amazing friends. And then, you know, I, I honestly saying I like learned almost nothing, probably that was like, useful to today, but true to myself, I just like stopped going to school senior year and I was working for a local startup in Boulder and this company was called East Worm. It is since long, long gone. But it was, it was inverse Groupon before Groupon. Like, it was a couple years before and they almost had the model right, but it was the wrong order. So E Swarm was like if I wanted a digital camera I would post on Eswarm that I want this camera. And let's say it retailed at a hundred. I would say I want it for 80 and I would go get people around the Internet to say I also want the camera for 80. And then what the site would do is if they got 400 people they would go negotiate directly with the manufacturer a whole discount. So it was inverse Groupon where you needed the demand before you had the deal. Where Groupon was just like, let's just go get a deal and know that we can fill it.

Yeah.

So they were almost there and they had a bunch of products tip and they did a bunch, you know and they like kind of got some revenue. And I was working there total like bitrol like I was true coffee getter, cold calls, whatever. But I would go 7am on school days, totally deprived school senior year. And it was like an incredible experience. Learned a ton and you know, graduated. See you move back to the bay immediately. This is 2009 in which I think SF back then was like glory days. Like it was amazing. It's fun to think about the companies that were starting right around then, like now, right. So Uber was not shortly thereafter. Like a lot of these generational companies were starting in and around next because it was just after the financial crisis. So it was an amazing time to be in San Francisco in my opinion. And then I, you know, started the, the rest of my career from there. When did you hit that inflection point of going from park ranger to I

want to join a startup, I'm not

going to my classes. I think the taste of that company versus like what my classes felt like, which is I was intellectually interested in the outdoors, in the environment. And I realized it was, it could always be a hobby. But professionally what I experienced at that company I was like this is what I felt as a kid when I was doing things that I loved, which was like putting my own energy into something and like moving a number, moving a needle, doing like seeing an output that's very, very real. That was the inflection. And so after school went to mentors, you know, what should I do? They're like go get work experience. And so I work worked for a venture backed company which like was all accounts at great companies called Silver Spring Networks Venture back they built, they were in the early like Cleantech 1.0 era. So they were building Smart meters, which allows, like, PG and E was the largest customer, allowed PGE to read your electric meter data every 15 minutes when they used to literally send someone to, like, visually look at your meter and write it down. It's crazy to think about. It's, like, a really good company at its core. As a networking company, we built chips and we built stuff over Zigbee protocols. We built access points and neighborhoods to pull back all that data. Like, it's a really interesting company. Ended up ipoing. But I just, like, realized I hated working for people. Like, what I felt as a kid, which I loved. I was like, okay, I get, like, this is cool, but, like, I can't stand the structure of this. I can't stand reporting to people. I can't stand doing work that is just to please, like, someone, even though it doesn't actually move the business forward. Like, that, to me, just felt so dumb.

Yeah.

And so shortly thereafter, and this was when I was 24, I left to now start suse. So, like, my entire life has been just suse, you know, on a. On a professional level. Um, and so my. My. My working career before this was, like, relatively short.

You touch a bit on the. The Nerd Glaze story, the Daily Trend bit of that.

I left Silver spring in about 2012, and I moved to New York City on a whim. I was like, I'm. I'm from the Bay. I live in the Bay. I need to get out of here. I need to go try something else. And so packed up the car, and I just did a road trip from California to New York City and got to New York two months later. As I said, I like skiing. I did it during the winter. So I skied my way across, hit, like, 15 ski resorts. It was a great, great period of life. Early 20s, like a fun adventure. Got to New York, and early on, I went to the taping of the Daily show with Jon Stewart. And his guest at the Daily show was Peter Dinklage from the Game of Thrones. And they were talking about, like, binging on too much nerd content. And Jon Stewart said, that's called Nerd Glaze when you binge. And then he, on a whim, just goes, if someone doesn't own nerdglaze.com they should. Like, the whole crowd laughed or whatever. So we go to dinner after with some friends that I went to the show with, and we're all sitting there, and I was like, oh, that part was really funny. And then I was thinking about the show, and I'M like, this is not a live show. This is a fully taped show. And he said, like a domain on tv. That's really interesting. So I went on. I think it was hover.com, like the web, whatever bought the URL at dinner, went home immediately. Like, we just like paid the bill, rushed home with a buddy of mine, and we stood up a webpage that like, it's probably technically illegal, but like, just put the face of the guy from Game of Thrones on the website. Just like totally made shit up. And we just said big things coming with like an email submit bar and that was it. And like a little call to action up at the top that was like, if you want to be involved, even though we had no plan of what the thing was, reach out. Like, that was the whole site set up Google Analytics on it. We stayed up that night as it went live. East Coast, Central, west coast, Tens of thousands of page views. Cause I mean, you literally watching the show, they say a domain, like you're gonna probably just type it in, right? Tens of thousands of page views, tens of thousands of email submits. Like, people just drop their emails in. They're like. And then people would send us emails. We set up like nerd glazmail.com so we have time to like, get the domain set up on the email. And over the course of the next year, my buddy and I through chatting with a lot of friends, just kind of built like a mini. I don't know the right term, probably like a barstool. Sports for nerd content. So think of like a content site that looks Reddit ish. Although we were using all these like WordPress plugins or templates at the time. We had anime, movies, video games, all sorts of content. We had writers, a decentralized group of writers writing free content around the us, all on this like, accidental moment of the Daily Show. And it was awesome. And like an article of ours would go viral on Reddit and it would take down our site and we'd try to figure out how to. And like, I didn't know that much about all this, right? So it's all just like learning in the moment. We ended up kind of like micro selling that to a content farm in the Midwest when I realized, like, this is taking up way too much of my time and this is like, not my future career, because halfway into that journey, we had just done the early start of suse. So I was like, I can't. I can't do both of these. And like, suse is clearly what I want to go work on. But it was, like, it was a great moment in. You never know where, like, entrepreneurial sparks or moments will come from, and you just, like, jump on opportunities if you see them. And it evolved into, like, such a fun project, like, late nights with, like, a small team of friends that I really loved working on stuff that was a blast. And, like, you know, we binged all the content that people would write, and it was awesome.

Can you give us maybe two intros to contrast a description of yourself out of college and then how. How you describe yourself now?

I was pretty, like, insecure and scared freshman year. I mean, CU is like, 30,000 kids from all over the country. Um, I looked 12 entering. Like, I'm 38. If you look at me now, like, imagine what I looked like at 18. I looked like a kid. I was pretty insecure. I was pretty scared in that environment. There were people that looked way older than me, that seemed way more mature than me, seemed way cooler than me. And, like, I think what I did not pursue and see you as this huge frat life. I didn't. Did no Greek life.

Yeah.

I found, like, five core friends that love mountain biking, rock climbing, and skiing. And, like, that's what we did. And we built our own track at CU that was probably very different than the average person, but that was, like, my style, and I was super happy doing that. So, you know, if I were to categorize myself, then it was like a sports loving, trying to figure out who I wanted to be and what I wanted to do in the world with a small group of friends. And. And I found people at cu, like, the thing about CU in these big state schools that people get wrong is people assume that there's, like, no smart people there. And the truth is that, like, big state schools have really smart people there. It's just that you have to find them. Like, that's the truth. And they're there for various reasons. Like, a lot of the smartest kids at CU were from Colorado, and, like, that was just their default path of where to go. Right. And maybe they didn't even know about the SAT or didn't know how to prep or didn't have tutors or didn't know how to apply to the play the game. But there's brilliant people there. So those are my friends. I think the me in my early 20s, like, had really clear vision, and I had developed by then, like, knowing what I wanted to do with conviction. And it was, like, to start a business and to start A business that could be important, it could be big. And that, like, we can talk about the series of things that led into deciding to a venture fund as a business as opposed to a product company. But, you know, that's what I had conviction on. And that, like, helped lead me to doing, you know, what I still do today.

Maybe talk us a series of events. Why?

Why?

Butcher. Yeah.

So after Silver Spring, I started angel investing. Small amounts of money. It IPO'd at the time I thought was a monster IPO, but this was like a Series C of an AI company. Today, the market cap was like 700 million and 700 million on like 250, like 200 million a Rover. It was like, you're like, wow. It's like. I was like, this is crazy. This company is huge. And like, really, how times change. I started angel investing in friends, and I'd always known about venture, obviously from that unique upbringing. And I'd always been really curious about. I always had this admiration for founders and entrepreneurs, and I didn't think I wanted to do it because, you know, I'd grown up around it. But I know my dad loved it. Like, he loved his job. He worked his ass off. He was. And I really, when we were really young, he was not around much. He was grinding, he was building his stuff. In our, you know, early teenage years, he made a really switch where he's like, I'm gonna be home for dinner every night. He was home every night. But, like, I saw him love his job. So that was very interesting. When I started angel investing into a lot of friends and people I was meeting, I was going like, I was just trying to hustle. I was. I cold emailed, like, Chris Dixon and David Tisch. At the time, he was running, I think, Hunch or something in New York. David, Chris was. And Tish was running techstars, like, cold email them. And I was like, just trying to hustle my way into, like, the New York tech ecosystem. I was going to, like, the TechCrunch, you know, disrupt events. And there was, you know, like. Like, people don't realize New York 2012 startup land was tiny. Like, you could truly meet everyone with a series of 20 emails.

It felt like, what did you ask them? You were asking, learn, work for them. What was the ask?

I was asking probably a bunch of dumb questions, but just basic questions like, how do you evaluate founders? And asking them about successful startups they'd invested in. The fact that Chris even responded was amazing. I asked him about building his own companies, right? So, like, at and they probably felt like dumb questions to them, but I was just like sponging at the time. And so, so what I was getting at, I was like, I experienced investing, angel investing, and I just was like, this is incredible. I'm working on multiple companies at once with people I admire on interesting projects. I get to kind of use my ADD scatterbrain to constantly context switch and do whatever is the most important thing that day. It's like, this is amazing. I think I want to do this as the company as opposed to something else. And so I've always viewed suse and I know a lot of people say this, but I've really, internally, internally felt this, which is like, I enjoy building our business, the business of our fund, as much as I enjoy investing. And I spend half my day roughly building the firm. So fundraising and people and culture and strategy and all those things. Same way any company, as much as they do investing and the. The desire to do a venture fund really came from three areas like that. I've always believed I talked about one of them in childhood, which is like a career built on, on honesty. And what I love about the venture business and the entrepreneurial kind of pursuit of building great companies on honesty is like, you cannot just be a cheerleader. You need to be as armistice as possible, even if it's negative, even if it's whatever. And like, over time, you just build enough goodwill that people assume you have good intention. And, like, that is the win scenario. I think professionally overall. The second is you build everything with humility. Like, my firm belief growing up and my still belief in the culture of suse is we are secondary to entrepreneurs. Entrepreneurs are the star of the show. Any success we have is because of them, not because of us. And like, that's very core to what we believe. And I fundamentally believe that everything we do here, any success we have, has to be done through the humility of knowing that, like, it's entrepreneurs that really move the world forward and we are like the supporting cast. And then the third is just like, empathy for that journey. So building a company is hard. You grind your life, you grind your own health down like it is. You sacrifice social relationships, like, to do it at the very best. And we've now seen that at this firm been lucky to be front receipts to many great companies. Like, it is really hard. And everyone's talked about that, and that's obviously a known statement, but like you, when you see it firsthand, it's really hard. And so having empathy for that journey and like Those are the three pillars I wanted to build a career on. And venture is like, perfect for those three. I've always kind of liked supporting fast. All the sports I love outside of skiing were team sports. I love being in those, like, supporting roles. I just always love that. It's like very core to what I. What I've always wanted to do. You mentioned you're 38. Where do you see the next couple decades going? There's stuff I know for sure and then there's stuff I don't know, but I don't know for specific reasons, which is like, I think you should always evolve yourself. The market changes. You have to change with it in. In strategy and what you do, like, think about every person. I really believe every person on there has like a way to have max impact. And you could define impact actually however you want. Right. That's up to your own decision and that's important. And the question I always ask, like, friends, peers, whoever, I'm like, if you really interrogated your life today, like, do you actually think you're on that path? And if you're not, why are you not trying to change that? And so if the world changes and it does, and technology changes and it does, and your community changes and your scenario changes and your life position changes and the risks you can take and the amount of capital you have to take, risk changes. Like, you should change. So I will decide what I should be doing and if I'm on that path every year. So that's why, like, I don't know for sure. What I do know for sure is I will be investing in companies in the same way I do today, which is primarily early stage, which is what I love. And that's why we do what we do. We can talk more about what SUSE does. I'm investing with people I admire, which is like I've done for 12 years. And I admire, like, I know I'll keep doing that and I'll invest in technology because technology is like my passion. So, like, I know those three things will be the same and then what other shapes and forms happen is still TBD to me. SUSE will always be part of what I do. And it will, similar to a person, need to evolve with the market and like the best firms and the best businesses all do evolve. But those things I know will be consistent and constant because it's just, it's. It's what I love.

Can you touch a bit more on your successes and failures at suse? One being Robinhood, one being Canva Goldie. Among them quite early.

We started SUSE in, in November of 2013. I was living in New York. I was like, okay, we started the business. What's my job? My job is finding startups. I'm gonna find startups. So I would go to all these events as I talked about and I'd also like just like live on the Internet, plan Internet. And I found Canva short within that first year. I think they had must have just launched or something as a tool and it was like obviously very different than the tool today. But I very quickly saw that this is interesting. This is like kind of like in a browser. It's not as like heavy handed as like an Adobe. It feels more, you know, easier to use for the average user. I could see applications in like hardcore like real design. But also if I want make a menu for a dinner party I'm having like this is really interesting, this is powerful but oh shit, this company's based in Australia. I'm not going to like fly down there. So I DM'd Melanie on LinkedIn and she responded, which I was like surprised about. First of all because I think LinkedIn was probably way less noisy in 2013 as it is now. Like people probably don't respond to many DMs anymore. And she said thanks so much for reaching out. We're actually not raising. I was like oh great, she's gonna, she's gonna just ping me when she raises. Like this job is super easy. You know, like I reach out, they tell me when they're raising great. She never reached out. Not her fault. That's just exactly what happens in the world when people get busy and have more options. And that was like hardcore. Lesson number one. It is your responsibility in life whether you're a venture capitalist or frankly any job. Like you have to do the follow up, no one's gonna do it up for you. And that was probably a hundreds of million dollar mistake. Like if you just run the mass. I think it's a $30 billion company. I can't even imagine what an Australian seed price was in 2013. But like I bet it was low. So that was you know, brutal. And it gets more brutal every year that goes by as the success of that company is so incredible and kudos to them. On the flip side like we got, you know, really lucky. One of my first meetings as a, as a vc Wasusa stood up was actually I flew out here to meet Vladim Baiju on Sandhill Road and they showed a early version of the Robinhood app Which is really amazing because like you couldn't trade a stock. They didn't have the broker dealer license yet. But the UI UX was shockingly similar. It is today in 2013. Like early 14 iPhone apps, like it's hard to think back but just go to Wayback Machine or whatever on the Internet and look at the design of apps back then, let's just say it's not what they are today. It was the most beautiful thing I'd ever seen in a mobile app like by far and away. And so it was an insight on like how brilliant they were on product and design. Couple that with the fact that I was the demographic, So I was 24, 25. They were talking about how the E trades and interactive brokers and that you know, wave 10 of online brokerages didn't speak to us as a user. And I was like 100% that. None of those brands feel relevant to me. None of those brands feel relevant to my friends. We're going to change the way you know, this generation thinks about investing, thinks about using products and that just made so much sense to me and so we're lucky to make an investment there in the early round and be part of that. And I think like what I've said both publicly and privately before is like they were just really good, you know, like people, you as a humans, you want to feel useful. And I think one of the important things in venture is like knowing when to, to be more involved and when not to. And like we were probably helpful around the edges but the company worked so well and yes they went through lots of times but they executed so well. One other data point I find that's really fascinating about them is startups get invited, especially successful ones to lots of things. This, this, you know, press event, this conference, this retreat, this, whatever. Those guys didn't go to any of those. Like they truly just focus on company building. They didn't get caught up in like I also want to be an angel investor much. Like they were truly really focused and like as I said before, like all humility with this business, 100% of the credit of that entire thing goes to Vladimir and the team. Like it was incredible execution. And I think, you know, I said this on, on Twitter a couple months ago, like I really believe they've built one of the most impressive companies the last decade and that will be a hundreds of billion dollar company in its terminal value. Like they're going to continue to ship great new products for an existing customer break that will compound with time whose Assets will grow on the platform. It will just be a juggernaut of a business over long haul and will compound forever. And like getting to be so luckily part of one of those from the seed is, is incredible. And like in a way my entire goal in life is like professionally is like I'm just trying to find more of those and it's really hard. They're so rare. Right. And so back to your question. Like losses and misses. Like I've definitely missed way more than we've hit things but like you learn from all those and it some companies fail for good reasons and some for bad. You know, we've seen everything now in 12 years I've seen founders break up and fall apart and the company falls apart. I've seen fraud in a port in a company or portfolio and I've seen like nothing to the fault of the team. But like market dynamics or all these things that are out of your control can totally tank a company. And so it gets back to like what we actually started a whole conversation with is like there's incredible amount of things outside of your control. So you can only control what you can. And you have to get some breaks along the way. Right.

Talk a little bit more about suse. Now. You guys raised a new fund?

Yeah. So we will have, you know, recently announced SUSE 5 and it's 175 million for just seed stage. And I think that makes us the largest, if not one of the largest seed only funds in the US and the nuance there is really important which is like a lot of early stage funds have opportunity funds, they have multiple strategies, they have whatever. SUSE has gone back to a core seed fund as our, as our main business. So that is pre seed and seed that is across categories, but primarily software. We're mostly leading or co leading these days. And so in a lot of ways we actually are doing what we did in 2013. We're doing seed again. We have the exact same size portfolio, we happen to write larger checks and are more meaningful in those rounds. But the core business of what we try to do and like the founders we serve and the stage of business is actually the same. And I gotta love that because the world is big, it's complicated and you have to pick a craft that you can try to be the best in the world at. One of my mentors early on gave me advice that like the reason to be the best in the world at something is not that you're the best in the world at it. Although that's a nice Thing it's that when you're the best in the world at something, you interact with the people that are the best in the world at what they do. And that's what makes life so compelling. And it's true the best people, like the best in the world of tech, hang out the best in the world world and acting and hang the best in the world with sports and like those communities interact and like that makes life really rich. And so I've always found like that's an interesting motivator but also like choose a craft and try to be really great at it. And, and I've chosen to, to choose this part of a venture in a world where venture is obviously going. I call it Buffet Venture Capital, which is like these funds are like gigantic buffets of everything. We're kind of doing like the, the specialized counter move.

What, what drives you now, what excites you, what excites people at suse? And what do you do different than all these other firms apart from capital?

So a couple things still drive me today. One, I like building our firm still. So I like creating a environment where people can build careers. That's really meaningful to me. Two, I like investing in exceptional people and doing everything we can to do right by them. And that is a compounding thing that is really powerful in the world if you stay at that for a very long time. The third is we now work for a set of institutions that I'm really proud of. So in this last fund we switched the entire LP base to US based nonprofits in education or healthcare. And those are things I really, really believe in. And so the capital we make and who we work for is these institutions. And I really do believe in where that capital goes in the world. So that's really meaningful. Those three things like really drive me and give me a lot of purpose.

We have two questions usually like to ask people when we're kind of wrapping up. They're quite hard candidly, so we'll see if we can answer.

Okay.

One is what's the unique story only you can tell?

I mean, I guess this one hasn't been too broadly told, but I mentioned one of my inspirations is my dad. And I actually haven't spoken that publicly about him mostly because he's an extremely private person. But he really is like one of my, my true like mentors and, and people I look up to in the world. And what I find very cool is the. We'll decide if he gets mad at me for telling the story. But the, the, the disease that that impacted his mother. He worked on companies that help develop drugs to treat that in the world.

And are there any causes at the moment that you see just as compelling to then push forward and, you know, support with capital with suse, et cetera.

So my love of healthcare came from, honestly, a lot of him. And at Suse, we probably do 20 to 25% of what we've done is healthcare. And many of the business we've invested in directly impact patient lives. So as an example, like a company called Biz that I help seed is the leading platform in the US for triaging stroke patients using CT scans. And it's like, directionally saved lives. And we know that empirically. So when a stroke patient gets triaged at a tier 2, 3 hospital, there's sometimes not a radiologist there to read the scan so that there's a delay in getting that scan read and triaging that patient to either surgery or IV or other. Other pathways. And VIZ is a software front end that can automatically read an image and start triaging a patient before the human loop verifies that decision. But that time saved is really meaningful for outcomes in stroke. Every 15 minutes, the outcomes seriously degrade. So, like, there's companies in our portfolio that I feel so emotionally, like, meaningful about that. Like, that is kind of like peak career happiness. Like, you really feel like a product changes the world. Sounds super cheesy, but it's so true, like, in a really material way, which is awesome. And that's like over a thousand hospitals now. You know, like real patient lie. Like, it's epic, you know, awesome. So.

And the last question is, there was a book about your life. What would the title be?

I live to out compete you.

I love it, brother.

That's for my brother. Yeah. Actually, it used to be so cheesy to look back on this. That was like my motto in my early 20s. And that was like my Twitter bio for a while or something. It was so cheesy. I, like, I can be miserable to play casual games with at certain levels. Yeah, I think it probably comes from rooted insecurity that I'd probably need to talk to a therapist about. But, like, I really do fucking hate losing.

I love it. That's why SUSA will win.

I hope so.