Delian Asparouhov of Varda Space Industries – Lean into Your Superpowers

This was a really large investment. I think you ended up investing. You were the lead investor in the round. I'm not sure if this was at Khosla or Founders Fund and you invested five million out of a seven and a half million dollar round. So it took up two thirds of the round. The first question I'm curious about is how do you think about position sizing and when do you know that you really want to lean in? And obviously so much of that now is like you're competing for that position size. I'm sure it's probably different for Founders Fund than it is for angels and smaller investors like myself. But just on position sizing, any thoughts, anything you've learned, anything you've absorbed there?

Yeah.

In comparison to, let's say most investors, I think it's important to just recognize what your superpower is and where to lean into versus not my superpower is I'm quite technical. I really like building things and I think I've got a pretty good taste for people that are builders. And in particular I think the areas where I tend to have a lot of success is when the builders are good product builders more so than they are great sales and marketing company builders or like sales and marketing engine builders. There's been several examples in my portfolio where I have invested in a company that has been an underdog in a market. Let's say maybe the most prominent example right now like is like Brex versus Ramp but believed in the founders of the company because I believe that their ability to build product was much greater than anything on the market. And even Sword versus Hinge Health is sort of that same thesis where like there was a well funded competitor that already existed in the market but didn't believe that they had the right product building culture versus really felt like Virgilio and the team at Sword were building a superior product that in the short term would allow them to win but also in the long term having a superior product building culture would allow them to win. And so I think I'm much better at assessing that as opposed to like I am not the like greatest IRR calculator. Analytical. Here's how other people are investing versus how we should be investing. In some ways I'm not actively disinterested, but in some ways I think you should lean into your superpowers and rely on others for other aspects of it. So I'd say I typically tend to be relatively binary in that once I get super excited about a founder and a particular market, I basically want to just put in as much money as possible and as often as possible, as long as the company is continuing, continue to do well. And if anything, I rely on other members of my team to be like, dallian. Well, this one's like, you know, kind of little too crazy risky. I tend to think of it more of like I want to put in as much as possible relative to just how many dollars at risk am I willing to put? Has this person effectively proven before that they know how to deploy a million? In which case, if they haven't, probably just start with a million. If they've already proven how to do a million, probably go up to 10 million. If they've proven 10 million, like 100. And I think they tend to think scales up in orders of magnitude. And so Virgilio, and with that, you know, round, it was like they had previously raised 4 million total. They relatively productively spent it. And so I was like, okay, you know, seems reasonable to double that. Just give them a $7.5 million round and try to take up as much as possible. Just had to give up some for Parada. So I can't claim I have some super smart intellectual framework for how to determine the exact amount. I think my better framework is around just assessing Virgilia as a founder and assessing the product, which largely came to like, I actually just did physical therapy with the Hinge health product and with the Sword health product to determine the differential between the two.