Investing in Trillion-Dollar Outcomes with Ben Ling of Bling Capital | Founding the Fund 1

when you talk to the institutional LPs in your fund one, how do you raise a $100 million fund? You sell the last $1 million 100 times. There's 2 slots of 3 to 5 or 1 slot of 7 to 10.

Are you interested? Welcome back to another episode of The Room Podcast.

Claudia, I'm curious, do you know who the first venture capitalist was?

No, I don't actually, Matt.

I know it's kind of one of those questions that I think a lot of people take the claim for. I think people believe it was Arthur Rock who famously actually was an HBS alum, so shout out, but he was the first check, if you can even call it that, into Fairchild Semiconductor.

Wow. That is a throwback for sure.

I feel like he wasn't even sure he was starting a fund at the time. He literally just said, these are 8 really smart people and I probably should put some capital against this. And what was it, the 1960s, maybe even the '50s. And really that became what we call today venture capital.

I mean, it's so funny you say that because the company that he first backed sounds like a story we would tell. I mean, we've been telling so many incredible founding stories of raising capital, building a team, building a business, becoming a unicorn. But there's so many parallels to that when you start a fund, if you think about it.

Yeah, honestly, it's been an opportunity of a lifetime to tell over 140 founding stories of zero to IPO companies, but we haven't taken a keen look at the investment vehicle and ultimately the startups themselves, which are the venture firms that have taken many of these companies through that journey.

I mean, the way that AI is changing the companies that are being built, it's fundamentally changing the strategies and theses of incredible funds. When I was back as the founder of Pryve, I always found it so interesting that the questions were always on us, but I had questions about how my VC that I've built a multi-year relationship with got started. It's like quite crazy bringing billions of dollars together to put their faith into the next generation of iconic founders.

I couldn't agree more. I take for granted that I understand what things like an LPAC is, right? A limited partner advisory committee and how these decisions get made. And oh my gosh, VCs have bosses too. So in this season, we're gonna sit down with respected venture capitalists to talk not only about the companies that they've backed, but the firms they've built.

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Welcome back to another episode of The Room Podcast. Today in The Room, we're joined by Ben Ling, founder and general partner of Bling Capital. This conversation was a particularly special one for me because Ben was one of the first investors to say yes to my startup. He led Pryve's very first fundraising round back in 2021. As a founder, I spent years getting a front row seat to the way Ben works with entrepreneurs, his conviction, his structure, and his ability to see around corners. So it was incredibly meaningful to have the opportunity to turn the tables and hear the story behind how he built Blaine Capital itself. Before founding Bling, Ben had one of the most remarkable careers in Silicon Valley, holding leadership roles at Google, YouTube, and Facebook, and becoming a general partner at Khosla Ventures. Along the way, he built a reputation as one of the most prolific early-stage investors in technology, backing companies including Airtable, Lyft, Square, Palantir, GitLab, Webflow, Instacart, and many others. But like many of the fund founders in this series, the path to building an enduring venture firm wasn't linear. In this episode, we go back to the beginning. We discuss Ben's journey from operator to investor, the decision to launch Bling Capital, what it was like raising a first fund, and how he developed the investment philosophy that has shaped one of the most respected seed franchises in venture. Today, Bling's mission is simple: help founders find product-market fit and then help them scale. We also talk about what Ben looks for in founders, why he has maintained a deliberately generalist approach across sectors. How he thinks about identifying truly massive market opportunities, and the lessons he's learned from backing category-defining companies across consumer, SaaS, marketplaces, fintech, and AI. This episode is part of our special Founding the Fund series, where we're exploring the entrepreneurial journeys behind some of venture capital's most influential firms. Because before these investors backed iconic companies, they first had to build one of their own. Please enjoy our conversation with Ben Ling. Let's open the door. Ben, thank you so much for joining us in The Room. This is such an honor.

Thanks for having me.

We like to start at the beginning with all of our guests. So Ben, tell us, where did you grow up and how has that shaped your view of the world?

I was born in Taiwan and I came to the States when I was 3. Then I moved back to Taiwan when I was 7, and then came back to the States when I was 9. I think I went to 5 different elementary schools. So I think as an immigrant, part of it is learning to adjust very quickly to new environments, making friends very quickly, and being able to read the situation around me. I think it's like one of the things that unfortunately, as a child, moving around so often was, I think, very challenging. But I think as an adult, it taught me some very important life skills. And I think that's shaped who I am.

I did not know that about you. And I also went to 5 elementary schools, so that's a fun fact we have in common. In that vein of early identity, did you always think you were going to become a founder, albeit a fund founder?

I thought so, yes. When I was in school, I definitely thought so. I landed at Google in 2004 after my PhD, and there we were founding different groups within the company. So I founded the commerce group there. That was definitely a fun and interesting time to be able to start a startup within the company. And it was 2018 that I stepped out of Khosla Ventures to start Bling Capital.

I'm excited to dig a little bit into that more deeply, but as you're alluding to, you've had meaningful operator roles across major platforms, which is different than a lot of fund GPs. You were a senior director of product at Google, but Facebook, YouTube as well, starting back in 2004. What did you learn about distribution, velocity, and building products that scale globally being early at these tech giants?

There's a lot to be learned there. I think two major things. Number one is that distribution oftentimes trumps the best product. And I think as a product leader, you typically think that the best product will win, but generally that's just not true. Distribution can absolutely trump product. 10 times over, many, many, many, many times. And I think part of watching the power of Google distribution, the power of Facebook distribution, the power of YouTube distribution sort of reinforced that. You can just see like a lot of products that the companies launched that were not necessarily the best products in the space, but achieved meaningful user adoption because of the distribution. So that's one thing. The second is really operational excellence, which is untied to the overall— product philosophy, which is I think I lived in an era at Google where operational excellence was valued extremely. Being able to operate very quickly, being able to set aggressive goals, march toward them, gather a team, and then actually deliver on them. I think that's one of the key skills that I learned at Google, at Facebook, at YouTube in spades. And I think it's actually helped me dramatically as an investor, at least being aware of the operational challenges and then also operating a fund and making sure that the fund operates efficiently. Unlike, you know, most venture capital firms are not necessarily known for operating very efficiently and necessarily getting back to founders in a reasonable amount of time and running their processes cleanly. But that's one of the things that we try to do at Blink Capital to make sure that the founders have a good experience.

From personal experience, I can say that you are the fastest text responder I've ever met in my life, which is such a breath of fresh air, especially when things are on fire. So I can certainly attest to that.

Our, our goal as a team is that we want to be working the same hours as entrepreneurs are working at Bling Capital. I think people are working at Bling Capital because they love it, not because they have to. It's a privilege and an opportunity to work with great founders. LPs ask me this all the time, what keeps you motivated? And I think what's really interesting is I get to do my hobby as a full-time job. When you look at the roles out there, there's not that many roles that are A, fun, in that you get to work with a lot of founders that are motivated, looking to change the world. B, learning experience that you can learn about new different areas and new sectors all the time. C, you're on the cutting edge of technology rather than the lagging edge. And then D, you can actually have a good profession. So like when you have these things all sort of the confluence of it, it's a really, really kind of lucky role. And I think that the people on our team actually also really see it as an opportunity.

I'd love to dig a little bit into how you started out on this hobby, which has now become your full-time career. You started angel investing as you were operating, notably in companies like Airtable, Lyft, Square, Palantir, Quora, Gusto, Yunmi, and others. Such an incredible roster. Tell us, why did you start and what were you looking for?

Originally when I started in the 2007, 2008 era, it was just supporting my friends. So if we were working at the company together and then you started a company, we'd say, yeah, for sure, I'll support you. There were not as many angel investors at the time. It was a handful of people. It was mostly like Marissa, Keith, Jeremy Stoppelman, several others, but it was not like hundreds and thousands of people. It was definitely more in the tens of people in that era that were actively writing checks regularly. And so that's how it started. Over time, what it evolved into was that I was at Facebook running Facebook Platform. And so there was essentially the nexus of where all the developers were because you could use Facebook Platform to distribute. You use the friend graph to have your users invite their friends and so therefore could grow virally. And so I met a lot of developers there. And then obviously over time you develop a reputation for being an angel investor and writing checks. And then the key value proposition at the time was really more of I was your insurance policy that if your ads were taken down, I know like who to send it to at AdWords. If your Facebook page was taken down, I know who to send it to at Facebook. If your YouTube channel had a problem, I knew how to get to the right people. If your email messages were getting set to spam, I could send you to the head of Gmail, right? So it was a simple sort of insurance policy at the big platforms.

Mm-hmm.

And then over time, I developed a reputation as being, I think, a helpful investor. And so I invested quite a bit between the 2007 to 2013 era.

What do you think the equivalent is today? Instead of knowing everyone at the Facebook platform and being the insurance nexus there, what is that in 2026?

I don't think it exists in 2026. I think it's a very different state of the market. The market in terms of technology is much, much larger. Than it was in 2007, right? There are multiple trillion-dollar companies out there that are all platform companies. Back then there were no trillion-dollar companies. And so I think it was like the right place, right time in a lot of cases. So I would say that it's pretty hard to have OpenAI coverage, Gemini coverage, and then like Instagram coverage, and then also Google search, like there's, I think it's pretty hard. to be in that situation today. I think it was just the right place, right time.

It was a very simple message that resonated with many founders, and ultimately you decided to take this side hustle into a full-time role when you joined Khosla Ventures in 2014. This was about 10 years after the initial fund that Vinod started. Curious how that opportunity came together, and having had so much experience on the operating side, how did you know internally it was the right time to make the leap?

Vinod is an incredible recruiter and he will recruit you years before you're ready. He will know you are ready before you will know you're ready. So Vinod called me many times before 2013 when I joined, and he literally will just call you on the phone. He'll call you on the phone and say, this is Vinod Khosla, and I want to talk to you about opportunities. And then of course you don't know who it is. You listen to the voicemail, you're like, "Louie Spinoza calling me." And then so then you obviously hear him out because he's very important and he's done a lot of great things. So he called me many times when I was at Google before. And I think in 2013, the time was right. I felt like I had spent a fair amount of time at the major platforms, at Google, at Facebook, at YouTube. And all of these, I think independently YouTube would be a trillion-dollar company. Mm-hmm. Today. And at the time I was thinking, should I A, start a new company, or should I B, join a company, or C, should I invest full-time? And in terms of starting a company on an option A, there was nothing that I felt incredibly passionate about. And I think, as you guys know, if you're not incredibly passionate about it, you really cannot do it for 4 or 5, 6, 7, 8 years, which is like required if you really want to have a big outcome. And then B, in terms of the companies out there, there were a lot of really interesting companies at the time, but I didn't really see any of the companies becoming trillion-dollar companies or truly generational in the same way that a Google or Facebook or YouTube really are, at least not early in their life cycle, right? Apple and NVIDIA obviously have achieved tremendous outcomes, but they were already very large companies. They were not small. They were not startups at the time. At least in the quote-unquote software area, this was like, it was not an obvious company join. Like in retrospect now, you can look at a lot of the Elon companies and they're doing very well, but they are different types of companies really that they require different type of skillset. And then the third option was becoming an investor. I looked around a couple of venture firms. Vinod had called many times before. I thought the partners there were all incredibly smart, incredibly hardworking. Keith, who I'd known for over a decade, had just joined and shared with me his experiences. And so I thought it was the right place to go really learn venture. I also thought of option 4, which is just starting my own fund then, but I didn't feel like I had the understanding of venture. I understood angel investing, but angel investing and venture are different. There's a lot of similarities, but it's very different. And so I felt like it was a really good opportunity to spend time with Vinod and the broader team in terms of learning how to do venture.

There is a big difference in angel investing versus institutional investing. And I think the biggest obvious answer there is the LP management and having to actually build both like a culture around how you support entrepreneurs, which you probably already had that reputation and strong strength of brand because of your angel investing, but then building that on the flip side with institutional investors. What if in addition to that, would you say were some of the lessons you took away from being inside of an existing platform and firm that helped you get to where you are today?

In terms of LP management, I would say Khosla Ventures has good LP management, but I would say Vinod famously, at least during the era that I was there, would say, I don't talk to LPs. I don't like to talk to LPs. I only spend time with entrepreneurs. Obviously he definitely does spend time with the important LPs when he chooses to do so, but his focus is really on entrepreneurs. In terms of the LP set, what I would say is that Working with LPs is very similar to working with senior executives in operating companies. So when you have a steering committee, for example, most of the operating companies or the platform companies today, some of them have moved to a GM model, but a lot of them are still not a GM model where it's, it's a matrix model. If you're the product owner, you don't necessarily own all the resources and you don't necessarily own all the decision-making. And so there's an aspect of making sure you can present your work in a way that is understandable to an external party. And then that inspires confidence and gets you to get feedback. And so I would say LP management is pretty similar in that aspect, which is showing your work and the progress against it. And one of the key things I think what we do well at Blinc Capital is we state a strategy and we stick to it and we actually do what we say what we're going to do. And I think that's important.

Absolutely. And, and in terms of expanding beyond that initial wedge of investor identity as an angel investor, You went on to spend 6 years at Khosla investing in many homework companies such as Webflow, GitLab, Wattpad, Tapingo, and Truecourt, and more. Those were bigger checks, right? Stepping into taking more meaningful ownership of those companies. What helped you gain conviction in taking more of those lead positions that evolved how you thought about investing in companies in that period?

I don't think that there was ever a moment where I felt like I was not equipped to write a larger check, if that makes sense. I think if anything, there was too much hubris coming from a Google or a Facebook or YouTube where we're doing like billion-dollar deals and we're like, oh yeah, this $30 million, no big deal. And so there was probably a little bit too much of that. It was probably the opposite, which is the— I didn't really fully understand my first 2 to 3 years at Coastal Ventures, the slot sizes. Slots, but $2 to $3 million is this slot size. $6 to $8 million is this slot size. Like $15 to $20 million is this slot size. $30 to $50 million is this slot size. And like the different levels of diligence that you might want to think through in the different slot sizes. And so if anything, I think I was underappreciating the different slot sizes, but I learned, I learned during my time there about the different slot sizes. And one of the things that I really saw is that I really preferred the earlier slot sizes with this pre-seed and seed where you can invest $1 million or $2 million and you can get 1,000x. And that type of investing is much more interesting to me than investing the $30 to $50 million and maybe getting a 3 or 5 or 10x. Obviously you can invest $30 million and get 1,000x too. It's possible to do that and people do that, but those are opportunities are harder to come by. And so that's one of the things that I saw is that early stage, I really preferred to do a lot of the early stage investment. And I would say most multi-stage funds have a structural disadvantage when it comes to seed. The structural disadvantage is that multi-stage funds typically have many GPs and have many decision makers. And not all firms are like this, but most firms have this aspect of there's a partnership conversation, there's a partnership discussion, but as the partnership gets larger, Like typically when a partnership is small, you can get everybody on a phone very quickly. If it's 2 people, I call Madison, Madison calls me. This company's important. Madison's okay, great, I'm gonna meet. If it's me, Madison, Claudia, and 2 others, it becomes how do we get everybody on the phone to have a conversation? Is it really that important, Ben? Like, you know, at a multi-stage, like, is it really more important than like the other conversations we have about the upcoming investment committee things? Like we're looking at for the Series A and the Series B, and these are, these checks are like, $10 or $30 million because, you know, the seed, you can always look at it again and another time at the Series A or the Series B. And so I think structurally there's a disadvantage because of the decision-making process that exists with multiple parties. Some firms have solved this by saying one GP can make the decision, but still it's like tricky to have the one GP make a lot of decisions without consulting your partners because at the end of the day, it's a partnership and you need people to be bought in. Most partnerships are not run by rogue cowboys and saying, okay, everybody just gets to do their own thing. because then it becomes a little inexplicable, like how people are making the decisions. It certainly, you can do it that way, but I think structurally, I think that's one of the challenges, which is that there's a conversation that needs to be had. And if I say, I love you, entrepreneur, I want you to meet my partner Madison, and then I connect entrepreneur with Madison's EA. The EA says, okay, today's Tuesday and Madison's traveling this week, so the earliest she can meet is probably Friday afternoon or maybe next Monday after department meeting. And then— Of course, as a seed stage founder, you've met with 10 other investors. So you've— we as a firm has a lot— we've lost ball control, which means that we probably won't be able to get a good price. We probably won't be able to get our ownership if somebody else just says, yeah, I'm in, I want 15% or I can 10% and here's the price. Like, let's negotiate the price. Okay. Do more references. And so I think there's a structural disadvantage when it comes to that. And the second thing I think is really around the asymmetric upside. being able to invest small and then being able to actually see really high return multiples.

I can see how you were gaining conviction and what ultimately you felt would position you as an individual investor to be able to win deals at scale over time, but then also how you might be able to build a next-generation firm built on these principles and learnings. And so we're going to touch on in a second when you decided to strike out on your own with Bling. But before we get there, you know, Vinod is definitely an iconic name and investor. Having worked for many years with him and alongside, what part of that culture pushed you the hardest as an investor?

I learned a lot of things at Khosla Ventures, and I think one of the key things that angel investors don't appreciate about venture is market sizing and the return multiples that you must achieve in order for it to be meaningful. And I think Vinod is very good about making sure that the thing has asymmetric, huge upside. And what that looks like is that he's not particularly interested in your $2 billion, $5 billion outcome. It's okay. It's okay. It's not great. He's much more interested in the $100 billion, trillion-dollar outcome. Because when you look at the distribution of outcomes and the returns, the drivers are the $100 billion, trillion-dollar outcomes. Uh, the $3 to $5 billion outcomes are great. They return the funds, et cetera, et cetera, but they don't give you the extra zero and they don't give you the extra zero after that. So that's one of the things that I would say Vinod is very— that I learned from Vinod that I think is, is a very important in venture. And obviously one of the things that's tricky to estimate is how big the company is going to be because these things are not obvious. When I joined Google, I don't think anybody at the company really thought we would be a trillion-dollar company when I joined in 2004. When I joined Facebook, it was valued at $15 billion. It had about 30 to 40 million monthlies, and people thought that, oh, this is not a real company. MySpace sucks. MySpace is a failure. The best it will be is as big as Yahoo. You have as many users as Yahoo, and you monetize like Yahoo, you'll be a $100 billion company. Well, Facebook's literally like a trillion-dollar company because the market sizes are so large. And then at YouTube, it was similar. Like, people were like, oh, this cat's on skateboards, not a real company. Like, you're going to be sued to death by Viacom.

It's never going to make money.

The market are extremely, extremely large. So I think one of the key things as a venture investor is really understanding where the markets are going to be in 5 to 7 to 10 years and really indexing more on that than necessarily what the market is today. And it's very tricky to describe how you formulate that insight, but you have to formulate that insight through experience and also just kind of prediction of where things are going to go.

Just a fun fact on the YouTube relevancy, even today, to your earlier point, when we started podcasting in 2020, it was Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube. And since then it has usurped all two. And so it's at the top, YouTube, and then Apple's now fallen to the third. So even in 5 years, like YouTube has continued to have explosive growth and grow of market share within a medium that they previously had very little stake in.

Distribution matters.

Let's fast forward a little bit to 2018. Ben, you started Bling Capital as a solo GP then. Tell us a little bit more about the moment when you realized, okay, I'm going to strike out and start my own fund. At my startup, Pryve, Rippling helped us avoid a lot of the operational drag that comes with scaling a team. With most tools, something as simple as onboarding a new hire involves multiple systems, payroll, apps, hardware, and it can take weeks, quite frankly. With Rippling, those workflows happen automatically in one place. That means fewer distractions and more time focused on building. Over 15,000 startups rely on Rippling to scale fast without adding additional ops and HR headcount. So if you or your startup want to move as quickly as you can and focus on what really matters, like your product and your customers, you need Rippling. Right now, venture-backed startups can get 6 months of Rippling's startup stack for free. Head to rippling.com/theroom and sign up today. That's R-I-P-P-L-I-N-G.com/T-H-E-R-O-O-M to sign up for 6 months free today. Focus on what you're building, leave the rest to Rippling. rippling.com/theroom.

I wanted to invest in earlier stage companies, as we discussed earlier. I had the blessing of Vinod and the team because it was not competitive, like focusing on the pre-seed and seed was really not competitive with KV. And in fact, I think we've invested in maybe 7 or 8 companies together that I've sourced for them. To me, it was clear that I wanted to invest in companies that I want to invest in, not just the ones that Vinod wanted to invest in. And then also focus on an earlier stage. And I started Lean Capital in 2018. It was a sole GP model. I got a team of 4 venture principals. That was a key opportunity. The differentiation of the fund, I thought about 2 major things. As it stands, it still is the same today, is one, which is the GP differentiation, and the second, which is the fund differentiation. On the GP differentiation, what we sought to achieve was basically try to say, what is it that I'm different? How am I different than everybody else in the market? And it was like 2 main things. The first is the product executive and having built products from the ground up at Google, Facebook, YouTube. And then the second part of it was understanding venture, the financing at the seed, the fundraising for the Series A, fundraising for the Series B, like how do you do the exits, so on and so forth. So I think that was from a GP differentiation perspective, that was like the key thing. And then from a fund differentiation perspective, I thought we've got to have differentiation, right? Like you can't just be any fund and just like the same as everybody else. So one of the things I thought, like, how am I different than all the other investors out there, and it was like my product background and it was my product network. So what I did in Fund 1 was I went and panhandled all of my friends and I said, please, I'm starting a new fund. Would you please invest and be part of my product council? The product council is essentially heads of product, heads of growth, heads of engineering, heads of sales, CEOs, et cetera, in the industry who are all invested in the fund. So when the fund's invested in the company, all of them are invested in the company as well, and the company gets direct access to them for help, mentorship, advisorship, so on and so forth. So that was like the differentiation. And so I went and literally asked all of my colleagues, I panhandled to I think about $30 or $40 million. Chris Sacca gave me really good advice. He said that when you talk to the institutional LPs in your fund one, how do you raise a $100 million fund? You sell the last $1 million 100 times. There's 2 slots of 3 to 5 or 1 slot of 7 to 10. Are you interested? We, we ran the institutional process as well, and you never know in Fund 1 whether the institutions will bite because it's Fund 1. Fortunately, we had a lot of institutions invest, and so that's how Fund 1 came about.

Not only are the LPs important and sourcing the capital, but it's also really important that founders are excited to say yes to a Bling term sheet. In 2020, TechCrunch ranked you at the top of the list of VCs founders love most. And actually, that's how I first found out about you, Ben, when we were fundraising. When you launched Bling, what was your founder promise? What did you want the founder experience to feel like that was different from other seed stage funds?

We wanted to have founders have a really good experience overall from a fundraising perspective, even if we didn't invest. And we wanted them to have a really good experience working with us through the ups and downs. And I think one of the key things is actually really straightforward, which is you gotta pay attention and you gotta do your job. For example, if founders are pitching you for a round, if you don't respond to their emails, it's just a terrible experience for the founder, right? Because you're like, are they interested? Are they not? They said they were interested and you didn't reply. I think a lot of what happens here is in larger firms, there's opacity because it's like, No, Ben is interested, but he's trying to get the other partners enthusiastic enough to be able to meet. And then if they can't get the partners enthusiastic enough to meet, then it's, I don't wanna waste the founder's time. And then, so you have a little bit of this dynamic, but as a solo GP, you don't have any excuses. You just have to reply, right? We wanted to make sure that we were doing our part in the ecosystem and being a good partner to founders that we back and didn't back. And when you back them and things are going well, it's easy to be a good partner. And when things are going poorly, it is harder to be a good partner. But I think we believe that when we make an investment in a company, that we are mutually electing into a partnership. And we're mutually electing into a partnership, which is for better or for worse. And if it's for worse, that's okay. But we still have our job to do at the end to help the company when the company needs help. And I think it's actually not just— like an ethical thing to do, but I think it's also a selfish thing to do. I think the selfish thing to do here is that some of the best founders do not start their generational company as the first company. Sometimes it's the second or sometimes it's the third, right? Mm-hmm. Sun was not Vinod's first company. Uber was not Travis's first company. So I think that there is an aspect of if you've believed in this founder to back them one time, and they've been a good steward and good partner, then you should make sure you have good relations with them so that you can back them another time, because that next company might be the one that really is a $100 billion company.

As we look at those early days, who was maybe the first company or first founder you gave a term sheet to? And then conversely to that, who was the first LP to say yes to Bling Capital?

There were a few in terms of the first term sheet. I'd have to double-check. One of the first investments that we made, one of the first, I'm not sure it's the very first because some things sometimes it's a price round, sometimes it's a SAFE. Like I don't remember exactly which closed first and which one we offered first. One of the first investments we made was a company called Merlin, which Josh Kopelman introduced. So Josh Kopelman from First Round, he's been a great friend and partner. I think he did 3 things for me. He said, I've never done this before, like 3 things. Number 1, he became an LP. Number 2, he introduced an LP. And number 3, he sourced a portfolio company, like all within a week or so. Big thanks to Josh for helping me stand up Fund 1. And the other person that really helped me a lot in Fund 1 was Chris Farmer. He introduced a lot of LPs. He had just gone through somewhat recently with LPs that were in the right size and scale, because an LP that is investing in a $60 million fund is not the same usually as an LP that's investing in a billion-dollar fund. Fund. This is check sizes are different and the mandates are different. And so for the first LP, I think there's a lot of individuals that invest. I don't remember who the first individuals actually are because I had just sent out the email to literally 50 to 100 people and we just scheduled calls. But I think the first institutional LP, I think was Horst Liebherr.

Since then you've backed over 19 unicorns to date, so a lot has gone right. Since those initial pitches, but we also know that founding journeys are not always a straight line, as you alluded to earlier. Tell us about a moment that didn't go as planned in the first couple of years of BlinkApp.

We are pretty lucky because I don't know, I don't have a good answer for you here. I think things have been going according to plan for the most part. One of the things that I told LPs in Fund 1 was I intended to be a sole GP firm, but I was not stuck on that. If the right person comes along and is a good fit, then I'm open-minded. And so Kyle came along, he was available. And so in Fund 3, we brought him on as a GP. And I had known Kyle for many years. I was an investor in his company that sold to Salesforce. When he was an HBS student, he had done some coursework for me at Google. We had invested in a variety of companies together and sat on boards together. So, I had a lot of background in working with him. And so, we brought him on as a GP. So, that didn't go according to plan, but in the upside case.

It's an amazing milestone to be able to grow and scale a firm to the heights that you have. And you've done so, of course, over time. Therefore, there's been hype cycles, resets, the AI acceleration, pandemics. How and what has been the hardest part of staying consistent with your fund narrative through all these macro changes going on around you?

At Bling Capital, we're generalists, so we index on two major things, which is A, quality of entrepreneur, and B, the size of the market in 5 to 7 years, not just today. And so we are not specifically tied to any sectors, but we do look to invest in durable sectors and not fads. Because we are generalists and we're not sector specific, it's enabled us to really invest in whatever we think is going to make a big dent in 5 to 7 years.

So having focus and clarity on this stage has allowed you to stay lasered in on the types of entrepreneurs at that phase of company building that, you know, makes this a Bling Capital deal. In terms of how you've approached scaling Bling, How beyond bringing on Kyle did you think about growing an investment team, a portfolio support team, and where did you decide to make trade-offs to hire or not to hire early on?

Uh, it's all been pretty much opportunistic, so I wouldn't say it's intentional. We're gonna hire another GP. A lot of it's been opportunistic. In Fund 1, we had 4 venture associates and venture principals. I couldn't pay them a lot of money. I couldn't pay them because it was just not a large fund at the time. And so the value exchange was that you could come and A, learn venture capital, B, get access to deal flow and invest your own money into companies. And then so C, build your own book, and then D, capture the network of the product council and the CEO network, so on and so forth. And it turned out to be really lucrative for a lot of the venture principals because some of them actually did make over I think $1 million, $2 million by investing in a company, a billing company. And then when the rounds were oversubscribed in the following years, they were actually sold. And so that's how it originally started, which is that we just had people that, that were on the team. Charlie was on the team when we started Blink Capital. And then over time, the venture principal program is not intended to be a full-time, it's not a promotion type of role. It's intended to be a rotational type of. role where you can learn all of these things, get access to these things, and then we will either join a portfolio company, start a portfolio company, or we can help you find another role at a venture firm. But there's been cases where we have hired from within. Charlie was hired, you know, we brought on as an operating partner. Eric, we brought on and he's most recently promoted to a partner. There's been cases where we do that, but it's been opportunistic. The major bar is, do— First of all, are the people really good? At their job, right? So that's the thing. But the second part of it is, do they love what they're doing? And would they do it even if they weren't handsomely compensated for it? Because I think we want people who are missionaries and not just mercenaries. It's kind of cliché, but I do think that people who really love the job really love the job. And I think other people who don't— if you don't love meeting new people, if you don't love learning new things, if you don't love negotiating, if you don't love dealing with constant conflict, but doing it in a productive way, the job is hard. As we know, the founder and investor incentives are misaligned when you're first investing because the investor wants more ownership and a lower price, and the founder wants reasonable ownership and a higher price. And so there's, there's a misalignment of incentives. And then also in exit scenarios, there's also a misalignment of incentives at various times too. So for example, when the founder is about to make $100 million, right? If let's say the founder owns 90% of the company and the company sells for $150 million, they make $100 million, which is like life-changing for everybody. But for a venture capital firm, if you return 10x, it's not that interesting. It doesn't return the fund. And so there's a variety of these things where the incentives are not aligned, but— And so you have to be able to deal with conflict very constructively. In order to actually have fun and then also have good relations with the founders.

Well, you've clearly been able to build a model that both has impact on the founder side, but also scales. In late 2024, you announced your Fund 4, which was a $270 million vehicle. So huge congratulations there on the exciting growth for Bling. Just taking a, a step back and how you've thought about growing the fund alongside the mandate, what have been some key strategic shifts that have happened as you've grown and scaled Bling?

It's mostly the same, meaning that we still focus on generally the same sectors, which is today we focus on AI. We look at marketplace companies, we look at fintech companies, we look to B2B companies. Historically, we have not really invested in hard tech. Generally, we're not qualified there. We've not invested in biotech. We're also not qualified there in terms of knowing enough to make thoughtful decisions. Then also we have avoided crypto. We also have not invested in the AR/VR space. I think that might change because if the platforms become much, much more— put differently, if there's 100 million headsets that are sold, then you— there's a platform to actually be able to build things on. And typically the platform companies are the ones that are going to be able to make that investment to get to 100 million or a billion. headsets, handsets, whatever you want to call them. So we stayed mostly in the same sectors. Geography is relatively the same. It's North America with some notable exceptions. So we have to have a comparative advantage if we're investing outside of North America. Comparative advantage here would be either a network advantage, meaning that we have, we know the founder very well from somewhere else, where we know the prior investor very well from somewhere else, or we have an information advantage in that we. have a lot of background in a company that is a similar business model, but in a different geography. And so the geography is relatively the same. In terms of our target ownership, we've increased that because the fund size has increased. So we typically target 12 to 15%, whereas in the beginning we were targeting probably 7 to 12%. I think that's the, probably the major shift in terms of the seed stage investing. We also have an opportunities fund. Mm-hmm. The opportunities fund will invest the late Series A, early Series B, and we look to put in around $10 million into each company. And the idea here is that we want to be able to 10x, like these companies should have 10x opportunities, and we want to continue to support the winners. And so that's like how the fund strategy has evolved.

I'd love to chat a little bit around the future of Bling, things like the Bling Fellowship. But before I get into that, you mentioned a few minutes ago that there's often misaligned incentives between an investor and founder. Founder, especially when you're raising capital. You're one of my lead investors at Pryve, and you've been in the room with founders for both the highs and the lows. What do you think makes an investor-founder relationship actually durable over years?

Uh, I think the answer is pretty clear. Both sides have to have high trust. One of the major challenges for VCs is I think VCs that are early in their career have a very difficult challenge, and especially if they are earlier in their career at a multi-stage, which is that their partners have a view of what the company should do. And I experienced this myself. If— when it was like, the company should do this, but the founders don't want to do that. And then your partner's like, you should convince them to do this. And ultimately you can have a conversation, but at the end of the day, the founders are going to do what the founders are going to do. to do, because it's their company, right? You don't— if as an investor, you may own 10%, 20%, but the founders probably own somewhere between 80 to 30%, depending upon the stage of the company. And as an investor, you're spending what, at best, 10 hours a week on the company. The founder's spending 80 hours a week on company. So you kind of have to let the founders be able to choose and decide. So one of our principles of operating at Bling Capital is that We tell founders that A, we're always going to be honest with you. We're going to tell you exactly how we see it because we owe it to you. And then B, we will let you decide. So we might say it's option— we think it's option A and here's why. But if you think it's option B, okay, we will get in the boat and row with you if you choose option B, but keep your eyes wide open just in case the data comes back not supporting the thesis of option B. We have to do that because I think it's the right thing to do. I also think it is the selfish thing to do because long term, that is how you can actually build a durable relationship with a founder versus trying to undermine them on their steps. Sometimes people have got to learn what they got to learn, but that's okay. And sometimes they're right and you're wrong, and that's how you learn. And so I think that's one of the key sort of hallmarks of how we choose to operate. I think it's hard to operate that way. When you're early in your VC career, because if you are raising your first fund or you're raising your second fund and you need the markup, right? You need the companies to have the markup. You think you know better than everybody else. Everybody usually thinks that they know better, even if they don't say it. You have this pressure that you're like trying to convince the founders to do something that may or may not be right. And so at the end of the day, we— I think we have the— we've earned the right to be able to allow founders to make their own decisions.

I just wanted to say, jumping in, because I couldn't have been earlier in my career when Claudia decided to start her company. It was the second company I brought into Defy that we ended up investing in. And as a young junior investor, I learned a lot from you, Ben, seeing how you supported Claudia. And I think people really underestimate the power of who else is around the table on the VC-to-VC relationship dynamics. It was a pleasure to work with you. And it, it wasn't even in a super intense way, not at a, certainly not at a board level. So, thinking about that kind of relationship too, you earn trust across the aisle as you see how that first check-in, of which you are often, is supporting those founders for the long run, which I know, and I was grateful to get to see your firm do with the end through Claudia's company.

A lot of our listeners are thinking about starting companies or in the earliest stages of starting companies. And hearing this podcast, they might be excited to get the opportunity to pitch to you, Ben. Tell us a little bit more about the Bling Fellowship Program you have.

The Fellowship Program is a distinct program from our Pre-Seed and Seed Program. Essentially for the earlier stages, if you're a founder with just kind of like the inkling of an idea, it may not be particularly well formed, but it's an opportunity to work with the team in formulating that idea, and it's a small check. That gets you started with the promise of a larger check. I think it's $150K upfront, $350K after. So it's around $500,000, which is enough to get the thing going. And we basically work with you and support you in terms of helping you find the idea and then also helping you find product-market fit with figuring out the mechanics of doing so. That's the program. And the pre-seed program is typically if you're a founder that has an idea, and has maybe a prototype or the initial, like, first design customers or no design customers, but a good analysis of the market and the product and the differentiation, we'll look at that. And then for seed, we typically look for a handful of design customers or some revenue to have some semblance of the thing is working at the very earliest stage.

And with the proliferation of startups, certainly over the past, call it decade, there's also been this proliferation of fund founders. So a lot of emerging managers out there, especially ones thinking about starting funds in the near future. What advice would you have for individuals thinking about starting a fund in 2026? Any lessons learned along the way that you would like to impart?

I think the key thing for people starting funds in 2026, there's two things. The first is Do you have differentiated access? And what I mean by that is, do you have access to the best founders for one reason or another? Were they all your colleagues somewhere, or do you have a disproportionate founder network because of some aspect of your life? That's the first thing. And then the second is, what's your right to win? What is your core differentiation and the value that you can provide, whether it's just As simple as I'm a quick yes, I can get to yes in the first meeting and it'll be like $300,000 and you'll be done. To you have a network of some sort, you can drive customers or access to engineers or whatever it is. But I think ultimately for LPs looking at GPs, it's usually one, do you have access? And number two, can you pick? And number three, can you win? And obviously LPs also prefer number four, can you support these companies in a way that helps them achieve outsized returns that they would not be able to do themselves. But really the first 3 are really critical.

Thank you for that framework. Ben, we've spoken a lot about your career. We've spoken a lot about the industry, the companies you've invested in. But as we come up on time today, I'd love to ask what's next for you personally? What are you excited about personally in 2026?

We're still doing the same thing that we're doing. We're still running Wing Capital, investing in companies. We're lucky to do that because It's a hobby that sort of became a full-time profession. And so I think we're very lucky.

Nothing better than that. We'd love to ask you our hero question. This is the last question of the podcast, the question we ask all of our guests. And the question is, who is a woman in your life that has had a profound impact on you and your career?

What I would say here is that, so I worked with Marissa for many years at Google, and she was my manager. We shared an office for many years. And what I would say is I learned a ton from Marissa. My prior managers were great. I love them. But Marissa really taught me how to support my team. And what I mean by that is early in my Google career, I had a lot of really good managers who were like employees number 4 and 5, basically. They were great. And they could help me essentially get to the right places and sort of debug problems. But what I would say is they never really helped me they would never really taught me how to manage my team and it was just do it yourself because that's what I was coached to do, which is just figure it out and do it yourself. But I think Marissa really spent a lot of time saying like, what's, where are we stuck? What are the options and how should we approach it? So what I would say is there I learned a lot more about how to manage people. If you ask the people that work for me at Google and at Facebook and at YouTube during the early stages of my career, I think they would say the guy just has really high expectations and then he's like, he just expects really high output from you, but like, he'll give you the framework, but like, then you just got to go do it yourself. He doesn't— he expects you to go and run around and figure out how to debug it, which I mean, I think is like really a lot of like high performers can figure out, but a lot of people actually do need a little bit of support of figuring out like how to reach the next level. In their career, how to debug a product, so on and so forth. Spending time with Marissa, I think she actually cared deeply about her direct reports, and I think it's a differentiated model, and I think I've been able to embrace that in my work subsequently.

Thank you so much, Ben. This has been incredible, super inspiring. It's been such a pleasure to have you on tonight.

Thanks for having me.

Thank you so much for joining us at The Room Podcast. If you want more from The Room every week, subscribe to our newsletter at theroompodcast.com/newsletter. We'll be back next week with a new episode, an inspirational guest, Tuesday, 10:00 AM Eastern, 7:00 AM Pacific. See you in the room.

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