Gaurav Jain from Afore Capital on Investing in pre-seed companies

Brilliant. I think we're on.

Hi everyone, this is Roy from Rise to Mastery. And today I'm excited to have Gaurav Jain, who's a partner at AFO Venture Capital, which is a $124 million early-stage VC firm. He was a founding product manager at Android Nexus, and he was an investor at Founder Collective, which invested into Cruise Automation, Firebase, and other companies. He done his software engineering from University of Waterloo. and he's done his MBA from Harvard Business School. Welcome to the show, Gaurav Jain.

Thank you so much for having me. It's a pleasure.

Yeah, I mean, you've had an interesting career. You were one of the founding product managers at AndroidXs, and you got into the venture world. What got you interested to be in this world of startups and the VC world?

Yeah. Growing up, I grew up in a small town in India, and my dad was an entrepreneur running a very small business, but it wasn't a startup in the way we define startups these days. It was a manufacturing business, but I was exposed to the world of business, I guess, early on. Frankly, when I went to University of Waterloo for software engineering, I just wanted to be a software engineer. I wanted to write code. I love math, I love computers, and I felt like it was what I wanted to do for the rest of my career. And believe it or not, when I started at Waterloo in 2003, Microsoft was like the company you wanted to work at. Of course, you know, the world changed quite quickly. It became Google and then Facebook, and then now it's, you know, startups are where you want to be, you know, as early as possible in your career. But anyway, I got into startups because, you know, I'd worked at different places, including Research in Motion, now called BlackBerry, back when it was still a cool company in the early 2000s. You know, the company started in Waterloo, or at University of Waterloo, many years ago. Kind of passage for engineers coming out of Waterloo at the time. So I did an internship there. I worked at Amazon in '05, working on search technology. Did a whole bunch of different stints, but really realized a key thing, which was I didn't want a job right away. I wanted to start something, right? That there was just so much innovation happening, so much flux. And I'd worked at BlackBerry, and of course smartphones were taking off, and the internet, you know, and so on and so forth. Saw with e-commerce with Amazon. So with a couple of buddies of mine from University of Waterloo, we ended up starting a company in 2007. And the idea was pretty simple. You know, we, you know, BlackBerry at the time was selling like hotcakes and, you know, these executives and customers wanted to consume more and more rich media content on their phones beyond just email and calendar and so on and so forth. So we basically went to media companies like Time Magazine, CNN Money, and said, hey, we can build your smartphone apps for BlackBerry and then eventually iOS. Android. And that business took off, right place, right time. And that was also my first exposure to venture capital. So it was a venture-backed company. We raised an angel round of $600,000 in summer 2008. I mean, we raised a Series A in 2009. So really got to see what it's like to be on the other side, you know, where as an investor you get to invest in a lot of different companies and get to see them from the ground up. And even that experience then brought me to the Android team. I was an early product manager, as you talked about. But the experience with Polar, that was the name of the company, that was my exposure both to the world of startups, but also venture capital.

Yeah, I mean, I want to talk about more about Polar Mobile, you know, when you looked at the idea of building Polar Mobile, you know, how did you structure your thinking on, you know, what is the problem that you want to solve? Did you look at the market or the idea? What really got you into thinking that you want to do? You know, start solving this problem?

Yeah, for sure. I mean, look, we really started off with the micro, not the macro, and this is what I tell founders, right? Don't, don't look at McKinsey studies on, you know, TAM, or don't read TechCrunch and then try to come up with an idea. I mean, there's some companies that are founders, I'm sure, have done it successfully, but I think you want to start with the micro, which is like a problem that you can solve or an opportunity that you're excited about that you believe if that product existed, you know, there would be people that would find value in it. And then maybe there are, that there's a big market there. And of course you want some conviction that there, if you build this, that there are a non-trivial number of users and that there's adjacencies in the market, but really start off with something small. So in our case, it was, you know, we were carrying BlackBerrys. And if you tried to read a magazine or newspaper or watch a video, it was a pretty terrible experience because BlackBerry always saw themselves as an enterprise product, right? An enterprise, like, you don't want to be watching a video that's considered frivolous, right? So they never invested much in the developer platform, in an app store. The browser experience really sucked. So we said, hey, what if we build a native app? Which I know today sounds like obvious, but, you know, 10+12 years ago, native apps weren't a thing before Apple launched the App Store. So let's build native apps that are custom to these different properties, and it'll be fully branded, and it'll be their content. And if you're a subscriber, you You can now access this content on your phone in a way that's a lot easier to digest. It's a lot more interactive. So that was sort of the idea. That was a lightbulb moment, which is like, okay, yeah, I want to read CNN. I want to read Time magazine on my BlackBerry. Experience today sucks. We think we can do better. Let's go build it. That was it. And of course, over time it evolves. And that's what I look for today as well as an investor is like, help me understand like at a micro level, what is the problem that's exciting you so much? We can talk about the market and stuff, but frankly, I think thinking about market this early, it's completely the wrong exercise.

Interesting. And, you know, you, after Oppo Mobile, you went on to work for Android. You know, how did that opportunity come in and, you know, what got you excited to work in Android at that time?

Yeah, totally. So, you know, I'd worked at BlackBerry, I'd started a company in the smartphone space, which then exposed me to iOS, and then Android was really just starting to kind of grow at that time. So I'd been in mobile and smartphones for a while, and I was really passionate about it, right? As a user myself, I kind of really saw not just in enterprise, which obviously BlackBerry was really taking off, but I think the consumer world that our devices will go from a Motorola Razr or like a handheld phone to eventually be smartphones, right? And of course the iPhone launched in 2007, and you really saw kind of what the touchscreen could do and putting consumers front and center. And then of course the App Store launched in 2008, you really saw this acceleration in adoption, right, of smartphones on the consumer side. So I knew that was, you know, kind of the rising tide, that's where the future was going to be. But Apple, you know, historically has been a fairly expensive product, right, for a whole host of reasons. So which works fine in the US, but you look at— and I grew up in India, in a small town in India, you can't afford a $1,000 device. You know, that's a lot of money. So I thought Android strategy was very interesting, which is you know, bring smartphone and web-enabled phones to like everybody else that's not the 1%, if you may, of the world, right? Which is obviously a very large market. And so I was, you know, Google reached out, you know, Google wanted to really double down on Android. And given my experience with BlackBerry and Polar, you know, they wanted to really bring in folks that have been spending time in the space to help grow market share. So when I joined Android, there were total— less than a total of a million users on Android. And by the time I left, we were getting about a million new users a day. So it really just saw the incredible growth of the Android platform, which I think was sort of this thesis coming to fruition that I talk about, which is there's a lot of people that would love to have a smartphone, can't afford an iPhone, but want similar functionality. There's a whole bunch of other stuff with the Android strategy that worked out well, but I really did believe in sort of the— where the future was going.

Right. And, you know, what were some of the key learnings while building the product? You talked about, you know, you very early into the product with— there were just 1 million users. And, you know, what were some of the processes and, you know, some of the learnings you had while, you know, when— while you were building the product and the user base had gone to 1 million users per day?

Yeah. Definitely a bunch of different learnings. I think one of the learnings that comes to mind is the fact that Android did a good job at having a community that was very excited about it, passionate about Android early on. And that was more the developer community, the more geeky community, if you may, which absolutely despised iOS because it's such a closed ecosystem. It's like really hard to develop on it, really hard to like work with it, versus Android took a very different approach, which means like folks that are tinkerers like absolutely love the platform. That's where it started, which in some ways that was the initial branding of Android was like, "Oh, this is this open source, geeky operating system, not gonna hit mainstream." But of course we took that and eventually kind of broadened the market, target market, right? Found concentric circles of markets that were adjacent to where we started. But I think it's really important to focus on a small but passionate community that loves your product. Don't try to boil the ocean. Don't try to be everything to everybody. It's just really, really hard. Out of the gate, start small and then eventually grow from there and learn from the first community that's willing to give you feedback, willing to iterate with you, and then eventually you kind of scale from there. I think that's one. I think second is the power of go-to-market and adoption. You know, building a great product is only half the story. You've gotta get it in the hands of users, right? And that's, you can't just build a great product and throw it over the fence and, you know, hope they come. Sometimes it works, most times it doesn't. You have to be just as thoughtful and strategic about adoption. And in Android's case, that was about partnerships, right? We knew that we didn't want to build the hardware ourselves. Instead, we wanted to partner with the hardware manufacturers like LG, Samsung, HTC, and so on and so forth, and empower them to take Android and build great experiences for, for, for their customers. And that worked really well. And of course, we aligned our incentives with theirs because they didn't necessarily want to build a smartphone operating system because it's very expensive to build an operating system. But also the developer community is very hard to like attract, right? And developers didn't want to build for Samsung, HTC, LG, and then iOS. That would just be way too much fragmentation. So we saw there's an opportunity to say, okay, what if we build a developer ecosystem, the Google Play Store, right? Standardize the APIs and the SDK, and then, but leave enough for our partners to customize. So Samsung phone, Android phone doesn't look like the HTC phone or the LG phone because they can customize the UI. So it's this perfect balance of like, you know, you get a bunch off the shelf, but then you can customize it enough to make it, make it, make it yours. That worked really well. And of course helped us get a lot of, lot of adoption. And then I think, you know, look at Android, it feels like it was an overnight success story. And look, a bunch of years of work had been put in frankly in Android even before I joined. And then of course, course, you know, when I joined in 2009, that's like 12 years ago. So, you know, a lot has gone into it. A lot of it takes a lot of time. So, you know, you've gotta be persistent. You've gotta, you know, there were ups and downs along the way. It wasn't always up into the right, never is. But if you're willing to put in the time, you're diligent, you have to, you know, you're thinking about from the first principles of perspective, you know, it eventually will work out.

Well, I think sounds like a great story. You know, it's once in a lifetime. Story to work in such a high-growth company. And you know, you moved on to Foundr Collective and you know, you got your first taste into venture capital. You know, what were some of your learnings before you started your own VC fund or what were your learnings with Foundr Collective?

Yeah, there's a bunch of learnings, right. One, I love investing super early, right. I obviously was a founder before, You mentioned about company, and when I left Android, I didn't wanna start something again. I wanted to instead work with a bunch of different companies and help them from kind of the ground floor, and joining a fund like Founder Collective was a perfect fit. And there's a bunch of learnings. You know, one was that, you know, you have to be very thoughtful around capital. Like, you don't wanna over-capitalize the company, right? Especially these days, I think it's very, very much relevant because there's so much capital in the system. It's relatively easy to raise big and big rounds. But I think this focus on first principles, this focus on like putting the customer first, focus on really solving real problems, and capital is a means to an end and not an end in and of itself, I think was really steeped into me at Founder Collective. I think aligning your incentives with the founders, but also doing the right thing by founders. You know, it's easy to say you're founder-friendly. Everybody says that because that's what founders wanna hear. But truly when like, when you're on the opposite side for whatever reason, right? Which happens sometimes, right? Shooting it, you know, on terms or, you know, exits and so on and so forth, but really ultimately being on the side of the founder, even if that means sometimes under-optimizing for what's best for you. Like, I think that's what truly makes you founder-friendly, and I thought the team at Founder Collective very much believed in that. So that was great. I think also just, you know, being a good human, right? Ultimately, this is a people business, and, you know, there's a human behind every company and behind every product, and I think just not forgetting that. And being empathetic to that and being helpful in the right way. Like a lot of my time these days is being like a corporate coach or like a therapist, if you may, for our founders, because it's not easy to build a business, right? It's an emotional roller coaster. So I think just being there for our founders, having been a founder myself and everybody at Founder Collective, hence the name, had been a founder themselves, really, you know, understanding what it's like to be on the other side and bringing that to the table, you know, were some of the learnings that I had from my experience there.

I think that's super interesting because you've been an operator, a founder, and, you know, an investor. You know, I wanted to understand, you know, what was the thesis behind AFO Venture Capital? Are you, you know, stage, sector, and geography agnostic now?

Yeah, we're sector agnostic, we're geography agnostic to a large extent. We are very stage focused. So the thesis behind it for, you know, I was having a great run at Founder Collective. You mentioned I invested in Cruise Automation, I invested in Airtable, or was involved in the Airtable investment, invested in Firebase and many other great companies. So Cure, you know, having a great run. But one of the things I noticed was how the goalposts were shifting for founders, right? So if you were two founders just getting started, looking to raise your first million, million and a half, so you can hire some engineers, so you can get some traction, Seed funds weren't investing in those rounds, right? Very often seed funds will tell you, well, that's great, but you go raise a million-dollar friends and family round and get some traction, build some product, and come back to us. And most founders would be like, well, I don't have such wealthy friends and family who can give me a million bucks, so like, where do I— I thought VCs were supposed to do that. And so the light bulb went off as a founder myself and said, okay, I think there's a problem here that we can solve. I think there's a gap in the market we can solve. So our focus at Afor is very much in a stage which is being called pre-seed, right? And the idea is simple, which is it's just the founding team usually, it's pre-product market fit, most times pre-traction, pre-any revenue, pre-customers, sometimes even pre-products, right? Maybe they have a prototype, right? And that's fine. Like we're very comfortable going in very early when like friends and family would've invested or angels would've invested, but we can come in as an institutional fund, right? We can write a $750K, a million-dollar check, million-and-a-half-dollar check to really get you into business, get you started, right? Because we believe it takes about $1.5 million in most geographies to get to a meaningful inflection point. $500,000, $250K, not enough. $5 million, too much, right? You need that right amount to be able to get something going, and then you can raise more capital at a much higher valuation, and that is a stage we are exclusively focused on, but we've invested in companies in B2B SaaS and B2C e-commerce, you know, fintech, edtech, so on and so forth, and, you know, most of our investments are obviously software heavy, right? Sometimes hardware, but mostly software, mostly internet-based. And then, you know, geography-wise, mostly US, but, you know, I'm— my family lives in Canada, so done a bunch of stuff in Canada. And then outside of, you know, the North America, I've invested in Latin America, I've invested in Sub-Saharan Africa, I've invested in India. So open to other geographies too, but that's going to be few and far between just because, you know, we're not on the ground there. I can't help you as much, but, you know, we were in the business of exceptions, so on an exceptional basis would totally invest outside of the US as well.

And you know, you mentioned that you look at, you know, sometimes pre-seed, pre-product market fit at times. How do you analyze the trio of people, product, and market, especially when, you know, are you focusing a lot on the team to figure out the problem, or do you also look at, you know, how attractive the market is.

Yeah, you know, a lot of investors believe that like market's very important, right? That, you know, the market's gotta be large. And I think Warren Buffett said, right, if it's a big market, mediocre team or something like that, the market wins. Something along those lines, which I think maybe is true later stage, but at our stage, I think market is a completely useless metric to look at, in my opinion, right? Because the best companies will expand markets in ways you can't even imagine, right? Like I think when Uber started, the whole taxi market, like in San Francisco was like, I don't know, a few million dollars at best. Like it was tiny. And like Uber does like magnitudes more business today in San Francisco than the entire taxi market back in the day. So if you looked at Uber as a taxi company, like you would've completely missed the real opportunity, right? And I can say the same thing for so many other companies. Like look at Google, right? When they started, you know, the online advertising market was tiny. But you've got to look at Google as much more than an online advertising company, or even search for that matter. So the best companies just expand markets or distort markets at the very least in ways that you can't even imagine. So you don't want to look at market at this stage. You should have some point of view on where this market can evolve to, or can this market— does this market have an appetite, you know, for a large company? But I would discount that market piece very, very heavily. So then it comes down to people and product. And at our stage, the product is still pretty early, right? It's not really built out. So ultimately at our stage, it does come down a lot to people, right? And what does that mean exactly? It's not about where they went to school. It's not about how necessarily how smart they are, or SE2 scores, none of that stuff matters. It's how thoughtful they are about the problem they're solving, how authentic they are about that problem they're solving, right? Being able to show that trajectory of like, look, maybe I was working at this company, maybe I was working at like, you know, Twilio or Segment first, and I saw this problem and it wasn't part of that mothership, so I'm leaving to start something. Like, that's great, right? 'Cause you've been thinking about this for a while. You've been working been working on this for a while in some shape or form versus, oh, I just read a TechCrunch article this morning and now I'm like working on this startup. That's not very authentic to me, right? And then just how much depth you have in the questions I ask, like so much of my diligence is I just keep asking you, so what, so what, or what's next? And then I wanna see you can go to like 5th, 6th, 7th level of detail and still have answers because you just, again, you've just been thinking about this a lot. So for me at this stage, again, A lot of it comes down to, you know, are this— is this the right team to back to go after this problem, right? And I really look at the first 12 months or so, like, can this company get to first base? Is there something here that'll get them, you know, some initial traction? And then if I'm backing the right team, they'll go from strength to strength, right? They'll figure out what's the next problem to solve, right? What are the adjacencies? What other market can we go after? And that's fine, but I've got to believe this is the right team to get us at least, you know, to first base.

Interesting. And you know, you said markets may not matter, but at least, how do you approach market sizing? Or even later on, when you look at follow-up rounds, how do you approach market sizing?

Yeah, you know, generally have a point of view, right? So for example, I invest in a company called Modern Health, right, in the mental health space, right? But they're going after the B2B channels, selling it as a benefit to employers to say, hey, your employees should be accessing mental health support because, you know, all of us have some kind of emotional stress, whatever the case might be. But when I invested, like, mental health was a small category, and certainly B2B mental health as a benefit was like a tiny category. So it wasn't so much of a snapshot of market size today, but again, just a point of view on— I think the trend lines are in this right direction. I think, I believe, and this is where we get it wrong too, right, a lot, but I believe that mental health would keep growing as a market because I think it's a systemic problem. It is something that's stigmatized. So, so it's a much larger problem than meets the eye because people are sort of, you know, not talking about it or not accessing mental health help. But the moment we make it affordable and accessible, like, the market will expand suddenly, right? I think that's the point of view you've got to have. And then, of course, is this the right team to unlock that latent potential and so on and so forth? Is this the right product and go-to-market? Like, all of those questions you have to ask. But I think we're trying to— so basically, we're approaching market sizing is less about, like, what's the size today, Okay, but what can it be in 5 to 10 years? And can this— ideally this team becomes a category leader. Going back to my Uber example, like if you look at Uber as like on-demand company or gig worker, like none of those things were interesting markets, travel, taxis, none of that stuff was interesting. But you've got to look at it as like, okay, I think if these guys do something right, like that'll become a category in and of itself. And today, of course, you see Uber for X everywhere. Like those are your best companies and that's sort of how you want to think about market size.

Interesting. And you know, how do you look at, you know, portfolio construction since you, you know, you invest into a company and, you know, how do you, what do you think is the right level of diversification?

Yeah, we really think of portfolio construction as like we want to be able to spend a meaningful amount of time with the founders in that sort of zero-to-one phase, right? When they're going from very early where we invest typically to like product market fit, I want to be the most like active board member, the most active investor, most active advisor you will ever have in the history of your company. And to be able to do that, you just can't take on too many projects, right? Too many companies. So it's probably what, half a dozen or so, maybe at any one point in time. So we think of investing in about 10 to 15 companies between my co-founder and I every year, right? So that gives us about that many companies that we support. And then of course, every 12 to 18 months, companies are raising more capital, and then they sort of graduate past our stage, and we're not spending as much time with them. So we're very focused on these companies in that pre-seed to Series A phase, if you may. So, you know, you sort of take that and you say, funds, venture capital funds are typically 3-year investment periods. So you're doing about, about 30 to 40 investments out of a fund. Our typical check size, let's say, is about $750,000 to $1 million. So you're looking at about, let's say, $30 million, $35 million investments initially, reserve half the fund for follow-on, and sort of that's kind of how our fund math is built and fund size is sort of backed into. And every investment we make is very high conviction. So we're not writing call options, we're not placing these kind of you know, small checks in lots and lots of companies, see which ones take off, and then kind of double down. That's not our game. We're very focused on like, I understand you're very early, I understand there's a lot of risk, but I still have a lot of conviction that this is going to be huge, and I'm willing to like put in my dollars and my time behind that. And it's a very concentrated, you know, strategy, and it is risky for sure, but again, when you get it right, it just really moves the dial for the fund. And that's sort of how we've talked about portfolio construction.

Got it. And, uh, you know, when you started, uh, Afo Venture Capital, uh, you know, keeping up to the theme of the podcast, which is license mastery, uh, you know, how did you look at, you know, uh, the values for, for your fund? Uh, and, you know, what are some of the values that you, uh, that you thought about when you, uh, when you built Afo Venture Capital?

Yeah, you know, interestingly, we are founders ourselves again, right, of a fund this time, not a company, but we have fundraise, just like our founders every, you know, in our case, every 3 years or so. We have to build a firm from scratch, build a business from scratch. We have customers, and our customers are our portfolio founders. We have an offering and a product that we sell to them, and we try to compete against other venture capital funds to win those deals. So in a lot of ways, it's a business, and we're founders ourselves. So, you know, we— one of our key values is to do to founders what we would like to be done to ourselves. So what that means is, Being respectful in the diligence process, being, you know, quick, and a quick no is better than a slow maybe, right? And when we do invest, like really following through into our commitment, you know, really holding a high bar internally and externally, being very transparent and communication. Like, you know, we tell our founders like, look, if you just want a pat on the back and just tell you that you're doing great and keep the feedback, the hard feedback to ourselves, we're not your right investors. But instead, if you want us to tell you what we're thinking, with the understanding that like we could be totally wrong, so just listen to us, but ultimately do what you think is right, because you are the CEO, you are the founder, like then we are your people. You know, so those are some of the values that we really, really abide by is, you know, the founders we invest in, you know, we never forget that even though we might be investing in their companies, we might have some, you know, a board, like whatever governance and so on, like none of that stuff matters. Ultimately these are people, these are founders just like just like we are. So I think that's very important to us. I think aligning our incentives very much with those of the founders, you know, always trying to be on the same side of the table with them, I think is important to us because, you know, we're trying to build a firm that like, you know, we would have raised from as when we were founders, or we would want to raise from even ourselves now that we're investors ourselves or founders ourselves.

Got it. And, you know, during these times, how do you advise your founders on approaching talent market since, you know, COVID having an inflection period where, you know, you could get the best of talent and they can work remotely. But what advice would you give to founders on how to acquire the best of talent?

Yeah, you know, the last like 12-18 months have been very interesting on the talent side, right? When COVID initially hit, obviously a lot of layoffs and it felt like, wow, yeah, like this is the, this is the, you know, hiring managers kind of market and the bid has flipped by the end of the year and it was becoming harder and harder to to find talent. And right now we're probably at the peak of just how scarce it is to find great talent. So it is interesting, a lot of flux obviously in the market. Yeah, we're seeing a few different things to our founders, obviously, you know, still keep the bar high, right? You don't wanna compromise on talent because these cycles come and go. But I think if you're trying to build a company for, you know, multiple decades, right? You see past that and you've gotta just keep the bar very high 'cause it is ultimately still a people business. There's still a human being behind that product, behind that code. That's building this stuff. So you wanna keep that par high, both in terms of culture fit, but also competence. You know, a lot of, you have to be really smart and thoughtful around where to find talent, how to approach them, how to sell them on the value prop. And it's not just about, you know, cash and equity anymore. There's a lot more that the best talent is looking for, whether that's flexibility, as you alluded to, on being able to work from anywhere, whether that's other benefits, you know, obviously one of our companies, Modern Health, that I talked about, you know, sells, you know, is selling mental health health benefit as one of those tenants, but there's a whole bunch of other things that the best employees are looking for. And you've gotta meet them there because the amazing part is, especially building a software startup, you know, best people just bring in so much leverage, right? They create so much value that they're totally worth it. And hence you really wanna prioritize that. But you know, at the same time, like there's just a lot of capital also getting thrown around, again, telling founders to like, you know, push back on the temptation to just raise the biggest round at the highest price, right? It is very tempting when you see your friends raise mega rounds and unicorns and decacorns and all that stuff. And look, you gotta be aggressive, you gotta be ambitious. You know, you absolutely have to, there's a window of opportunity and like, if you don't take it, somebody else will, right? It's a competitive, competitive world out there. In some ways getting more competitive because now you can start a company anywhere in the world as long as you have access to the internet. So, so you've gotta be ambitious and aggressive, but at the same time, And, you know, I do think first principles matter. I do think building a sustainable business is more important than just a quick, you know, quick hit. So anyway, our advice is also constantly evolving as the market keeps changing around us. You know, obviously, you know, we're living in a very much a bull market with a lot of money, but that may change and hence our advice.

All right, Gaurav Jain, I quickly want to do the top 3, what's your favorite business book?

There's a lot of business books that have had a lot of impact on me, but I think the top of the list still is— I was very privileged to take a class from Clay Christensen when I was in business school. And he's obviously the godfather of the theories of disruption and innovator's dilemma and his books around that. And also just his books around personal life and how to spend your time and sort of focusing on something 100% of the time versus 99% of the time. Just, he's had a lot of impact on me. So I'd say anything he's written has been my favorite. Got it.

We'll put that in the show notes and, you know, if you could go back in time when you started 4Ventures Capital, what is the one thing you would have focused on or done anything differently?

I think we might have invested more on some of the resources around helping the founders, frankly, more like my co-founder and I did a lot of the work when it came to recruiting, helping recruit We were the first few engineers, the first few employees helping fundraise for Series A, you know, helping with go-to-market, getting your first few users. Like a lot of that work was done by us, which was I think good, 'cause like A, we enjoyed, and B, we were able to learn what to productize. But we're at a stage in the Forze journey where we're looking to scale the team to really operationalize some of those things that we can bring to the table for our founders to go from that 0 to 1 journey, right? And I think to be able to create that impact at scale, and maybe if I could have pulled the timeline in a little bit, that would've been great, but, You know, we're certainly at that inflection point where we're making those investments and we're already starting to see some results. So for example, we launched this program recently called the All-Stars Program, where we want to make it easy for the best talent to join the best companies at the ground floor, right? I get hit up all the time to say, hey, like, I'm looking to leave this company. Like, what's the next greatest company I should join? What's your favorite company in the portfolio? And I end up making these ad hoc connections, which is fine, but we said, hey, I think there's a better, more efficient way to do this. So what we're going to do is with this All-Stars program. And I'd love if anybody in your audience is interested in this idea is hand-select 10, 20 folks, right, that are looking to join, let's say, first head of sales, first, you know, engineer, so on and so forth. These companies have like 5 or 6 founders come in and pitch you for 5 minutes each on why you should join their company. So sort of a reverse hiring process. So the founders will pitch you on joining, and if you like the pitch, then you can email them after the fact and say, hey, look, I was interested, can we chat? and then you can take the process from there. So, you know, we've launched a program with that, which obviously for portfolio founders is great, 'cause now they get to be in front of hand-selected talent, you know, in a more efficient manner as well. So there's a whole bunch of tools like that and programs like that we are gonna be rolling out that help our portfolio founders, but also just help the broader community.

Interesting, because I've been part of On Deck, Parker's fellowship, and And they did something very similar where they invited founders to pitch and, you know, pitch for talent. So something very similar is what Maven is also doing.

That's amazing. Yeah, no, and I think it makes a lot of sense because it's such a win-win for everybody all around and it's just time is of the essence. So if you can be efficient and if you can do some filtering for folks, I think it's a huge value creator.

Got it. And do you have any favorite online tools, for example, Gmail, Slack, Zoom?

Yeah, you know, it's funny you said this, Calendly has been like one of my favorite tools, which is crazy 'cause such a simple tool and you'd imagine like Gmail should have built this like 10 years ago, but it's been amazing. Like I used to have an EA and she was amazing, except like the response time delays were just like, I mean, humans, right? It just takes us time to get to emails. But with Calendly, I find I get introduced to a founder in the morning and by the late afternoon, I'm already on a call with them I send them a calendar link right away, they book something and like we hop on a phone. So I love the shorter cycle time because we look to move very fast when we see something good. And I think Calendly has really helped me achieve that. And it's not a portfolio company, so I'm not selling my book.

I wish it was though. Yeah. Now Calendly has also been one of my favorite products along with Zoom. Really saved me in the last couple of years, especially.

I mean, Zoom obviously goes without saying. I mean, I've been working from home for over a year now and I don't think I could have done it frankly, if it wasn't for Zoom, I still, people sometimes get invited to Google Hangout meetings or WebEx, or I just like, it's a horrendous experience. And I hate to say that because I'm an ex-Googler and like a shareholder, so I wish the product was better, but Zoom is just a class of its own.

Yeah, no, absolutely. And Gaurav, what is the best way people can reach out to you and know more about AFO?

Yeah, we want to be very accessible. So look, the absolute like easiest way of course is just email me. It's my first name, gaurav@ afore.vc, A-F-O-R-E.vc. But I will say like, I get a lot of emails. So if you can find somebody in our mutual network on LinkedIn that perhaps knows both of us and can like give me some color on how they know you and maybe if they know something about your startup, it just helps me prioritize my day. And like, we see over 3,000 new companies every year. We only get to invest in 10 to 15. So I have to very quickly whittle down the funnel to figure out which, where to spend time. So again, I don't wanna make it hard to reach me. Please email me if nothing else, because I absolutely— and I read every email and I'll get back to you if it could be a fit for us. But if you could just help me prioritize, that'd be incredibly helpful.

All right, we'll put up the email in the show notes. Thank you so much for taking your time and speaking to us.

Thank you so much, this was a lot of fun. Thanks for reaching out.