Movers & Shakers Ep 3: Paige Finn Doherty of Behind Genius Ventures

Welcome to The Room Podcast. My name is Madison McIlwain and I'm a partner for seed stage investments at DefyVC.

And I'm Claudia Laurie, a co-founder of Pryve. We're a founder and funder who are in the room where it happens. If you're a first-time founder or an emerging venture capitalist, we're glad you found us. We share inspiring, authentic, and insightful stories from founders, funders, and operators who have been in the room and provide tactical feedback on their early aha moments and learnings along the way. Before we dive into this week's episode, we have a short message from our partners.

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Cooley is a global law firm built around startups and venture capital. The firm has been devoted to entrepreneurs and investors, partnering with both to transform breakthrough ideas into successful companies. Cooley works with thousands of entrepreneurs and newly formed companies to ensure that they are structured for growth and long-term success. Since 2005, Cooley has been ranked the number 1 most active law firm. Representing VC-backed companies going public. Learn more about the firm at cooley.com and also at cooleygo.com, Cooley's award-winning free legal resource for startups. Welcome back to The Room. I'm excited for today's conversation, which is another installment in our mini-series, Movers and Shakers, where we sit down with early-stage entrepreneurs and influencers to hear about their stories. Today, we sit down with Paige Dougherty, founding partner of Behind Genius Ventures. Behind Genius Ventures is an early-stage fund investing in product-led growth companies and play at the pre-seed and seed stage. They're backed by Bain Capital Ventures, Tribe Capital, Bonfire Ventures, and many other incredible backers. Behind Genius focuses on API-first products, wellness, the creator economy, and dev tools. Outside of Behind Genius, Paige is also the author of Seed to Harvest, a simple explanation of venture capital, and is passionate about educating the next generation of venture capitalists. Today we talk about her passions, how she got into venture, and her take on the future tech trends. Let's open the door.

Thank you so much, Paige, for joining us in the room today.

Thank you. It is an honor to be here. Madison and Claudia, thank you so much for the invitation.

We are so excited to chat and get to know you a little bit better and dig into all of the exciting things on the horizon for you. But before we do that, we would love to rewind a little bit and start at the very beginning. You grew up in San Diego and began working at a young age, I believe 17, when when you landed your first internship at the aerospace company Northrop Grumman. How did you find yourself in this role at 17?

[Speaker:MADISON McILWAIN] By accident. So in San Diego, there's a large defense base. There's a bunch of different branches of the military and then also military contractors. So a lot of the people I grew up with, their parents were engineers at military defense contractors. And I ended up randomly applying through my peer counseling program at Rancho Bernardo High School. And they're like, "You should apply for this." So I wrote an essay about why I wanted to do engineering stuff. And then I did an interview and I remember I like got in my like one professional outfit that I had and I was like, "Hi, I'm Paige, I like engineering." And then I ended up working there for 3 years, like all throughout college. And it was an incredible place to start my career. I think that there is something to be said for being at a large company with a lot of infrastructure that's invested a lot in building a really diverse and inclusive culture. There's like so many veterans and women and, people of color in leadership positions. So it was, I think, like a really great place to see a lot of great examples.

[Speaker:MADISON McILWAIN] It's super cool that you had that exposure at such an early juncture where you were able to see so much diversity and so much diversity of thought even. I'm curious, did you think at any point during those years that you would go into venture?

[Speaker:ELIZABETH KLEIN] No, it's such a funny question. I never knew that I wanted to go into venture until I was a junior in college, but I knew that I wanted to be an author. So I was like writing a lot during that time period. People had asked me a question, And if I got asked it more than 5 times, I would just write it and then be like, "Here, you can read this and you can send it to your friends." But yeah, it was a really great place to get started in engineering. That's what I was studying at the time, but I ended up switching out of that to computer science and Northrop was really helpful with helping facilitate that transition and show me what CS opportunities were available there. Definitely weird having a top secret clearance when you're 18. Definitely a very different college experience than a lot of people had.

That's probably a great fun fact for whenever you meet someone new. Yeah.

Oh yeah. It's my party trick.

I myself had my first internship at 15, and I similarly felt really out of my depth and not knowing what I was doing. But I recently hit my 10-year mark since I had my first internship. So I was like, I've been working for 10 years.

She's been a career woman, everyone.

She's been on the street wearing her business casual for some time.

A decade of business casual. We need to do a retrospective of all of your work attire since 2012.

I think it's leveled up a little bit, hopefully. But I was reflecting on the fact that being in the room at such a young age just habituates you and conditions you to being comfortable being the youngest person in the room. How does that feel for you, Paige, still to this day?

I'm starting to not be the youngest person in the room, which is really exciting. I think that a lot of people put a lot of emphasis on age, but I think a large turning point for me was someone sitting me down as we were building behind Genius Ventures and being like, you don't have to dig into the fact that you're 23. Like everyone gets that. Like you get, that's a sentence. That's not like what defines you. And I think switching into that perspective, okay, like outside of being young, like what defines me? I'm very like community first. I love to create content and educate the next generation of venture investors and work with early stage founders. So I actually had that earlier on when I was at Northrop. I think I felt that my opinion was respected even if I was in the room with people who were much older and had much more experience because they really valued what kind of innovation could come from new perspectives. So for, I guess I was like conditioned to appreciate my own point of view and how it could be helpful even in a legacy organization. I think it took me longer to understand that was useful in venture because when you're like learning so much about this industry, you can feel small and everything seems very big and scary and jargon-filled, and it can be hard to grapple your way up into understanding. Then once you start to understand, then you're like, okay, cool, I understand, I can start to apply it. And then there's that additional jump of— I think there's a big portion that comes with making the switch of identity. Now, it's never about writing your first check, it's like stepping into the identity of an investor. And so I think I crossed over like November of last year. And so definitely still like growing in that. But to answer your question, I think I try not to look at age as much anymore because I think that while it is a demographic that you can be slotted into, you can't really control it and everyone gets older. So I'm not gonna be 23 forever. And yeah.

I was recently in just like a bunch of calls where I was like meeting older people for the first time, sales executives and just older mentors who are in their 40s and 50s. And something that I realized about myself was that when I did my personal intro, I got so in the weeds of when I went to college and what I studied there and the turning point after graduation. And it was a 30-second intro, really focused on the span of 4 years or 4 to 7 years. And then you have folks who are in their 40s and their intro is so high level, like, "I did this and this," and it's 20 seconds and they've spanned 3 decades. And it's just really interesting how just because I'm young, I don't need to necessarily feel like I have to prove my background by explaining so in depth, like all of the stuff that I've done at an early age. It's no, like it's also at a high level. I was here and then I founded this and this is what I'm doing now. So it's interesting. I've been paying attention more and more to how people like frame themselves and it's so different based on how old you are.

And do you guys read Highlights when you were younger? It was like one of my favorite like science magazines. They had this really cool article about the passage of time as you get older, like summer seems shorter, everything seem shorter 'cause it's a smaller fraction of your life. And so you will automatically have a different time framing of things. And so when you're in college and you're describing that 4 years, it could feel just as long as someone who's describing like a decade of their careers because it is that, is like a fraction of time in your life, which I thought was a really interesting perspective. And I think about them as like abstraction points. So you're like, I talk about this inflection point and this one. And as you go further along in your career, you like prune and nip and then some of them, pop up later where you're like, this wasn't part of my story that I was telling 6 months ago, but now I see like where it's connecting and I think it's important to touch on. So yeah, I think the framing aspect is really interesting.

This recently happened to me where one of my other internships from when I was in high school was at a company that was trying to create buy-in-store experience with no inventory on the shelves. So you would go, you'd take your mobile phone, you'd scan the QR code, and then it would magically appear in the dressing room. Yeah, it was like very cool. It was 2013, that wasn't really a thing. The founder had come from Amazon, and the whole idea was our cell phones are going to help us buy physical items digitally before we would actually buy them like online while you're in store, right? And I think the premise was so sharp, and it was just a little too early. And I was just hearing another founder talk about their company that uses QR codes, to enable customers to scan real-time their items and create their own warranty around them, which is a great idea. And I was like, oh my gosh, this is the company that I worked for 8 years ago who tried to do this.

And so funny, timing is such a big aspect.

I just don't— I, to your point around like bringing in a nugget that you forget about, forgot about that internship. It wasn't as flashy as working at Rent the Runway, but it was still a relevant experience that has recently come back up into my story.

That's so funny. Yeah, it was funny. I don't talk about Northrop as much anymore in my story, but it was definitely very pivotal into how I carried myself in a professional workplace and got more comfortable with my opinions as a young person in the room.

That has ultimately brought you into the room of venture capital, even if it wasn't originally a part of the plan. And you were the co-founder and managing director at Behind Genius Ventures. Tell us a little bit more about Behind Genius Ventures and the mission.

Sure. So Behind Genius Ventures is an early-stage fund run by myself and my partner Josh Schlusserman. He's awesome. We met on Twitter when I was trying to figure out how to run a syndicate deal last year, and I had just asked a founder for allocation and I hung up the phone and I was like, ooh, like how do I do this? And I ended up getting introduced to Josh by someone who is now an LP in our fund, limited partner or investor by other words. And he was like, oh, so cool. You're working on this. Like, I just wrapped up my first one. Happy to help you through logistics. Started talking like deal flow, nuances of venture. I think I found a very similar intellectual hunger. And fast forward to today, so we invest in pre-seed and seed stage companies that are product-led growth technology companies at the future of work and the future of play. As a creator myself, I focus on a lot of creator economy companies. So some early investments include companies like Palette, which is a community-oriented job platform, and then Matrix, which is a company in the Web3 space that's oriented towards games FYPM, which is like a Glassboard for creators. And then also do some stuff around like dev tools, API-first tools. And it's been quite a, quite a journey so far. I honestly definitely wouldn't have placed myself where I am today a year ago. I was just getting started with investing and, and getting more comfortable with, like you said, like my voice in the room. But I think through the support of communities like Transact Global, the On Deck Angels Fellowship, and the Sutton Capital Emerging Managers Program, I met people who might have had more experience than me, whether it was as an operator or in banking, and they were like just as excited and knowledgeable about venture as I was. And I think stepping into understanding, I was like, oh, okay, cool. Like I'm in the room with these people and I can hold my weight. And that was a big moment for me. And I think it's that access I feel very privileged to have through Twitter. Was just like creating content and like vibing online about stuff I was passionate about and finding people who happened to be interested in it as well, who'd been in the industry for a while. But yeah, it's been pretty crazy. We made 13 investments so far. We've deployed around $1.3 million. I'm stoked to talk more publicly about Behind Genius Ventures in like a month or so. We did soft launch, but there'll be a bigger one coming soon.

We're, we're really excited to continue learning more about that as well. And just congratulations, because what I think I heard you say just now is you were running your first syndicate about a year ago and now you're running your own fund.

Pretty crazy. Yeah. I think like the transition from being a syndicate lead to a fund manager is a really interesting transition because your investment philosophy changes a significant amount because you add additional variables of fund fit and timing. When you're running a syndicate, you're like, I love this company. This is awesome. Like I can basically like You're a salesperson for that company, so you're like going out and selling it to all of these investors and they're like, I either like it or I don't. And you don't take it very personally. With a fund, it's like my decision process for the next 10 years. When people are like, no, and then you're like, ooh, that one hurt a bit more. And then from like an investment perspective, like cash flow becomes really important. So I talked about this a bit in my book, Seed to Harvest, but there's these things called capital calls. And so when you look at someone raising like a $50 or $100 million fund, they don't have $50 or $100 million in their bank account at any given time in the fund unless they're like returning it. And so you have to think about, okay, cool, we have like X amount to allocate this quarter. We have to make deals in this quarter, or we have to like be like, hey, can you all wait for a couple months until our next capital call? So I think becoming a fund manager, there's a lot of interesting constraints that get you very educated in the nuance of being a fund manager versus a syndicate lead. But I'm really happy that I got to work on some of the skills that I needed as a syndicate lead before I became the fund manager.

[Speaker:MADISON McILWAIN] I was just going to say, it's actually so interesting from the founder's perspective around fundraise timing and how there are actually quarters where funds are making more investments, and then this is a cooling off period. And when I was going through my fundraise, it was so interesting. I didn't really know anything about that. And you would talk to an investor and they're like, "Hey, we're actually just about to close our new funds. If you can chat back with us in a month, that's a much better time." "Oh, actually, you caught us as we're closing out this quarter. We have 3 more deals to be done this quarter. This is great." it's, it's from a, um, founder perspective, it's almost, yeah, you really have to be strategic about picking your timing and understanding like where they are in the process when you're pitching investors.

Everyone's on different timelines, like depending on the structure of your fund, who you're raising from, whether that's operators, which I think are a bit more like wiggly with their deadlines versus like institutions where if you're taking money from an institution as a venture capitalist, you got institutional quarters and then you got like venture capital quarters and then you got like the deals that you're seeing as an investor. So there's like a, even an additional layer. So that's like a big part of why I wrote Seed to Harvest. So I was like, I want more founders to understand the incentives at play in venture because then you can align yourself a bit better strategically and it'll help you not only fundraise but also understand the agreement that you're making to be a venture-backed founder. It's a, it's a big one.

Yeah, it is a big one. That's something we've talked a lot about on this podcast is asking the tough question of are you building a venture-backed Do you want to sign up for that? Because the media has so glamorized what it means to be venture-backed and it might not be the right capital answer for your company.

Yeah. I technically like venture funds are venture-backed, but they're run like small businesses on, unless you're like a large fund, you're running on a pretty like shoestring budget. And I think that's really interesting being like Mac was talking about this on Harry Stebbings' podcast. He's one of my good friends and been on this emerging manager journey together for the past year. and he was like, yeah, I'm like a broke VC. Like I'm making all these decisions, but like my bank account does not look like that, which is so funny cuz it's, yeah, it's definitely not a direct reflection of what's going on. So I think that there is just like such an interesting transition happening where a lot of more, a lot more emerging managers aren't coming from positions of generational wealth. And so they're having to be like scrappy and build venture firms that might not look like the traditional ones, but that might like align with some founders that want to build differently because there are some nuances in how they're like atomizing the part like venture businesses. But yeah, I don't think venture's for every founder and I don't encourage every founder to pursue venture. I think it's more of I want all founders to have the information to make an educated decision about whether they want to pursue the route of becoming a venture-backed company.

I love that perspective. And that is why you wrote Seed to Harvest. For our listeners, what is Seed to Harvest?

Sure. I actually wrote Seed to Harvest because my parents were like, you have to stop talking about venture at the dinner table. And I was like, why? And they're like, it's too much jargon. And I was like, let me just explain it and I can still talk about it. But, and then other people like wanted to see it. I remember tweeting about it because my friend Nikhil had written an illustrated children's book for adults. I was like, ooh, love that medium. I think if you can't explain something to a child, like, you don't know it through and through. And so that was kind of like my baseline. So I was like, okay, cool. And by child, either an actual child or someone who is new to— so I'll make that delineation, it's for adults too. But it basically goes through like why venture is important, how venture funds get put together, and then some of the different terms like follow-on funding or capital calls, how companies go through exits, whether that's like an IPO or a direct listing. And then my stick figure drawings were like really not cutting it. And so my mom is an artist. You can see like her paintings in the back. For all the people on audio only, her art is awesome. And she was like, yeah, Paige, I think you need an illustrator. And I was like, what?

What do you mean?

My stick figures are pretty good. She goes, no, like this could be so much such a bigger vision if you carried it through with an illustrator. So I was like, I don't have any money, so I'll start a GoFundMe. And then It was so incredible. Over like the course of 48 hours, $5,000 were donated and all those people are credited in the book as like partners, analysts, and associates. And then I ended up going through 5 test pages. I ended up picking my younger brother Owen, incredibly talented illustrator, and now he's working on a bunch of really cool NFT projects. I'm like crypto-pilling him. I'm like, "Your art is awesome. We need to get you in the crypto space." And so it took 9 months from start to finish. And along the way, I set out to write it as like a fun side project for my day job. Day job, but it led me to doing my first deal, meeting Josh. And now as I meet founders or investors, they already have gotten to know me through my content, which I feel like is a pretty special relationship, especially because I would say I'm pretty authentic online in, in terms of like my thought processes and frameworks. I remember like doing this interview and sitting like being all dressed up and styled and just like sitting and looking at the book in my hands, and I was like, oh my gosh, I can't believe that this all is happening because of this book. So I feel really lucky.

I'm so impressed. I love that you had this thing that you couldn't stop talking about and went out to share it more with the world to make sure that other people were empowered to be able to talk about something that you think is really cool. And then that turned into you finding a job and a platform with Behind Genius Ventures that now allows you to invest in more incredible founders and creators like yourself. Taking a step back, I am curious for our listeners who are also thinking about going on this journey of starting their own fund, and perhaps they've run a syndicate or two on their own, or angel invested where they could. What advice would you have to a potential emerging manager or someone in the early innings of their emerging manager journey on getting started?

First to set the stage, there are people who talk about raising money and snapping their fingers and raising $10 million. Likely not going to be your reality. So gear up for some of the hardest months of your life. Fundraising is not an easy process by any means, but it really hardens your passion for whatever you're doing. For you to have to like put it out on the line and talk to hundreds of people about why you're doing what you're doing, why it's important to you. And I would say like when you're getting started, like really think about why you want to be a fund manager. It is like a potentially multi-decade commitment unless you're doing like an angel list rolling fund, which could be a really great option if you're looking to deploy more capital into cool deals that you're seeing. But I think that just staying true to who you are, I went through some of the process and I was trying to act older and then, and I remember being like, oh yeah, I want, like in July of 2020, I, I was like, yeah, like one day I'll raise like a B2B SaaS fund. And then I got there and I was like, I don't want to raise a B2B SaaS fund. This is like, a bunch of people can do that way better than I can, but I want to be in this blend of future of work and future of play where I'm experiencing these generational shifts and like, I'm really excited and not just do B2B stuff. We definitely have like B2B software in our portfolio and it's really exciting, but I think like digging into what makes you unique and your interests and then it's often a gut feeling and then you have to find like the facts and stories that back that up. So digging into what makes you unique is going to be really important and framing that story.

I think that's incredible advice, even like for founders as they're like pitching. Just be your most authentic self because ultimately whoever invests in you is going to be there and it's going to be like a long-term relationship for many years to come.

So, oh yeah, and if you don't represent yourself authentically, then you have to be that fake self for the next 10 years. That doesn't sound fun.

Totally. Well, you mentioned that you're really passionate about the future of work, future of play, content creation, and you mentioned a couple of the investments that you have made so far. Would love to dig in a little bit deeper. Tell us a little bit more about an investment that you've made this past year that you're really excited about.

Okay, there's this really cool company called Atelier. The founder, Maggie Norris, is just, just a powerhouse. That's like the only way I could describe it. I got on the phone and 5 minutes into the conversation I I was like, oh my goodness, this is why our fund is called Behind Genius. Like some people mispronounce it as like beyond. I'm like, no, no, we're definitely not beyond genius. Like we back genius founders. That's what we do. And Maggie's building this really incredible future of work platform called Ateli. And basically what they do is if you're familiar with Main Street that allows businesses to access tax credits much easier, Ateli is doing the same thing for tax credits for caretakers. So right now there's an incredible amount of people who are at home taking care of relatives or loved ones as caretakers. And oftentimes that can be like, if not full, like often a part-time job that they're not getting paid for. But there are government programs available that provide tax credits for these people so that they can make an income as a caretaker. And so she's building a platform to basically unlock that revenue stream for a lot of people who don't want to go through the really mundane process of filling out like a ton of paperwork. So that is the company I'm really excited for, especially because there is a growing elder population. A lot of people have been wanting to stay at home longer versus going to a home. And so that rise in caretakers needs to have some support from a financial perspective because oftentimes it's like mainly women leaving their jobs to care for loved ones. And so I'm really excited. That's like future of work and future of income play that we've made. And I couldn't be more stoked to be backing the team there.

Super meaningful mission. I mean, any company that is making something that is like one, like difficult to do and mundane and hard, like getting tax credits, but in a space where you're actually, you're like really empowering people who might not historically have been able to, like the financial benefit for doing that job is super impressive and cool. Earlier in the podcast, we touched on age. Age and kind of being the youngest person in the room and how that's actually not the case anymore for a lot of us. We have Gen Z growing up and entering the workforce and founding companies and investing. What do you think is distinctly different about investing in the Gen Z cohort?

That's a great question. So one of the things that stands out to me about Gen Z specifically is there's a strong motion to build a portfolio career. And what I mean by that is you might work for different companies or be a content creator and have a day job, but you're doing a lot of different things and involved with different organizations. And so I think that people are becoming more collaborative because they're not tying like their whole professional worth to one job for the next 17 years. And so they're really collaborative and work open to working with other people. You're seeing this now in the crypto space in, in terms of DAOs, like decentralized autonomous organizations. But I think it's gonna continue to proliferate where you'll see people graduate from college and maybe be working for a DAO and then doing content creation. There's all of these jobs that just didn't exist before that people will be stepping into. And so I think like that collaborative and then also very mission-driven. I think that the younger population has been demanding in an incredible way about diversity and inclusion, about climate change, about shifting the way that we think about using venture or building businesses as a tool to change the world. And I don't just mean that in the, the cliché way. I mean, I think that real change will come about using the tools of capitalism if enough people are enabled to play that game and really use those reins in an intentional way. So I'm really excited about that. And I'm also really excited to see the rise of a lot more Gen Z investors. I think it's been like the 4-minute mile. Like no one thought that anyone could do it this young and then people started doing it and now all of a sudden, I met this kid Ryan, he's deployed like $30 million through his syndicate. And I was like, oh my gosh, this is awesome. Like, I'm stoked for you. There have been, I have a 10-year goal of helping 1,000 people write their first angel check, 500 people lead their first syndicate, and then to seed 100 emerging managers. And I've already helped 8 people lead syndicates, like just through the content that I've produced. And they've reached out and been like, hey, like I couldn't have done this without the steps that you laid out. So I think that's been really rewarding. So I think we'll start to see more folks investing as part of that portfolio in, in their friends. And yeah, so I'm excited for that.

As you're talking, Paige, I'm just thinking about the proliferation of access to capital that has happened, not necessarily to every person, but there is just more capital flowing in the market. And I think as Gen Z, I think Claudia and I are borderline Gen Zs, we're on the cusp. I think as we look at how that is getting deployed, people to your point want it to have more meaning behind it. There is more capital flowing in the markets today. And so it's able to unopen, hopefully more doors as the decision makers behind that capital are bringing their values, the ones that you alluded to, into the room.

Absolutely. And I think like one of, when I talk about the structure of venture, it's really important to understand that like the institutions at the top, like the institutional LPs, people who are like, yeah, we won't write checks smaller than $10 million. And so they're continuing to invest in the same fund managers that have been funded over previous years. I think that a diversity of allocators, and I don't just mean that in the race, gender, age perspective, the diversity in the checks that are being written to other capital allocators will really shift the game for who A, gets a say in where that capital goes, and then B, gets that capital. So that's one of the things I'm really excited for. When you look at the Black Lives Matter movement or the Me Too movement, there was an outcry among venture capitalists to allocate more capital to diverse founders, but that didn't really happen from endowments or larger institutions that are technically holding the purse strings of a lot of those organizations. And so I think the change really needs to come from more institutional allocators and it's slow, but I think it's coming. So I'm excited for that.

[Speaker:MADISON McIlwain] You mentioned a little bit earlier that you've helped a lot of other individuals raise their first, or sort of raise and then invest in their first syndicate. and you've definitely been able to build a presence for yourself and your fund online, primarily through Twitter as one channel. Where do you see the broader creator economy's role specifically in unlocking funding for founders?

That's [Speaker:MADISON McILWAIN] a good one. So right now there's a fractionalization of assets happening where you're seeing more liquidity across different asset lines. So for example, people are selling secondary of private companies because they're staying private longer to avoid like the heavy regulation that's on public companies, you are seeing like this kind of Medici effect in crypto where groups are creating different art projects that will go on to create the income that company or DAO needs to create technology and they don't have to answer it to anyone else. So I think the line between social capital and actual capital is continuously getting like thin down and down and down. And I think that social capital honestly I guess from my perspective, like not coming from, we were definitely uncomfortable growing up and I feel very like lucky and privileged to have an incredible family and that had an awesome house to grow up in, but didn't come from generational wealth. So I didn't really understand that flow. But I think that gaining social capital as you're seeing more creators build open source playbooks about how they're gaining social capital and then turning that into real capital and then becoming capital allocators is like this massive leap that we're going to see. There's a bunch of creators I know that are just like, "Yeah, I make money on creator stuff and then I stake OHM or I sow beans or I invest in startups or I invest in these different asset classes." So I kind of am calling that the Medici effect because the patron of the arts, but the arts have expanded more to technology as well.

[Speaker:MARY] And so you're chatting about this individual who might be in technology as a founder, might also be a creator on the side, might have a completely separate side hustle I'm curious, how do you see like the founder archetype and the creator archetype diverge?

[Speaker:MADISON_MCILWAIN] It's an interesting question. I think there's, as a relatively public person and very online person, it's a conversation that comes up a lot. And I think that it's awesome if you have the luxury of choice to build in private. For myself, it didn't really feel like a choice. I was like, this is what I'm drawn to and I want to inspire other people to follow this path. But I think there's also people who really value their privacy and I respect that. So I think that there isn't necessarily a divergence of founders and creators. It's more if you want to be a creator, it's a calling that is really hard to ignore. Whereas I think the same can be said as founders. And so you kind of have like the matrix of like people who are like identify as founders and creators, maybe like a creator but not really a founder. And then I think like a creator but not a founder is a really interesting one because at its core, like, you're building a media business and you have to think about the revenue streams that you're building. So you absorb founder characteristics or you won't be, like, super successful as a creator. So I think, like, looking at people who have really mastered that game, like, one for example is Anne from Glamnetics. She built a social following and then she took, like, a magnetic lashes company from $0 to $50 million in ARR in 6 months, which is is absolutely nuts. So I think that people that are creators and understand that space have an asymmetric edge in terms of distribution. But founding a company isn't always about the distribution, but it, it is a large part. So I think it can be an advantage.

I'm seeing like an interesting 2x2 matrix where we can plot these different types.

Also, as you're talking, I'm hearing a lot of different labels that people put on people. Founder, entrepreneur, creator. In venture we say, oh, I'm a venture capitalist. I'm, or I was a former operator. And all of these really just help us put each other in boxes. But I think Gen Z is not about that. They don't wanna be put in a box, no boxes. And I experienced this lack of boxes when I was in LA in August where I went to one of my first like IRL events basically since COVID And I kind of identify as an investor now. And I got there and everyone asked me, they were like, oh, are you a creator? It was a very LA question, but I also was like, like, no, I'm not a creator. And then I was like, wait, I am a creator, I have a podcast, like, I totally am. And you can be both a creator and investor, a friend, many other things.

I know. Yeah, boxes are funny. I feel like I don't— I feel like in the venture world I often introduce myself as an investor, but I don't know, it's fun to play around with that when you like meet other people. I guess I'm an author. That's a box I like don't really— haven't really stuck on my name tag before, but now I wrote a So it's there, but it's funny.

Yeah, maybe that could be the name of your podcast. No Boxes Podcast.

No Boxes. That's funny. Yeah. Oh, I think that you take things from every career that you have. Some people are just like speeding that up by doing multiple at the same time.

Yeah. The queen of the side hustle. That's all of us here. Thank you so much, Paige, for joining us today in The Room on this delightful conversation of learning more about your journey into venture and building behind Genius Ventures. Who was a woman in your life who had a profound impact on you? Already shared a bit about your amazing mom who's an artist.

I think that one that's come into my life recently is this incredible woman named Judy Estrin. She is one of— she won't say this, but she was like, helped invent the internet. She's pretty, pretty wild. And she is a scientist and founded 8 technology companies, some of which went public. And she was the former CTO of Cisco. But I've spent a lot of time with her recently, and she's so funny. She always says like— not always, but she's joking with me, and she was like, yeah, I'm like in the elective period of my life. I've really like done a ton of interesting things and now in control of what I'm choosing to do. And I was like, how can I like build that more into— I want to be in the elective part of my life. That sounds pretty cool. And so we were were just noodling on it together and we came up with this idea of Greenhouse Days. So it's like I block off 4 hours of my schedule to just— it's like an innovation greenhouse where I'm just like, everything is protected from the outside world and I'm just gonna either read or play games or go for a walk. And that's been like a really important part of staying sane as a fund manager and a creator. I think blocking out time where I get to be in my zone of genius, which I see as like a lot of like content creation and just synthesizing information from different industries. So I think Judy's been really influential in my life recently, but there's so many incredible women. I think like the community of Transact Global especially has been awesome. It's all the women-led funds are in a WhatsApp group together and it's people like talking about like accountant recommendations and CRMs. And we're also talking about like the state of venture capital itself and like people are sending pictures to their kids in Halloween costumes. And so it's been like a very supportive community to be a part of and I can I couldn't be more grateful that, that we were all brought together in there.

More women helping more women is what Claudia and I are all about. So thank you for sharing those examples in your own life.

Of course. Yeah, thank you so much for having me on. This was a blast.

Thanks for coming on, and thanks for taking time on the other side of the table in your podcast.

Thanks for listening to this episode of The Room Podcast. We hope you enjoyed today's conversation And we hope to see you next Tuesday at 10 AM Eastern, 7 AM Pacific for another miniseries episode of Movers and Shakers. Please like, subscribe, follow us on Twitter, Instagram, and Clubhouse. We'd love to hear from you. In the meantime, we'll see you next week in the room for another inspiring conversation. See you later.

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