Matt Mazzeo, Managing Director, Lowercase Capital (Pt. 1) | Product Hunt LIVE
In this hour‑plus live AMA, Matt Mazzeo, Managing Director of Lowercase Capital, shares his journey from a CAA agent to a venture investor and discusses his investment philosophy, favorite deals, and day‑to‑day workflow. He highlights Mark43, a gov‑tech startup improving police field reporting, as the investment he’s most proud of, explaining how a personal introduction and the founder’s hustle led to the deal. Mazzeo breaks down a typical VC day into three equal thirds: sourcing new deals, supporting existing portfolio companies, and fund‑related activities such as networking and content creation. He stresses that cold emails are ineffective unless they are exceptionally thoughtful, and he prefers warm introductions. The conversation moves to mentorship, offering concrete advice for high‑school and early‑career founders, emphasizing college, building hard skills, and delivering value before asking for help. He discusses the merits of solo versus co‑founder teams, advocating for two‑person teams but noting that strong solo founders can succeed if they surround themselves with experts. Mazzeo also points to “dirty” industries—government tech, waste management, self‑storage—as under‑appreciated markets with huge upside. He addresses the challenge young VCs face with long feedback loops, recommending focus on process, thesis development, and measurable signals like founder referrals and follow‑on rates. When asked about hardware versus software, he notes Lowercase’s bias toward software due to scalability but acknowledges emerging opportunities in physical products driven by 3D printing and new manufacturing models. Finally, he introduces “Lowercase Alpha,” a program to give early users beta access to portfolio companies for rapid feedback, and shares his personal definition of a hustler as someone who adds value beyond the minimum required. Throughout, his tone is conversational, enthusiastic, and candid, offering practical, experience‑based insights into venture investing and founder mentorship.
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I was an agent at CAA, so a recovering agent, where I helped build businesses for talent and brands and different media companies in tech. And so grew up in LA, Harvard for college, came right back because this is where all my family was. And if anybody has any questions, we can do an hour-long jam session on AMA. And we have first guest, who's a buddy that I've blabbed with before. Here are gonna be the rules really quick. Just give me a quick second on who you are if you jump into the show, and then hit your question. Saul, rip it. Cool, hey, I'm Saul. First of all, Matt was very humble over there. If you watch his recent interview with Mark Souster, you could hear a lot more about his background. It's really interesting. I suggest everybody watch it just because it's always interesting to hear these stories. But I'm, I founded a company called Miner, working on that, looking at some other things as well. TBD, don't want to get too into that. But my question was, and I posed this earlier, what's the one investment you're most proud of and how did you find that deal? One investment I'm most proud of, there's a company that we invested into, it's one of the first ones that I did. You know, coming into Lowercase, I think people expected me to do almost entirely media investments just because that's what my background was. And it was very explicitly not what I was just gonna focus on. And so I found a company founded by a guy named Scott Crouch. And if you've had the chance to hear Scott speak, he was at Fortune this year and spoke a little bit. The company's called Mark43, and it's building technology to help better power law enforcement in the field. And they've rolled out to a couple of big markets. Scott's an absolute animal. Washington, D.C. was market number one. I know them because they presented at FirstMark's data-driven event? Yeah, I don't know how much of that is public, but they've done a pretty big rollout of their first major market. Uh, so basically, like, there's a lot of challenges when you sell into gov tech. You have, you know, municipalities, you have these crazy long lead times. Um, it can be a real pain in the ass to work with local governments. Uh, their first deployment in the DC— in DC, incredible. I'm sure Scott's going to give a lot more data on it. Um, but it's a great mission. It's, uh, it's helping put cops back on the street. If you were a cop, you know, working up until, until Mark 43 came out, you were basically working on a DOS prompt. Whenever you filled an arrest, you had to go back to the station, you had to fill out, sit in front of these terminals that looked like Windows 95, and it would take 90 minutes to fill in an arrest report, not including travel time. And Scott's technology drops that down dramatically. And we've just done early numbers on the success of that, that'll let him eventually give the data on, but— It was like 400 questions, right, that you had to go through to fill out an arrest report for like the simple things, and these guys are totally changing that. Now it's all done, now you can do it almost entirely in the field using basically, um, cops are used to having sort of best-in-class technology when it comes to like Grubhub and ordering a car through Uber, and then they're stuck with like the worst enterprise SaaS software ever when they're filing arrest reports. And so how do you reimagine these really old dirty industries that have just never had this kind of technology layered in? Scott's a beast, uh, they won the Harvard Entrepreneurship Contest. So the second part of your question was how did I find them? Another alum introduced me to those guys. They were 21 years old and had built this platform and started deploying it for some police forces en masse. And it was, it was just a no-brainer. Really awesome mission, great founder, crazy hustle, technically, technically brilliant. And honestly, he ran the first board meeting like somebody who was like, you know, 10 years, 30 years hardened by you know, uh, the tech industry. It was one of the best-run board meetings I'd ever seen. And so, um, I'm proud of it. Uh, I think it's a great mission, and, uh, it's in a category that I don't think gets a ton of love. Um, so I, uh, I'm all for it. How do you look at something like Fix next to that? What? How do you look at something like Fix, which recently got shut down by the municipality in San Francisco, where they were also trying to take them? I saw that. Honestly, I didn't dive in too hard on it. Uh, I was just hoping it could fix a bunch of my car— my parking tickets. Cool. Thanks, dude. Uh, we're gonna keep this going. Alright, I don't know what— call in. Bang! Let's see if this is working. Sorry, we're figuring this out, guys. Just bear with me. Shot Pitch is coming in. I don't know what that is. I didn't see their question first. I'm being a little aggressive. This could be crazy. Hopefully this isn't gonna turn into one of those crazy Reddit AMAs. Yo, shot pitch! Hi, hi, Matt. Hi, Matt, this is Prashanth here. Can you hear me? Yeah, yeah, we all hear you. What's going on, man? Yeah, so Matt, it's night here in India, so you might not be able to see me properly. Where in India are you? Bangalore. Bangalore, cool. I was there when I first joined Lowercase. Chris told me that I had to wash the suit off, and so he said, go travel somewhere you've never been. I spent a month and change in India traveling around. I didn't make it to Bangalore, but I loved it over there. My best friend from college is running the largest talent agency in Bollywood. Incredible place. Great. I hope to see you back in India sometime soon. So Matt Mazzeo, my question is, having done so many investments in the field, how does a typical day of a VC or an angel for that matter look like? Because I'm doing some research in this field, I would love to hear your perspective because, you know, there are a lot of people, you know, when I meet VCs and angels, they say that they don't have any time in the day, and I totally respect that, but just to give a hint on what it looks like would be great. Yeah, those people who are complaining about the life of a VC are full of shit. So I, you know, my— let's do time breakdown first. So like, before I dive into like an average day, so my life is split kind of like a third, a third, a third. One third is finding and identifying and meeting with new potential investments, 1/3 helping and servicing our existing portfolio, and about another 1/3 on like fund management, conferences, networking. Sorry, I'm getting a call. These are like the technical difficulties of trying to blab. So it's 1/3, you know, new companies, 1/3 existing portfolio, and 1/3 like going out and basically doing a blab on Product Hunt, going to conferences, writing a post, whatever the case may be. Average day, I think all of this differs for a lot of people. If you ask my average day versus Saka's average day, like totally different. I kind of get high going and meeting people and love that part of this job. And so I do an exorbitant number of like coffees. I'm probably the best caffeinated VC you'll ever meet. I love that moment of like meeting people and like being in person. It doesn't scale well. Probably it'd be better for my inbox if I did way less of that. But it's a combination of like coffees. I don't have an office. You're literally sitting in the house. Hey guys. Okay. So you're— it's not an office. It's not a conference room. We don't have a ton of analysts. There's not like a lot of board meetings. We don't have a ton of internal process meetings. It's like meeting entrepreneurs, helping and jamming with our companies. And then like having a lot of like one-on-one and small group sessions with people and talking about product. Okay, great. Thanks, thanks, Matt, for that. One small thing, just the last thing. Go for it. So how often do you end up replying to cold mails and to cold calls as an investor? You gotta stand out pretty well to do cold emails. I actually think that cold emailing somebody today is a sign of like lack of hustle. There's so many ways to get intro to me or to Chris or to almost anybody nowadays. It's like, it's ridiculous how like that is just such a low bar to get a cold email from somebody when they know they could like go and find somebody else and like get an introduction. Like nobody has time today for cold emails, literally nobody. So it's gotta be like an incredibly like standout email, thoughtful, well-written, like puts the content front and center, has an immediate ask. There's a whole bunch of things you can do. Not to say we don't take— like, we're not investing in companies where I don't have a direct connect. Like, I'll reach out, you know, if I see a product I love. You don't have to know us to get that stuff done. It's just the filters are so prevalent now that it's getting a cold is like maybe a sign of like a lack, you know, or a lack of hustle. Anyway, great, great. Thanks, thanks, Matt. Thanks for that. You're awesome. Have a good one, dude. Thank you so much. Let's keep going. Oh, cancel. I'm gonna kick you. It sounds violent to kick you, but I'm doing it. All right, so Eric Thornberg has— I'm gonna do a couple of these like from the side column, which has comments or questions from people. What's something you and Saka disagree on? This one actually, we're just getting into it. Like, He and I disagree a ton on like the value of meetings and coffees and that kind of stuff. I'm a firm believer that like that's how you build really great loose ties, and those ties end up breeding sort of a great deal flow, great sort of muscle memory around what's happening out there, way better to get like insight from people. Chris is sort of a firm believer in asynchronous. The best way to get a response from Chris is like DMs, and then text message, and like email maybe then, and then like way down there is like phone call and FaceTime. I'll give him the credit that like he also barbells out, so he would way rather do like a deep weekend dive with people or take an entrepreneur to Camp Lowercase, which is like our little spot in Truckee where he literally like will have entrepreneurs up and get to know them over a course of a weekend and get way deeper with them. I like, I love meeting people. I, you know, it's, this can be a lonely job when it's just like you and Chris, and we don't have like an office. And so I love getting out there and having conversations with people and like doing it in person. It's where I do my best jam, it's where I do like my best thinking is having like somebody to bounce ideas off of. And so different ways of managing time, like when he first tried to get me into the job, He was like, hey, here are a bunch of hacks for how to avoid meetings. I was like, what do you mean avoid meetings? Like, I love meetings. And so yeah, there's this like war on meetings. I kind of enjoy it. FaceTime is a fun time. Anyway, let's, let's keep these call-ins going. Investor, serial entrepreneur, diehard Knicks fan. I don't know if I can buy that, but Brandon Rubenstein, you're coming in. And then we'll do you, Niv. Brandon, what's going on, man? I, I had— I spoke to a lot of, uh, investors and everyone's really critical about solo founders. For me, it's really difficult to find someone as motivated as me and that's willing to put as much time as I'm willing to put in, in my own project. So it's really difficult for me to find like a co-founder or something like that, but yet I execute. So what's your view? I'm— I still haven't launched my product. What's your view on a solo founder pre-seed? I think First Round has a lot of data on this, and actually a lot of people have put data on this that's just like overwhelmingly in favor of— I think 2 is the optimal number. It's like drop off at 3, I believe. But like 2, you have somebody going with it, you know, the emotional toll of somebody— you know this probably better than anybody because you're probably going through it now, but like it's really hard, right? You're working your brains out, and so having somebody there and empathizing with you who's in the same seat and has the same incentives and alignment, you can push each other. Like, that's a way more sort of a fun way to go through life. But I get you on like having, you know, finding somebody who's motivated in that same direction as you and like has your sort of feel for the product or the market or your drive, like really, really hard. You're gonna have that challenge with anybody you bring onto the team though. And so I— we do both. We've invested in single founder businesses. We don't have a religion around it, but the numbers show that like it's a way stronger investment thesis that you could actually like— yeah, the first round article I think said it all. I mean, I've built a team, but I just headed by myself. Yeah, I think that's possible. You just— you need to like— you need to surround yourself with people who can empathize with you. Who are there from the beginning and are incentivized along the same line. Start to make yourself obsolete as fast as possible in categories of the business that you're not great at. And so find people who are 1,000 times better than you in those categories and like immediately incentivize them correctly and outsource that to all of them. And so like, that's, that's kind of like founder— that should be your job as a founder, period, is just bring on people who are way better than you in all of those categories, right? But like, I would start by focusing on things that you don't like doing. Rather than avoiding doing them. And so, um, like, you have to just, like, uh, like, if you get it, if you get this, like, itch where it's like, I'm procrastinating on something, like, that's a hire, right? Like, those things that, like, you're not superhuman at and you don't love doing, get, get rid of them faster than anybody, uh, and you have to do that more quickly, right? That's the benefit of the co-founding teams is you can complement each other really well. And it's like, some people might love the organization, some people might love the brand building, There's also just a ton that goes into this. You're going to have to like, I don't know if you're a micromanager too, but that's like a lethal cocktail of a lot of the founders I know are just absolute maniacs when it comes to control. You got to do whatever. Because I feel like the people that are around you are very similar to me. I mean, the people that are around me are very similar to me, so bringing on somebody as a co-founder that's similar to me is just Yeah, I'm not sure that's the move at all, right? You gotta— if you're gonna do it, bring on a co-founder that's like similar in the sense of like work ethic, fine, but similar in the sense of skill set. Like, that's a challenge, right? You often want to see like skill sets that are complementary in early co-founding teams. Um, thanks again. Uh, I like your hockey reference. Islanders are cool. Bye. Uh, all right, this is fun. Let's keep it going. Uh, and by the way, I'm reading some of these things on the side. Uh, so if you guys are digging this Great, it's kind of an experiment. We'll keep it going. Niv, who's a Meerkat legend. Hahaha. Hey. Niv, introduce yourself, bud. Hi everyone, I'm Niv. I am formerly of Meerkat, and this is my second week at Product Hunt, although I am live from San Diego. You're on Product Hunt? I emailed you. I missed your email. I'm an ass. I'm sorry. Yeah, so this is my second week. Congrats, dude. Thank you. I'm really— oh my God, the Hoover-Tornberg-Niv combo. Yeah, that's dangerous. I was grinning for like a good 20 minutes when Ryan called me. Like, it was good. Dive in, man. What's your question? So Twitter Moments, um, super excited about it, but what do you make of it kind of so early on? Personally, I think that like the, the, the format of the content seems off because like they're It's inherently vertical, but then it's so in and out in the tweets. I don't know. So what do you make of it? Like, so quickly? Yeah, let's dive in. A bunch of thoughts. So no question, beautiful visually, right? Like, really amazing. Gives Twitter this, like, crazy visual quality. It feels like a photo-realistic— like, photos and videos, living magazine. People called it, like, the newspaper for everything. I like that description of it, but, like, it almost doesn't do it justice in the sense that it's like more than that. It's so much more visually pleasing than any newspaper or media product property we've seen. I think there's missing pieces of the product, but it's early, right? So like V1 of most products is, is a work in progress. You give— you sort of force a higher standard on companies like Twitter, but I kind of love that they're going back to this route of like, let's launch shit, get it out, see how people are interacting with it. I think that speaks really well for it. Twitter polls too, I love they launched that to some people. I wanna get access to it. I think it's a, there are misses, right? Like the fact that you can't like instantly follow in that ecosystem, and like the retweets and faves, and like that stuff isn't built natively into it. Strange, strange product decisions. Hoover made a couple of those points, I thought they were really interesting and smart. You know, the one thing that struck me was like, I kind of feel like it could have been a different product entirely. I feel like you could have broken Moments out à la Facebook strategy of unbundling and created maybe versions of Moments within the Twitter feed, but I actually think it could have been a totally separate app. The advantages of that would have been you can focus on a great form factor there. You can create an entirely different follow graph for categories. You can still weave it into the narrative, weave it into the product in the timeline of Twitter,, but you can actually build notifications maybe in a different way. Like, you might have had, you know, part of the rationale I think for why they broke Messenger out of Facebook was like the notification challenges of like, you have to get 100% of your notifications, but nobody gets all the notifications. And that's what's cool with Meerkat and Periscope, the notifications are such a key part of the distribution. Totally. Moments, especially like the best parts of moments are the live ones, like the sports games and stuff like that. Yeah, I would have loved to see it like, I think there's still a lot they can do with it within the core Twitter app. I love this idea. I think the narrative of Twitter is all of these media platforms that are all tied to the public graph and reframing the narrative of like Twitter is the public graph, but it's like really, really rich content in Vine and Periscope and Moments and like go down the list of all the things that like used to exist in Facebook, but you could literally like explode those out into different product categories. With the fundamental shift being that it's a public graph versus a private graph. I think that's actually a narrative that they could go down. But I love that they've launched it. I love that they pushed it out there. Um, I've been playing with it. It's beautiful. Um, I dig it. And hopefully more to come, and hopefully they make some of these iterations in terms of like, uh, getting the product out there. You're the man, Niv. Congrats on new role, dude. Thank you. Uh, Abe, let's bring you in. Abe Story. And you gotta introduce yourself and go through the whole thing. This is, the Blab product's really beautiful. Abe! How you doing, Matt? You handsome man, talk to me. Thank you. I'm Abe, I'm a student entrepreneur. And I have a few questions for you. First off, thanks for taking the time to do this. Of course. My first question would be, What advice would you give someone as a senior in high school or an 18-year-old very interested in the tech and Silicon Valley space? What advice would I give? Yeah. What advice would you give to yourself during that time? I guess, what advice would I give to myself? You know, 18 is an interesting moment, right? Like, you're right, are you going to college? Go to college. I'm applying. I'm applying. Okay, first, first step, go to college. Uh, all this like stop going to college thing, no, don't do that. Go to college, it's worth it. You'll build great relationships at 18, you'll find a lot about yourself, uh, you'll be happier. The whole skip college thing is BS, don't, don't listen to that. Um, that said, uh, there's a lot you can do while you're in school to like continue to pursue your passion and get build skill sets, right? And so like, um, focus on building hard skill sets try to learn. If you're thinking about like tech and you want to be on the engineering side, it's not a bad path to go down. Find things that like make you an interesting person. So like don't just like try to dive into tech. I think like there's a lot that can become— that can come from like service jobs, that can come from travel international, that can come from those things. Like the next few years are good, about a good period of time for you to focus in on like building yourself into a more compelling person that people want to be around and have conversations with. And think critically, like those are great skills to build for the next 4 years for you. Mentorship, number one, sorry, that should have been number one on the list. Like identify individuals that you can start to add value to and take on and will take you on as mentors. That can be professors, that can be advisors, that can be upperclassmen. Recognize that like that kind of mentorship can come from a lot of people. Don't try to climb too fast, like don't try to rush out of school, don't try to get out of it. If you're gonna go to college, like, you'll have a lot of people who are at your level. There's this tendency to like focus on like the bigger people in tech. Like, build core relationships with the people that you're coming up with and like, man, and spend a lot of time managing at your level and down to build great friendships. Like, those things will last you forever. And in my case, like, I went to college with, with Sam Lessin, who was at Facebook for a long time and now is building his own startup, and he's at Slow Ventures. I went to college with Joe Green, who has done a ton of stuff in tech, and Jessica Lessin. And like, it didn't start with a focus on like, hey, let's network and be future tech buddies together. It was like, hey, we're just gonna find great friendships and people that we care about, and together you become better people. So hopefully that answers your question. Oh, read, read everything. Just continue to read. Participating here is a great start, but like just find like the blogs that you love reading and just get after it. Stay up on it. Uh, you'll have more time now than you ever will in your entire life, so just start diving in. Thank you so much for that. Yeah, you got it. Can I ask one more question if you don't mind? Yeah. So what space or market do you believe is going to be a huge market in the next 5 to 10 years that other people believe is not? Oh, you're going for like the Teal ecosystem question? Sure. I, yeah, that other people don't believe is going to be a big market. Um, it's definitely a TL;DR question. Yeah, that's TL;DR. Uh, that's a long question, Abe. Um, what markets am I— that I think is going to be big that other people don't think is going to be big? It depends on like, like, people are focusing on like, uh, machine learning and messaging Genetics, robotics, technology. You know what, you know what people don't realize? I think people don't realize the number of like dirty industries that are gonna be revolutionized. Like if you have a market cap, a huge market cap, and you're in a category that's not sexy, I love the not sexy industries. One of the most interesting ones that we, that we didn't invest in because it was a little further along, but is really interesting, is in waste management. Now, when you— if you ask me to like talk and have an interesting conversation about like waste management, it's gonna be hard. If I told you like self-storage was gonna be one of our most interesting investments, like you probably look at me cross-eyed. But those categories where it's like just really shitty dirty industries that nobody's paid attention to, like it's really fun to talk about like communication and messaging and machine learning and all those things. I love like huge swaths of our economy that are gonna be totally revolutionized because the people running those big businesses and brands like never had, uh, you know, a social graph and wouldn't know the first thing about like, uh, you know, code. And like, those are the categories that I'm excited about. And so, um, I don't know if that answers your question, but like, that's where I'm starting. That makes a lot of sense. Thank you. Um, yeah, man, thanks. Thank you very much, Matt. Hey, take care. You got it, bro. Um, let's get some, some girls in the mix if we could. Um, love to have See if any women came in. Dylan, do people tell you all the time that you look like the Silicon Valley version of Macklemore? Yeah, let's answer that one. Yeah, they do. I think Greg Bettinelli has put out a few of those. You know, there's a story where I'm at a Medieval Times wearing a weird hat for my friend D.A. Wallach's birthday, and I'm standing in a circle with two famous musicians and a very famous entrepreneur, and one of the guys at the thing walks up to me and says, like, "Good sir, might I have your autograph?" And I'm like, "No, why is he talking to me? Maybe I'm gonna get to go play with a falcon or jam with one of the knights. Be really cool." And these two people are famous, he's asking me for my autograph, that's pretty awesome, 'cause nobody knows who the hell I am, and I go up and I'm like, "Sure, man, of course." Like, this is gonna be sweet. Part of the act, signed my name, Matt Mazzeo, on the arm. And he looks at me, he's like, good sir. And I'm like, yes, kind knight. He goes, is this your real name? And I'm like, yeah, that's my name, Matt. He's like, but sir, are you not Macklemore? And yeah, so I get that a lot. Thanks for that, Dylan, appreciated that. Let's do— Austin Gugliano. Luliano? Let's do that. Oh, what? I said thank you for saying my name. So I was cooking, so I had to turn the heat off. Oh, what's going on, man? Hey, my name's Austin Gugliano. I run the website dscience.co. My question for you, Matt, is if you were the CEO of Twitter, Twitter, what would you do to change it around? Jesus. I think, I wish Chris had a blog post about that. He did have a blog post about that. Let's see, what would I do to change it around? We talked a little bit about this. I think he, If let's not compare myself to— let's not put like put a comparison of like Jack or Dick or any of those people in there. What would I do to turn it around? I think they're actually like focused on all the right things right now, like launching great products, iterating faster, making a leaner engineering team, focusing on richer media. Like I love the idea of like the richer media categories. And I think that narrative hasn't necessarily fallen through the right way because these products Steam sort of like satellite right now, but like I think Vine is an extraordinarily compelling product. I think, um, um, what's it called, Periscope is an extremely comparing, compelling product. I think Moments is great product. Like there are all these different use cases built on top of the massive information graph. And so I would spend a lot of time thinking about the content vertical that you can start to build and curate, um, out of what is the current massive fire hose. And I think that goes into purchase. I think that goes into like all of those things. I also think they're just gonna start making really interesting strides on the video ecosystem. Like, I think they made a huge step by starting to think about talent and how talent gets compensated there. I think people underestimate how valuable that was to YouTube dominating in the early days of video. And I think that move is like, kind of went, it went to the news and it didn't get thrown out there as massively as it should have, because like the idea of like aligning incentives with your biggest content creators is really, really interesting to me. And so those are things that I would focus on. Thank God I'm not. Thanks for the question. I lost you, sorry. Let's see more questions. Bum bum bum. We started the first one. Blah blah blah. Is Chris still picking deals? Let's do this. I don't know what this question is. Dovi, Dunhua Capital. Hey Matt, is Chris still picking deals? How come you guys can manage and scan so many early-stage deals with only 2 partners? Do you really sleep? We started our first one with $90 million in assets. Understand, I don't know the rest of the question. Yeah, I sleep. I don't know, this is like the thing that I love to do more than anything else in the world, so I get to do it. All the time, and it's, it's a lot of fun. I get to like be with entrepreneurs and ask them really fun questions and like have debates with people who are way smarter than me and pick their brains. And so it's kind of what I do by deep— like, it's what I would do by default if I could. So, uh, it doesn't feel like crazy work to me. I think if this felt like work, it'd be a really exhausting job, but I love those conversations, those moments. I can kind of do it, um, without getting tired. I feel more energized by having those conversations. Uh, you build pattern matching. I know that's like a terrible VC term for like, how do you identify things that you love? But like, you start doing rubrics around talent pattern matching. It's frankly, you start to pay attention to signals earlier for things that you really want to dive into. We have great network of founders and co-investors that we co-invest alongside. Part of it is that I'm also— I'm built as a— we're built as a collaborative fund. And so we can sort of partner in and dive in with other teams. We don't have to take the entirety of a round because we're relatively small fund. This last fund, which we closed end of last year, is only is a little under $50 million. And so we can kind of like piggyback and dive in without having to take— we don't take board seats. I think that helps. I don't think we have a religion around that stuff. And frankly, at the earliest stages, the best stuff happens outside of boardrooms. So we do a few things structurally to help manage time. Paying attention to signals, where the deal's coming in from, is their product live, can you play with it? Like those things help you build faster momentum around source, around deal analysis. And luckily more and more of the deals that we're seeing now, even at the pre-seed stage, are beyond just ideation or at like a product live. I can tell pretty quickly by playing with the product how I feel about it and how the story is being built by the founders. I love it, those things. Thanks for the question, Toby. Catherine Short, KSS Creations. Hey, how are you? You always come to these live things that I do on like Periscope and Meerkat, and I love that. Thank you for doing it. Well, I try. I actually have class in 30 minutes, so— Oh, congrats! What are you taking a class in? Um, actually I'm just taking general studies right now, but I'm a photographer, so— Awesome. I don't know, something to do in my spare time. I'm taking a government class with my sister right now. I never took like Harvard's intro to US politics and neither did she. And so we're doing it on edX right now. Oh, cool. My next class is airbrushing. Cool. I'm a huge fan of like extracurricular classes. I love that. Lay it on me. What's your question, Catherine? What made you switch hats from becoming like a creative agent to working for Chris and doing, doing this sort of thing? Um, well, so I was always like fast, I was always doing this. So CA, I wasn't like your traditional agent. So my job was actually like helping start companies there. I opened an office in San Francisco to basically start covering venture the way that colleagues of mine covered studios, networks, sports teams, leagues, and brands. I covered venture funds, entrepreneurs, sometimes doing outsourced business development for tech companies like Tencent and Ustream and RockYou and a bunch of others. And then eventually starting companies from scratch from within CA where we had the opportunity to bring in brand partners or clients. And so we started companies like Funny or Die there where we were building business plan, raising venture funding, bringing in management, helping operate those companies in the early days. And so I loved sort of being in both of those worlds and I love the company. The clients are the most fun, super creative. I thought I would die in a suit in that Marvel building. But, um, yeah, every once in a while, um, you find somebody who, like, makes you, uh, an offer that you sort of can't refuse. And, uh, and, like, life pivots around those moments. And so when Chris asked me to come in as his partner, I knew I'd have an incredible mentor. I'd have freedom. It's kind of like, um, you know, Willy Wonka, you know, bringing you into his, uh, his factory and just being like, Here's the brand, here's how we do it, I'm going to teach you everything you don't know, and you're going to be in the driver's seat. That's something you kind of can't turn away. It wasn't planned, it sort of came out of left field, and it's been the best decision I ever made. I love it, and I'm really lucky to do it. That's how it happened. It wasn't the shirts? His cowboy shirt? Yes, his frat shirt. He loves to make fun of me because I asked in the very early days, like, do I have to wear a cowboy shirt? Because if so, that's deal breaker. That's not part of the attire. No, it's definitely, it's definitely not, uh, you know, the cowboy shirts. His style choices, uh, are not my fave, but, uh, that's, that's it. That's his bit. Uh, Catherine, it's great to see your face. Enjoy class. Thank you. Thanks. Have a good day. Um, all right, let's keep it going. Um, are there any other questions over here that we should— what does it mean to be a hustler? Let's do one of these. Uh, what does it mean to be a hustler? It's kind of unfair because I get to pick the questions. Answer question. Uh, Avery, Matt, what does it mean to be a hustler? To be a hustler, uh, a bunch of different things. Um, The basics of hustling are just like, people talk about like working longer, working harder. I think those are like platitudes, frankly. I don't think that's actually what being a hustler necessarily means. I think there's a bunch of different ways that you could go about it, but like, I think being a hustler starts with adding value to other people without asking for anything in return in the short term. Like that, for me, is like scrappy, awesome hustle. It's not just like breaking down doors and not taking no for an answer. Like, those things I don't think are necessarily it. I think a lot of it comes from starting to add value to other people. And like, there's a moment that happens when you complete a task or you have an objective in front of you where you're like, okay, I'm done. I completed objective X, I'm on to objective Y. I'm just gonna keep moving. And there's another moment that happens if you're a real hustler where you say, I'm gonna go one step further to delight on objective X. And like that moment of pause that forces you not just to work harder and do more and move to the next thing and check things off on a task list, but to like stop and be creative about adding more value after the fact is like, I think, what differentiates— like, it's the handwritten thank you note. It's like the attention to detail after the fact when you do those things that I think like can differentiate those hustlers. Not shortcuts, I think people talk about shortcuts as like a hack. Hustler used to have like a really bad connotation until Gary Vee like co-opted it and made it like the primacy of life. But like, I think it's those extra moments, like the extra detail, attention to detail can differentiate somebody as a true hustler. That's actually a lot of the hustle that I look for. And actually I brought on a coordinator at Lowercase. It's sort of one of our first hires. Really, really smart guy named Jackson Dahl. Matt Mazzeo, who impressed the hell out of me because he took notes and summarized those notes after we had a coffee. Not only that, but like posted them out and they were really thought— somehow out of an hour-long coffee ripped apart sort of the most poignant things. He had great insight, great brain, but that extra moment of hustle and like synthesizing the information after the fact and adding value even though it wasn't like required, nobody asked, nobody said, impressed the hell out of me. I think the extra step differentiates somebody who's just a hard worker from a hustler. Boom. Let's keep it going. Sean Greene. Sean Greene! Oh, and then we'll do Kanye. Kanye! I'm in LA. Sean, what's going on? Are you in LA? I'm good, man. Where in the world are you? Okay, we've got to connect. Bradley! Brad! Well, you just did. Brad Feld said he was gonna see if he could reach out to you. Done. And see if we can actually sit down. Do you know Brad? Yes. Okay, Brad Feld's awesome. Yeah, Brad's a huge supporter of the fund and a great guy. The books he writes, you know, the first reading material you'll get as a young VC. Nice, nice, nice. Thank you for, uh, selecting those books when I first started. Um, and, uh, one of the things is, is who are your mentors? That's what I want to know. And, and when you sit down with them, um, how do you prep and what are you looking to take away from your mentors? And, uh, and then number 2 is like, from your advisory board, like, what are the top things that, that, uh, founders should look to extract or to get or to leverage from their advisors? Oh, wow. Good one, man. Um, how do— so I, I'm the— like, the— I think the thing that has defined my path more than anything else is finding those mentors. I think that's like one of the biggest challenges today. And like, I believe that almost every business today is an apprentice business, and you have to find those people to like pull you up and beat the hell out of you along the way. And like take enough of an interest to make you better. And so, I spent, like, if I could focus on one thing for, like, that's the kid who asked earlier, like, what should I be focused on as a high school kid? Like, mentorship is everything. I'm like the luckiest person ever to have gotten and found a bunch of these mentors. And so, I could go down a list, but it's like, I mean, Sock is there. Matt Mazzeo. Hustler beyond belief. Matt Mazzeo, bless her heart, can't get on Facebook, doesn't, can't, you know, but she's a killer. Michael Yanover, Richard Lovett, Michael Rubel, Brian Lord, the guys at CA, the partners there, Doc, like Kevin Huvane. I had like the craziest group of this team at CA. Who were the best agents you'd ever meet in your entire life, and great, incredible people, like, just to their core, amazing people, who took a bet on me and let me sort of run wild in all things tech and digital when people weren't paying attention. And like, you know, it was sort of this mentorship of like letting me have enough rope to hang myself, and still beat me up when I needed it. Like, I'd go into every meeting with them, you want prep? I'd go into review meetings, with those mentors, and I'd ask what I could be doing better every single time. I— Suser and I talk about this. He's been a great mentor too. Like, I asked them to beat the shit out of me. I think I say it like that, beat the shit out of me every time. What do I prep in addition? I usually try to go in there with like something that I can like do to add that. You always do your homework on all of those meetings, so always find out what they've been up to and like have an opinion or have a thought on how you would how you could help or deliver value to. In the early days, it's like all of— like I said this earlier— all about delivering value first before ever asking for anything. Not everybody's gonna be your mentor. You can't ask somebody to be your mentor. That's like kind of weird and creepy. But you can get like, uh, you can get a lot by just like doing stuff for other people. In the early days at CA, like, I'd go into people's offices and, uh, I just like— I knew how to use PowerPoint really well, so I'd like make up PowerPoint decks for them, like, who aren't my agents, just people that I could help out on. Um, and so I don't know, like, that kind of stuff. Um, Ed Hu and Tom Hutnett, uh, Tom Hutnett from, uh, my high school were great mentors. I had a professor named Ellsworth Firsch, uh, who called me Mr. Mazzeo through college. Ellsworth was a PhD in English, law, and psychology, one of the first forensic psychologists ever, helped define that, uh, division for the FBI. Wow. And also taught me sort of an entire class on psych and law, which I almost failed, and then an independent study. I was very fortunate to have people who took bets on me along the way, and it's like one of the things I'm most grateful for. Made me way better. Yeah, so hopefully that answers your question. We got another one about advisory. On our advisory, both who we mentioned and people who remain unmentioned, and I was wondering You know, we put out right now, we're trying to put out a biweekly recap and, you know, just trying to figure out, you know, who can, like, how to extract the most value from your advisory. Like, what are your points regarding that? Yeah. Okay, so communication is everything. So, like, as fast as you can get updates out, the better you'll be. Stay in front of those people at all times. Like, we spend a lot of time with our founders teaching them how to write like those investor updates and how to make it public and how to structure them so you're constantly like, feed them the right information and then put asks in every one, specific asks. Like, and make— everybody's busy, everybody's crazy busy. And so do as much of the work upfront for those people. I know that they're incentivized and want you to succeed, but like, There's a difference between the founder that says, "Hey guys, do you have anybody that could be a great designer or developer? I need help recruiting." And then, you know, the one who says, "Here's the social media post that you should put out," alongside like an ask for that job. Like, make it easy to help. Oh, thank yous and shoutouts create social pressure. And so positive reinforcement for the investors that are doing stuff. Everybody who's an investor looks at that list of other co-investors and says like, you know, oh, that person's getting shoutouts. I don't want to be the freeloader, the lazy freeloader, because Chris and I will remember that shit of who are the lazy freeloaders on every deal. And, uh, and that's your— the only way you differentiate today is are you adding value. And so giving back credit and due, uh, for those, uh, for those moments is, uh, is important. Um, what else do I have for you? Um, know the strengths and weaknesses of your investor and advisory group as you're going into it. And like tailor your questions to those specific people. Yeah, help, and are you a fan of contemporary art? Does that help? Okay. Oh no, wait. Okay. I'm a LACMA member. We should grab coffee. No big deal. I'll hit you up. Again, time you ask me out on a date, Sean. You wanna go to LACMA? Um, that rain exhibit is crazy. I want to see that rain exhibit, man. I got to see the downpour rain. That's all I got. John, I love you. I'm kicking you. All right, Kanye. Kanye, he's the best. The people that don't know Kanye, I'd love to introduce him. He's the happiest VC. Look at that smile! Alright, let's do it, let's do it, let's do it. My concern and challenge as another young VC is around feedback loops and the relationship between inputs and outputs. So I'm a young person, I want to put a coin in the machine and get my candy out. And as a VC, I feel like I put my coin in the machine, wait 7 years, and then get my candy out. 10 years, 12 years with late-stage financing. Right? And gosh, I feel like it's really hard to build learning cycles and as a result build wisdom as a young VC that way. And I'm wondering, how do you, A, find ways to hack getting wisdom more quickly, and B, how do you just manage that psychologically? 'Cause I feel like I don't have any output and so I don't have any idea how the hell I'm doing. Yeah, not only that, but like, orienting out any signals you might pay attention to get distorted in up and down cycles, right? Like everybody looks like a genius right now because there's so much late stage financing sloshing around that like, it makes it even harder to pay attention to the proxy signals like Series A, Series B, follow-on financing might not be the biggest cue anymore. Paper gains are nice to have but doesn't correlate. So what do you do? Honestly, I struggle with it too. I think I benefit a lot from having somebody who's been in this cycle for almost 10 years now and sort of can keep me focused on like the things that matter. Like you focus on process, not results, and you hope that the results come there. Like focus really in on like Building strong thesis for the companies that you're backing, things that you're proud of regardless necessarily of outcome. Like, sometimes you can't control those crazy exits at the end. Do as much homework in advance in terms of like trying to avoid the misses. Mm-hmm. What else? You know, the things you can focus on that I think will even out in the long run are like, are founders recommending you for future fundings of like their friends? Are you getting a founder who's maybe a second-time founder coming back to you? If this job is 3 things, right? It's like site, selection, and service. You can build those processes better and better, right? And so like, am I seeing all the deals that I want to see? Are there deals going by me? Like, measure yourself based on that because that's something you can impact immediately. The service, you know, selection is the hardest piece of this because sometimes you don't, you don't know. You can track some of those things with follow-on financing. Again, like we talked about, I think it's harder than ever to get that feedback loop down, but you can start to see indications earlier. And so like acknowledge, acknowledge your misses faster and see if you can learn from those. And then the service piece is the one you can control the most, right? Like this is the one that feedbacks, that feeds back into all of those other categories. And so like, are you getting those shoutouts on founder emails? Are you getting the founders being like, hey, you know, Here's the 3 seed stage people, and I, you know, you and I have worked together on a couple now, and I see your name on a lot of those, so you're kicking ass on it. And you're known and traveling, and like, you're on the, you know, you're out there and people know you. And so I'm— my gut says that you're seeing a lot more deals because your name gets brought up every single time. And I see you, you know, you and I are like user zero on a lot of these platforms that like, you can tell that you're hustling to get on those things. And so I think the feedback loops you pay attention to are like recommendations from founders and feedback from mentors who have been through a couple cycles. I spend a lot of time trying to get that feedback. Ask people to beat the shit out of you because the other stuff either is distorted or takes too long. I liked when you said that before. Well, and thank you for those nice words. I'm looking for that. You are obviously somebody I look up to as a peer and as a mentor. It means a lot to hear you say that. I love you, Matt. Very, very, very last question. Yeah, keep it going. How you doing? How am I doing? I'm great, man. I'm like happy, healthy. My family's doing well. Brother, sister are happy, healthy. Mom's healthy, dad's healthy. I got good friends. I love the job. I might be the luckiest kid you know, man. It's a good time. It's— All right, I'll stop hogging the mic. Thanks, man. You're the man. Bye. Who else we got in here? Does anybody want to come in and play around a little bit in this thing? Sorry, I'm looking at— so on the sidebar, I don't know if you guys can see these, I'm looking at like the most popular questions. Okay, let's go with this, the most popular one right now. Abe's story. Oh, you already got one. Damn, I already clicked. What is one thing you hate to see founders do say during an initial VC meeting and one thing you love? Oh, so one thing I hate is like founders who try to rush you into making decisions based on false timing pressure or founders that will lie about the realities of a fundraising round. This industry is really, really small. We collaborate with everybody. If you think you're gonna sort of get one over or push people into a decision, I get no FOMO in moments like that. I would just sooner not do it and I pass all the time. Great deals because the timing wasn't there for me to build my thesis strongly enough, and I'm not rushing deals, and I'd rather not be hasty in making those decisions. The other, the other thing that I, that I love to see is— and I asked, especially in the early stage, you sort of are as much doing a psychological analysis of the founders as you are a business analysis of the company. And so I ask a lot of sort of somewhat vague questions that I think trip people up, but one of them is like, what's your vision? What does success look like to you in those moments? And like, you can sort of tell the mercenaries from the visionaries, like the people who are, who believe that success is tied to the outcome of the business as an exit. Like, we believe we'll be acquired by X, or we believe this is, you know, a quick turnaround. Doesn't get me going, doesn't make me excited about working on a product like that. We're not looking for those. I get really excited when the founder talks about solving that problem that they're setting out to forever and eradicating a problem. And like, that is really, really exciting to me. It's like, when you measure your success and don't reference the problem that you're trying to solve, it's a key for me, and I probably shouldn't be saying that because it's one of the things that maybe people optimize for now, but like, that's become one of the things that helps me really sort of flip up like a little bit of like who's gonna be in this for the right reasons. Because when that exit doesn't happen in 2 years and you're struggling to raise your bridge or Series A and that flip isn't there, the thing that keeps you grinding is gonna be like the problem still exists. And we're solving it the best way we know how, and nobody solves it better than us, and I believe the problem is worth solving. And so those are the things that I think motivate really great founders, not the, not the exit. At least one of the things I found. Thanks, Abe. All right, let's— David Diamond, you've been in here for a while and you're from Ireland. Chris would be really upset if I didn't bring you in. Hey, David, what's going on? Pick a card. You a designer? Yeah, I'm a designer. I'll stick to your intro rule. So I'm a 15-year-old founder of Divi. I'll give you background on that later. Yeah, and I'm a designer from Dublin. I would call myself a hustler. Pardon? You skipped your quinceañera for founding a company? Yeah, exactly. I didn't really see the point in the whole high school thing. So yeah, um, so like rebound question on that, um, at the end of that question it said, um, what would you give, what advice would you give to your 18-year-old self? Um, sort of one loosely connected to that, what advice would you give to younger founders in general and what should they be working on? What experience should they be gaining other than the mentorship? I know that you talked about that before. Yeah, I, again, like, there are outliers here that have become lionized, I think, in our society, and we talk a lot about those things. I think you have, you might have like this crazy insight on a product that you believe you have the vision on how to solve, and we love talking about those, those founders, and there, there are some incredible examples. You don't have to be old to start a business nowadays, right? You can have that great insight and understand human nature, launch a product, and scale that product to millions of users, and not have to be an MBA grad to do any of that. And so, like, if you're motivated and that's what you want to do, fantastic. But I firmly believe— and you can build, by the way, incredible skills in the process of doing that. And I don't believe that you necessarily have to have formalized education. I think a lot of our educational process has failed sort of this generation and generations before. But I do believe in building those hard skill sets and in a rigorous process towards self-reflection that I think comes from academia and the— and self-questioning. And so, like, the other thing is, like, a lot of friendships come out of that experience that you might miss, right? Like, you're in this bubble. Being a founder, you put yourself in this crazy bubble where you're like, away from people, where you aren't necessarily like seeing the broader universe, you go so tunnel vision. And I see it with my own founders, even in their own ecosystem where they like miss a lot of the world happening around them. Don't miss that stuff. You don't get 15 back, and so like still continue to build yourself into a really interesting human being, not just build products. You're still in that stage of like you are the product. Yeah. Focus on that. And so like, whatever product you're building, like, make sure that it goes— is accretive to you as an individual, the stories you're telling, to the relationships you're building, to the hard skills that you're nailing. Uh, I wouldn't judge performance of like this company as my sole output. I would judge like the externality of like, am I getting better at the things that matter to me? And sometimes at 15, just so you know, I was like, like in a in a file room in some like temp agency. I was like tutoring chemistry and like doing like totally disparate things that would never have come up, you know, in my career today. But like those service jobs and like made me better over time. And so if this is what you're passionate about, push it. Yeah. Go for it. But don't forget like all of these other things will make you much better. Yeah, like I'm gaining experience. Um, like I'm pretty much— I think it's unhealthy the amount of work that I'm doing at the moment, but like I'm just getting into like everything that I can and just designing. Somebody says, oh, I need something designed, I'm just like, I'll do it. And so I'm just like making all the connections I can, interning everywhere. Like I'm interning at Intercom, which has been an amazing experience. Um, traction on that product. Yeah. But yeah, I get what you're saying. But it's really what I'm passionate about, so it's hard to do something else. No, listen, if this is your thing, this is what you're passionate about, you're gonna push it, I'm all for it. I'm not telling you not to do it. What I'm telling you is we have an imbalance in this ecosystem. And you have to be a founder, it's almost like this cult of imbalance, right? You talk about the 100-hour weeks, and you gotta hustle, and you gotta be in it, and it's gotta be deep. And like at 15, like, you should be thinking about a plethora of things to make you a well-rounded, balanced individual. Because the earlier you dive in on single categories— this is why I'm a firm believer in generalized liberal arts education too. The sooner you dive in, the more you bubble yourself. You live in this bubble of social media anyway, where you start to like— the feedback loops of personalization mean you don't get exposed to as much other shit. And I think early on it's really important to get exposed to other shit. Yeah, definitely. Cheers, man. Thanks a lot for your time. Yeah, enjoy Dublin. All right, let's keep a couple more going. I don't know how long we said we'd do this for, but it's 1 o'clock. We gotta get back to work. Let's do Michael Doran. Hey, Michael, nice to meet you, man. All I was working and all my friends started pinging me on Slack because you're talking about my favorite subject, which is mentorship. Yeah, I've been a corporate recruiter for 20 years and I personally mentored about a dozen people and I've seen phenomenal results. So people who are willing to listen and really are eager to learn. But one thing I've noticed is that, is that there's— and you kind of mentioned this too— is that mentorship, mentorship discovery is broken online. You made the comment a few minutes ago, you know, like asking someone to be your mentor is really, really creepy. But— and people widely acknowledge that mentorship is really needed, but yet it's so difficult to get a mentor. I got one who was CHRO of Aon, and it was just because I was at the right place at the right time and he recognized me for what I was and took some time to invest in me. Made a huge difference. I wanted to just ask if that was a problem that you see as well. Nope, disagree. I think it's gotten better. I think it's easier than ever to find great mentors. I think Twitter, social, seeing the graphs out there of who's connected to who means that you can have warm introductions to almost anybody. I think you can start to contribute and ask questions and be value-add without having to be overbearing. I think you can start to showcase and add value to people faster and more demonstrably than ever before. And so I actually think it's gotten easier than ever to find whoever you really want to be your mentor. I take a look at like what Elliot Bisnow has built at Summit Series in, you know, whatever it is now, 7 years, and he literally owns a mountain. But it started with the idea of like, I want to find the 5 entrepreneurs who I love the most, and I'm going to literally fly them to a conference that I'm going to put on my credit card so that they'll be It'll be fun for them, they'll all enjoy the experience, and eventually they'll become mentors and friends and all of those things. But he started just by reaching out over digital. I think you have more insight, and so the tools at your disposal, it's about the approach that you have. I think that's the problem, is that nobody's created this brand around how do you get a mentor, what's the process to getting a mentor. It's like, um, that's what I'm trying to demystify a little bit, which is that like it literally starts with like finding people out there that you respect, who have a similar moral compass or a drive, or that you want feedback from in the long run, and commit to spending real time making their life better or the life of something they care about better. And they will eventually notice that and give you feedback. Like, if I were trying to break into a big VC fund today, I would start— if the 3 things that matter in VC are like site selection and service, which I said to Kanye earlier, I would start by going and adding value to all of those portfolio companies that that partner that I want to be my mentor in the future sits on, and I would outvalue all of the other venture funds. I would just go, I would deliver whatever it takes. Like the Ryan Graves approach to like, hey Foursquare, I started doing BD on your behalf, here we go. Or like, hey Travis, hire me at Uber, like I'm already doing this hustle anyway. Like, I would just start by getting into the shoutouts of every founder email being like, By the way, we're not paying this person, but they've been more valuable than all of our other, all of our other investors combined. Like, you can do that and you can get those feedback loops in, and that's the kind of signal that like drives you into, into those moments. But like, I actually think you can, you have more insight nowadays than ever. Yeah, you have more insight, but I think that I kind of agree with you in a sense that there needs to be a little bit more organized system and kind of enabling those, those those relationships and those connections, or maybe giving the information to the people who haven't gotten to that point or heard you talk or someone else talk that can kind of teach them what they need to do to start getting on the people's radar? Yeah, I think, again, like, I think it's a really simple formula. Identify the people that you, that you want to learn from and, and have taken interest in you, uh, see what matters to them most. Like, and if it's all out there, we're all talking about like the products that we care about or the causes that are important to us, You can find more insight into the psychology of anybody today than ever before. Start adding value to the people in that person's orbit or that person directly, and then ask for time. Yeah. And if you follow that process, I think you can actually build pretty incredible mentors, and it builds, it scales on itself, right? So you like find one person, and eventually they start, like you start getting better and better at doing this. I think it's like, that's like step by step of what I would do. Got it. Thanks, Michael. Awesome, thanks for your time. Nice meeting you. Nice to meet you too. Bang, bang, bang. All right, what time did we say we'd do this till? Are we over? No? Still 200 people here. Hey, Don! Hey. Yeah, you got an incredible microphone. Did I lose you? Was it the microphone joke? Oh, you know what? Here. Am I there? Can you hear me? Yeah, I got you. Sorry. Okay, great, great, great. So, uh, my name is Dawn Carter. I'm the director of marketing. Dawn, you keep— yeah, you keep going in and out. Sorry. Oh, I'm dying. Oh my gosh. Bring it. Okay. Hey, hey, hey. So if you can hear me, so I just have to say the, the barriers have been removed nowadays. You are so spot on. So that people that are reinventing themselves or are connectors by nature, you literally just bring value. And I think being the first ones, so you have zero followers on some of these new platforms. If it is a way that you just hit it spot on without asking. So anyway, I just had— that's it? No question? Dawn, you're breaking up. We're breaking up. You're getting kicked. Am I breaking up? Dawn was too slow. Sorry. Ooh, see, I love esports. Let's dive in here. Cory. Hello, so I'm Cory. Cory. I do— I was doing esports gambling. Oh God, we don't touch gambling businesses, Corey. Uh, I, I pivoted it. We didn't do gambling anymore, we do esports media. I love that. I'm a League of Legends fan, and, uh, I think soon I'll have an announcement to make in that space. I've made a few, uh, investments in that category. Hopefully one's called Esports Clips. No, that's what, that's what we're called. Um, I'm just wondering, like, we're getting ready to raise like a $600K seed round And I'm wondering, how do you normally tell founders to go about reaching out to investors, like early seed kind of round investors? Like I have a lot of reach with VCs, but they're just like, it's too early. Like we would be more like a Series A. Know who you're going after in terms of like fit, get social proof, create FOMO with some of those investors, 'cause that drives a lot of quick investment decisions early. Find people who are passionate about esports. Not that hard. There's a bunch of early investors who are making angel investments in complementary businesses in esports that you can get into nowadays. Build as much social proof for yourself and for the product or for the category that you're in. Build a really strong narrative for why you're the best in that category. Hopefully you've got all those materials in place. The more you can do in terms of proof point while bootstrap, the better. So if that's like I built a team and now we're ready to go. Or it's, I built a team and a product. Fantastic. Yeah, we, we— I built a team and a product and launched, and we have X many X users and they love us. All of those things are like great steps towards like building a more defined narrative. And so like whoever you're talking to, like each investor fits a different risk profile, identify investors who fit along your risk profile. And so, early angels or friends and family might be willing to take a deeper risk on you because you are compelling and because they love you and they want to do it without having the proof points there and they've known you for what looks like 25 years. But, um, so I, uh, side question on the FOMO, do you feel like it's, uh, like, how do you, how, what's the best way for founders to emphasize the FOMO? Is it really like the closing of the round day? Is it like the industry it's in? Is it like just Can't bullshit on any of it. FOMO gets created by like, um, everybody talks, right? So like, you can pick up a phone and call almost any other investor. It's all out there. Everybody's reachable. And so no bullshit, just like FOMO gets created by, by like making those incremental steps and then getting close. So you need to have somebody take the first leap or like the first little slug of it, and then several like, uh, and then start having that conversation with other, other investors saying like, hey, this This is gonna move, this is gonna go. We need, I just don't believe in like the false dates. I don't believe— Oh, I didn't even mean false. I just meant like, is it really like, listen, you know, you get your lead and then it's like, listen, this is good to go, this is great close, this is who we have, or is it before you even have your lead, it's just more like, this is the right team, right industry. No, sorry, I'll be more specific. It doesn't start with FOMO, it starts with conviction from one person. Or a group of people, and those people take it, take it early. And after that, you can like, to get to close, you can drive FOMO quickly if you, if you pull the right levers. But like, at the beginning, uh, I, I think it, especially the seed stage, um, where people are willing to sit back a little bit, it's conviction. Either people who have conviction in you or conviction in your product or both. Hopefully both. Okay, that was my question. You got it. Hey, have a good one. Oh, we got Sean. Sean! I'm giving you props. Are you hanging in there? You sweating? No, this is fun. We got a good crew in here, man. A bunch of good friends came in. It was fun. This is good. You've been going an hour strong, so I just want to let you know, if you need to hop off, don't worry. You're not a jerk if you do need to leave. But I did want to pull one question in here that I I would have asked myself, but Elizabeth already typed it, which was, what was your first job? First job, um, first job ever. Oh, by the way, uh, for people that don't know, Sean built Blab. Uh, uh, Sean's a good buddy, works in Monkey Inferno, the team behind this, partnered with Michael Birch. He's built an incredible product, uh, I think understands live streaming and video formats and sort of the evolution of this space. As well as anybody I've talked to. And so, high five to Sean for building a really awesome product, dude. Thanks for the intro, dude. What was my first job? I guess I was an assistant in my mom's real estate agency on the weekends. So my mom is an assistant to a real estate agent, has been since I was a little kid. I, what's it called, I would go in on the weekends because I worked from like 9 AM to 5 and do homework at the desk and basically get to do all of my homework while getting paid and just manage the desk. And then I could do my sports, you know, I played water polo or whatever, go out at night and have a blast. I made way more money than I ever thought I would as a little kid. I also was a chemistry tutor for a long time. I'm a big chem nerd, loved it, like Chem Olympiad as a kid. We could go heavy metal theory all day long. I love that shit. And then later I was a, what's it called, I ran Harvard Student Agency Cleaners. So I ran a dry cleaners. And then after college, first job after college was I was in the mailroom at CA. I was an assistant to an assistant and then got into the mailroom at CA. That was like first real career job. 8 years there, and here we go. Love it, cool. No, I appreciate that. I mean, I know Chris has talked about this before and you mentioned it earlier, which is you know, having different life experiences before you kind of hone in on what you're going to do for maybe 20 years. So I tell everybody to go study abroad, go live somewhere else, go get some other experience, go work a shitty job. And I wanted to know if you had had any of those shitty jobs under your belt. Oh, no question. I had all of those shitty jobs. Like, by the way, I cleaned toilets for the reunions so that I could then be a bellhop at the reunions and make like a little bit of cash around the alumni stuff. There was no shame in that space. Whatever it took to get the job done. Very cool. Well, I'll let you go, man. Hey, man, thanks again for putting this together. Yeah, the live abroad, I wanna reemphasize that. We actually take that as a major filter for a lot of our founders, is like, have you spent time at the mercy of another culture? Had been forced out of your own bubble. I lived in New Zealand as a kid. I spent a year in the South Island of New Zealand in a town with 2,000 people called Arrowtown, and it was like an old gold mining town. And it, uh, for a kid who grew up in LA and big city, uh, it was the greatest change of pace I ever could have asked for. And I think made me a much, much better person for having that experience. Um, love New Zealand. All right, we're gonna do, uh, we're gonna do last one, uh, and then we're gonna jam off of here. Let's see. Rob. Hi, Elizabeth. Hey, Rob. What's going on? Cool. So I run a design agency that basically— a product design agency, so industrial, physical stuff. What would you say— I know a lot of your investments in digital products. What would you say the main difference is between physical products and digital-based startups? What are the main differences in risk? What's the main differences in risk? Yeah, and sort of any advice you have for like startups wanting to go into the product space? Are you asking about like startups focused on software versus focused on hardware? Yeah, exactly. Yeah, yeah. The calculation that you're making there? Yeah. We don't do a ton of hardware investments, candidly. It's not a category that we're as well-versed in. We've done a couple, one that I, I can't quite announce yet, um, but the, the hardware space, I mean, like, again, you know, if you talk to, talk to a few people, uh, Nate Bossard at Coastal Ventures, I think, has a really great thesis around like physical products that we're going to start to see the same shift and disruption around physical products that we've seen recently in software products, like iterative design, 3D printing, cost of manufacturing, maybe the macro shift like manufacturing coming back to the US and Mexico. Like doing to physical products what software has done to a lot of other businesses recently. We tend to focus on software stuff just because the opportunity to scale is just so massive today. But I, you know, scale, measurement, you lack some of the logistical challenges there. Physical products, it's really hard to get. And not only that, but like, I've seen a lot of hardware products lately that I think are really, really cool and interesting. Like Lily, I think is one of the coolest products ever. It's really awesome. If you haven't seen it, go check it out. It's an amazing little broom that flies up. The video was spectacular. And I would totally be a buyer of that product, right? And I think, like, I go on Kickstarter more than anybody and have probably, you know, impulsed backed, like, more things. Like, there's a whole closet of stuff here that I, like, will never touch, but I impulse back it just as something that happens. The next big revolution is a product, because digital sort of is going pretty strong, but product seems to be— there's— it's something happening, but it's not quite there yet. Yeah, I don't think we've gotten, um— I mean, you've got— again, you've got disruption in, like, production, disruption in production in 3D printing, disruption in distribution in, like, Kickstarter and funding in Kickstarter. You got a whole bunch of interesting things happening in physical products. Um, I worry that the time cycle still favors like big incumbents in a way that like, uh, startups and software don't necessarily have the same challenge. That like, um, you might build a great drone product, but in order to get to the scale that you need and build the ecosystem and distribution with retailers that you need, you still have these friction lines that I think are really hard to overcome that you don't struggle with in digital, in software. And so those kinds of things concern me a little bit and frankly have kept us less, less exposed to hardware than maybe we should be. Maybe that's a miss. Yeah. But I'm excited about it. And there's a couple of products that I'm looking at now. Like I said, we did, we did one just from a team of just absolute vets who are killer in that space. But I'll make an announcement about that soon. Awesome. All right, thanks, Rob. Yes. All right, I think that's it, guys. I think we're gonna, we're gonna call it. Um, one, this was super fun. Thanks for joining. Really, really fun. Uh, questions were awesome and fun too. Uh, it's kind of strange to be put on the spot, um, but hopefully it was a little bit entertaining. We had like 200 people, almost 1,000 people show up the whole time, so that was really fun. Um, I love this live streaming stuff. I think it's fascinating. I think, um, the idea of having like, uh, the intimacy of this— you guys are like actually in my house. Hey, there's no like, uh, you know, hiding behind like an army of AMA bots. Like, here it's me literally on the fly answering this kind of stuff. So that's super fun for me. Um, and then I, I just wanted to say, uh, whenever you have an audience like this, it's really great to like throw a shout out to something in causes or charity. And so We love Charity: Water. If you haven't checked it out, please do. They build wells in Africa for clean water. Scott Harrison's a good friend, and those guys are amazing. And my friend Yael Cohen at Fuck Cancer doing a ton to help spread the word around early cancer detection. She's amazing, and you should check out her charity, Fuck Cancer. It's really fantastic work that both of those people are doing, and I'd love if you guys would check that out. And the last piece is We're gonna be launching a thing soon called Lowercase Alpha, which is like a challenge that I've had recently around how do I get early feedback. Kanye was talking about early feedback for like the venture cycle, but often I'm playing with products and like he and I and like the other 100 people who are in this room are trying beta products super early in their lifecycle. And I'd like to start to like broaden that out. So before something launches on Product Hunt, what I'm gonna try to do for a handful of our portfolio companies and a handful of other companies is give people, uh, early access to like test flight beta alpha accounts of like some of the companies that are launching new products. And, um, it'll be like a thing where hopefully you can just text back feedback and like give the entrepreneur some, some loops. Um, I'll have like a Medium post about it in the next few days, uh, hopefully, and you guys can check it out. But I ideally, I'd love this crowd specifically if you would join in on that and start to give some feedback to some of the companies. It'll be really, really fun, and yeah, keep an eye out for what lowercase alpha. So that's the jam, an hour and a half of live streaming. This is— God bless whoever does this next. All right, thanks, guys.
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