An Overview Of Craft Ventures As A Leading Venture Fund

could you maybe share a little bit more about, you know, what led you to, uh, to joining Craft Ventures and then maybe an overview of it as a venture fund? Yeah, sure. Um, yeah, my shirt says Craft. Um, so, um, so yeah, so I've known David Sacks for a long time, you know, when he was at PayPal, uh, in the early 2000s and I was running StubHub, you know, 2002 or '03 or something like that. I met him, uh, through a mutual friend. Um, And kind of kept in touch with him over the years. And he actually invested in my second company, SpreeCast, that I mentioned briefly. So we've kind of been friends and known each other for a long time. And he has a similar background, right? He's kind of an operator founder who had done a lot of angel investing successfully. and then decided to launch Kraft in 2017. When I decided to wrap up Spreecast, he reached out to me and said, hey, why don't you come join me at Kraft? And I spent some time with him and some of the other early people that were at Kraft at the time and decided it was a great fit for me. I had started my career as an investor, as I mentioned, at Blackstone. So my very first job was investing. I had always been an active investor in the public stock market, even as a teenager. I don't know when I opened my Schwab account, but maybe I was 13 or 14 years old or something. So I learned how to buy and sell stocks and had a finance degree from Wharton, worked as an investor at Blackstone, and then I was an entrepreneur for 20 years. But knew a lot about finance and investing, and I had done a lot of angel investing successfully. And I thought that getting back into investing, specifically venture investing, was a great next step for my career. I knew that I didn't want to start another company. I had, at that point, in 2017, 2018, I had 3 kids. I now have 3 kids. You know, ranging, you know, now they're 10 to 16, but then they were whatever, you know, call it, you know, 5 to 11 or something. And, and so I knew that, you know, I just, I felt that like starting another company would be challenging with 3 kids, just the work-life balance questions. My, you know, my own sort of nature, and I think is generally the case, is like, when I'm running a company, when I'm starting a company, I'm so all in on it. It's like I have blinders on everything else in life. And so it's hard to do that and also like have a family and be a husband and be a dad. So I didn't want to start another company, but I love technology. I love software. I love startups. I love entrepreneurship. And it was a great way for me to sort of stay involved in all of that stuff, without carrying the flag of being a CEO founder myself and be able to share a lot of my learnings and knowledge with lots of founders who I work with today instead of just being so laser-focused and tunnel vision on one thing. And I've always had a lot of respect for David. I've known him for a while, as I mentioned. He's an extremely smart individual with a lot of super impressive experience and track record in like I said, both as an entrepreneur and as an investor. And every time I sat down with him to talk about my company or whatever, I was always leaving those conversations with a new insight or a new learning. And I just felt like working with him would be just great for me personally and just another opportunity to learn more. So, yeah, it was a pretty easy decision actually once he reached out to me and I spent some time talking to him about it. And You know, kind of joined in 2018. I've been there now for about 4, a little over 4 years. And, um, yeah, I focus— so, so a little bit about Kraft. So Kraft is, um, you know, we are primarily an early-stage venture firm. Um, we have kind of 2 products, I guess you could say. One is our kind of flagship early-stage fund. It is, um, it invests— that fund. And then we have— and our second fund is a growth fund. We more recently have added growth into the mix. Our flagship early-stage fund invest in kind of seed, A and B rounds primarily of SaaS and marketplace businesses. Um, actually most of what we do is SaaS, primarily because we see a lot more SaaS businesses than marketplaces. One of the things, um, you know, I think marketplaces are kind of hard to find, um, you know, really interesting marketplaces. And so we don't see as many interesting marketplaces. But so probably 60+% of what we do is SaaS and, you know, 30% marketplaces. But those are the 2 areas we focus on. David is an expert in SaaS, just given his experience from Yammer. I'm an expert in marketplaces, given my experience from StubHub and also a lot of other investments I've made. So we do seed A and B rounds out of the venture fund. The one caveat I would say there, and we can talk more about this, but is we really only, even at the seed stage, we don't do like pre-revenue or pre-product companies. Like we only invest in companies that at least have built a product and launched it. And generally speaking, speaking, you know, have some, at least some users and growth in users that we can see. And generally they have revenue even, even at the seed stage. So they have revenue. It's not enough to raise a Series A, so maybe it's not like a million of net revenue yet, but it might be $100,000 or a couple hundred thousand of kind of net revenue, and they're growing nicely. And that— so, so the seed stage we do is not like, you know, 2 people and a deck. It's, it's, you know, a little bit further along. Um, but we do seed A and B rounds out of that fund. Check sizes range from you know, kind of a low of about $1 million up to a high of about $25 million in that, in that fund. Um, and then we have a growth fund now as well, which invests in the same types of companies, just a little bit later stage. Um, our growth fund is, is in a way, it's more like a late-stage venture fund. We, we don't do like the, you know, $5 billion valuation, about to go public company, um, investments. We do more of the um, you know, call it $400 million to billion-dollar valuation, pre-money valuation companies that, um, you know, might be Series B, C, D rounds. Um, again, SaaS and marketplace companies. Those check sizes range from like a low of like $10 million up to, you know, $60 million check sizes. Um, we have about $3.3 billion of assets under management now. We have about 38 people on the team. Um, our investment team is about 17, 18 people, and then we have 12 or 13. The investment team is primarily focused on identifying new opportunities, making investment decisions, winning deals, and then adding value to those companies after we invest. The platform team, which is about 12 or 13 people, all they do is try to add value to companies after we invest. They don't really get involved in identifying new opportunities or making investment decisions. They're just there to help our companies succeed. Half of that team is recruiters, so they're helping our companies with recruiting. And then the other half are like subject matter experts in, you know, things like government relations or information security or online customer acquisition, things that many of our companies would, you know, like help with or advice on. It's a pull model, so we don't like push this onto the companies, but if they want help, they can kind of ask for it. And that's the platform team. It's about 12 or 13 people. And then we have sort of some back office folks that are involved in just kind of LP relations fundraising, capital calls, distributions, things like that. Yeah, that's the firm. It's been a fun ride. It's obviously been an interesting 12 months with the market shifting. I've been through this before. Obviously, as I mentioned, StubHub was started at a time that is similar to the time we're in now. And then I obviously saw it in 2008 and '09. This is the so-called end of the cycle. And this happens, business cycles are natural, normal things that happen every, call it, usually 7 to 10 years. This one was like a 13-year bull run, but usually they're shorter than that. I think a lot of people have never seen one of these, so people are surprised, like, what's going on, what's happening? But this is just the normal course of how the economy works. Anyway, so that's Kraft, and happy to talk more about anything.