Founding Partner of Precursor VC Charles Hudson on Prioritizing People | Seed to Harvest Ep34

Welcome back to Seed to Harvest, a podcast with founders, creators, and investors about their stories, frameworks, and tactics. Today I'm joined by Charles Hudson, who is the managing partner at Precursor Ventures, a classic seed stage investment firm based out of San Francisco, California. Charles is a serial entrepreneur, previously founding Bionic Panda Games, Third Power LLC, and CH3 Media Holdings. Prior to founding Precursor, he served at, as a partner at Uncork Capital and as a senior associate at In-Q-Tel, which is the venture arm of the CIA. He is currently a lecturer at Stanford's GSB and a board member of multiple organizations, including H2, LightSide Games, Populous, and the National Venture Capital Association. Charles, thanks so much for joining us today.

Oh, thanks for having me.

Of course. So I want to get right into things. One of the things I've been thinking a lot about in our investing process as the solo GP is how do I scale my time and my team in a way that aligns with my strategy? So as a solo GP yourself, I would love to hear about any specific time management strategies that you've focused on applying in your business, maybe some that you tested and didn't work, and how the ones that you've decided to keep have positively impacted you and the fund.

It's probably the thing I spend the most time on, Paige. I think what I would say is when I started Precursor, I think I had the same naive assumption that every new manager has, which is the job is mostly investing. And I tell people like, there's 3 different jobs. There's the investing job, there's the fundraising and investor relations with your LPs job, and then there's the job of running a venture fund, which is a, you know, a small professional services firm.

Yeah.

So right now at Precursor, we have 3 people on the investment team, soon to be 4. I have a full-time controller, part-time CFO, and I have 4 people who work directly for me on various time management projects. And I have a coach that I work with who helps me design systems and processes to be more efficient at Precursor because we have a, we've made about 300 investments. And the largest our investment team has ever been in terms of full-time people is 4.

Wow. That's, that's pretty incredible. I actually, it's funny, earlier this year I started working with an exec coach for the same reason, to design systems and processes around time management. So I'd love to hear, are there any that you are currently applying that you've really enjoyed or have brought more, I guess, peace into your life?

I think one that was really helpful, particularly during the pandemic, is every week I have someone on my team who looks at my calendar. We color code all the meetings.

Mm-hmm.

And she gives me a rolling view of total meeting count by week and distribution across category. And we have some soft and hard bumpers on my, like for example, the hard bumper is if portfolio company meetings go above 50% of total calendar hours, you're probably Missing out on something else. The chance to meet new LPs, the chance to expand your network, the chance to rest, the chance to do deep work. So we have some like really hard bumpers. And during the pandemic, my meeting load went up probably 25 to 40%.

Mm-hmm.

Simply because the, the day expanded. And it was really interesting to see that in the data and just say, okay, well if this is my new normal, how do I wanna reconfigure my day? And it has not really gone back down. The COVID restrictions have been eased. So it is for me the new normal. That's one example of something that's incredibly, that's been incredibly helpful. The other thing I will say from a time management standpoint is, you know, with all these portfolio companies we have, I always assume that sometimes I'm probably like, they need less of me than I think they need of me. So we've instituted a process now where once a year, and I feel like, you know, with the power dynamic between founders and investors, It's better if I ask. So we now have a policy that anytime someone raises a new milestone round or, or at least once a year, I go back and say, hey, I have really enjoyed spending time with you. If you feel like you've gotten to a place where you need less of me, I just wanna create space for you to say so. And if you don't, we'll just continue going. And it's been really positive for me 'cause I don't wanna, you know, force someone to show up for a monthly meeting where they're like, I kind of only need you once a quarter. Like, this is great. I mean, I'll keep doing it. You, you, It's on the calendar. And I found that by taking the first step myself, it was easier than waiting for them to come to me and say, I kind of don't, you know, it's kind of awkward to say, hey, you've been super helpful.

Yeah.

I just don't wanna hang out with you 12 times a year. More like 4 or 6.

That's so funny. Have you seen that happen on the LP side as well? I find that this is like something that I've thought about is as you have different LP bases for different funds. That like LP graduation stage is an interesting one.

We have a couple people who've been with us in every fund on the institutional and individual side. I am incredibly grateful to them for their support, but we have other people who are like, hey, I'm here to help you get started. We will do fund 1 and maybe fund 2. Mostly my GP friends, they're like, once you get to fund 3, we're gonna take the money we were gonna give you and go help somebody else get started. And I think it's a good policy and, and one I, I tend to follow as well. But yeah, I, I think the whole LP management thing took me a while to figure out, 'cause when I was at Uncorked, Jeff really did it all.

Yeah.

And so you have to figure out for yourself, how often do I want to talk to them? What do I want to talk to them about? What kind of relationship do I want to have with them?

Yeah. And I guess it's also dependent on what their needs or wants as LPs are, whether that's they want strictly great returns, whether they want co-investment opportunities. It kind of like also depends on on that in terms of the cadence. So in terms of like zooming back, 2 aspects that I think define a venture firm strategy are portfolio construction and thesis. So can you briefly explain what yours look like and we'll get deeper, deeper into the episode. We'll talk a little bit about how those impact different operational aspects of your business.

File my portfolio construction under what not to do if you want to have an easy fundraise. I would like to think that there's harmony between our portfolio construction and our thesis. Mm-hmm. So I'll do the thesis first, 'cause I think that's important. My thesis is, you know, when I was at Uncorked in the early days when I was there, when, when Jeff was, I think, less well-known and where the pre— and when the seed industry was much smaller, so like 2010-ish, we invested in a ton of companies where the founders had very little traction and they also weren't super well-known to us.

Mm-hmm.

We maybe knew them through an accelerator or maybe they were a friend, but they weren't like People we knew really well. And a lot of them were not like double Stanford or double Harvard, whatever, like pick your favorite simple-to-use heuristic that people use in this business.

Yeah.

And a lot of those companies turned out to be fantastic investments. And I think it was because we were willing to write checks to these people that we thought were great. And most of the underwriting was actually not signal-driven. It was like, you meet the founder, like for example, when we met Laura from Shipbo, I'm like, Laura's amazing. We should totally make an investment in this company. And he's gone on to do great things. I could name half a dozen companies in the Uncorked portfolio that fit that model. I think what happens is as your fund size scales, the temptation is to concentrate and to say, well, let me be a bigger fund. So we gotta write bigger checks so that it moves the needle and we can make fewer investments. And your lens changes. So I think the experience I've seen for most venture funds is you start off with this sort of scrappy portfolio of people that will take your money. And the longer you do it, the more well-heeled people show up in your inbox. And next thing you know, you're like a fund that mostly does repeat entrepreneurs or people that are in your network. And I just said, you know, the only gap in venture seems to be people who don't have a ton of traction.

Mm-hmm.

And also who are strangers. And my whole thesis was almost anyone will write a check to their college roommate who has no data if you think the person's smart, or anybody, you know, a former coworker. If you think the person's great and they have no data, you can write a check. Or if you don't know the person at all and they have amazing traction, you can write a check. I just find most people aren't willing to write checks to people they don't know very well or people who don't have a long operating track.

Mm-hmm.

And I was like, but I like those checks. And if I look at my best investments, most of them look like that. They're like people who I just believed in and I was like, I don't need the data. So I said, okay, if that's gonna be our thesis, I don't know how you do that in a concentrated fashion. And it's not like, it'd be like, oh, it's spray and pray. I don't think of it as spray and pray. I intend to like build a relationship with every one of these founders to the extent that they'll have me and help them out through one phase of their entrepreneurial journey. So we made 71 new investments last year. That's higher than normal. Normally we're more like 50.

Yeah.

We're still recalibrating. I mean, Zoom has just opened up so much more. We were already a Zoom firm before. Um, the pandemic, but everybody else wasn't. And now that it's just opened up so much more capacity for me to meet people, 70's probably a little heavy, but I was just like, look, we're gonna meet people. We're underwriting people without much data. Most of the things I wanna know about them from a performance standpoint, I will only find out after we invest them.

That's true.

And get to work with them. There's not that much data that you can analyze, so there's really no data room and like, so really we have to be really good at underwriting people.

Mm-hmm.

And I think we can underwrite 50 to, 50 to 60 teams a year. And some of those teams are gonna want a close relationship with us, and some of them are gonna want an arm's length relationship with us. Mm-hmm. And, uh, under favorable graduation recommendations, the model kind of works. But a lot of people were like, it's too many companies and not enough people.

In terms of like employees, right?

It's too many companies and not enough ownership.

Got it. Got it. Yeah. I'm, I'm curious, like on the, Underwriting people side, I'm curious what your reference calls look like for founders or like what that process looks like.

Oh my gosh, Paige, this might sound kind of heretical. I missed out on a handful of really great investments in Fund 1 because I would do reference calls and the references would be like, really? No, I didn't really, like, they weren't bad. They're just like, oh, I never really thought that of that person as a founder. Or like, oh, I'm surprised they're starting a company. And what I realized is like, we're dealing with people that are generally, I would say, I think this is like underestimated things, maybe a little overused.

Mm-hmm.

But we have a lot of founders where I think their own manager never thought that person would be a founder. But then I'm like, but your manager's not a founder. So maybe like the views of non-founders about who has founder DNA are not as valuable as, as I once thought.

Mm-hmm.

So now I focus most of my reference checking on like making sure the person's like not a person I would be embarrassed to be in business with and less about entrepreneurial fitness. Unless of course they had a previous startup. Mm-hmm. Then I do wanna talk to people who've worked with them and get, but even then I'm just like, people sometimes make mistakes.

Yeah.

Like we have a really successful company where the person really was not mature in their dealing with their previous set of investors. And they acknowledge like, hey, he called me, he's like, hey, I know for sure that if you call my investors, they're not gonna say nice things. I was not a great— he, person owned it. Like, I was not great. Didn't stop me from investing.

Right. Well, I feel like it's like even more encouraging that they're taking ownership and they're just saying like, this is what's up. I wanna tell you in advance of this reference call. That's super interesting. It's, it's something that I, that I've been exploring more in my work and I, I think in part because It is, uh, it's mostly around like folks that have known someone for a bit longer to get reference on them, like you said, in more of like a personal standpoint than, than a founder fitness standpoint. So that's super interesting to hear. Yeah. That you do that similarly. I'm curious, this is going a bit further back, but what are some of the biggest lessons that you learned transitioning from Fund 1 to Fund 2?

Oh, wow. I think I've had to block that era out of my brain only because Paige, no, everyone told me, everyone told me, don't worry, Fun 2 will be so much easier than Fun 1. And our Fun 1 took me almost 2 years to race.

Mm-hmm.

It was really hard, like really hard. And everyone's like, don't worry, Fun 2 will be easy. And I believed them. And boy, was I in for a surprise. I will tell you, 2 things that I learned that I still believe to be true. I still practice to this day. One is I was so burned out on fundraising after fund 1. I like needed a break and I took too long of a break.

Yeah.

And my rationale was like, I don't have anything to tell these people if I go back. And in reality, I actually had learned quite a bit about the pre— maybe the portfolio hadn't moved much, but I'd learned a lot about our model. I'd learned a lot about our ability to get into good companies, about support. And I was sort of timid to go back to people. I was like, I wanna go back to them when I've got like a 2x TVPI. And so I waited too long and I realized, oh, I could, I had lots of things along the way I could have shared with people that would've like kept us engaged.

Mm-hmm.

So that was one which was like, don't take such a big leap. There's always something, even if you talked to somebody yesterday, there's probably something you learned today that's discussion worthy. So like, take, like you just have to sort of have a fundraising plan that spans across multiple funds. I think the other thing is like, you sort of have to show up sometimes for good things to happen to you. And our single biggest LP relationship came from a chance meeting I had in an elevator, a conference where I'd planned to fly home the day before and I stayed for the event. I was in an elevator. I bumped into my friend Rashawn Williams and he's like, hey, I think I got somebody for you for your fund. Like, you should meet this person. He introduced me to her and they ended up doing collectively the LPs that she represents for half of my fund too.

Whoa.

Yeah, right?

That's wild.

And it was just one of those things where like, I happened to be at that conference. I happened to be going to the elevator at the same time he was. He thought of me. He didn't have to think of me. He thought of me and he made the intro. And that person has become probably one of the most influential relationships we have. We have a, we, we call her our fairy godmother, but she's like one of the most influential people in the development of our firm. And like, I owe her like an un— unrepayable debt of gratitude for like her support.

Wow. Yeah, I, I find in, in our fundraising journey, some of the most incredible relationships have started as like a last-minute intuitive gut decision to book a next-day flight to San Francisco or a random cold email from an investor. I got a random cold email from an investor at BlackRock and he was like, hey, I read about you in our local paper and I would love to learn more. And I was like, this is definitely a scam email, but it wasn't. And it was so funny to see how that he's now become like One of the best, like, advisors that I've worked with, and I'm going to visit, like, him and his family in London next week. So it's like sometimes some of those things where you don't, uh, yeah, you just like don't expect there to be like crazy outcome from it, or you might not anticipate in the beginning really flourish. So I think that's something I take a lot of pride in.

You got 2 institutional LPs through the Hello@ alias for a fun one.

Really? Mm-hmm.

They just like, hey, one of, one of them I, one of them I knew. One of them I knew and he emailed me and I was like, oh, you must not know that I left Uncork. I can forward this on to Jeff. He's like, no, you dummy. I want to talk to you about your fund. The other person was someone I literally did not know. They emailed me. There's like nothing about them on the internet page. I was like, thank you. I'm like, this is absolutely a scam. I asked all of my GP friends. I'm like, have you heard of these people? And they're like, never heard of them. And I was like, hey, I'm in New York next week, which was true. We should all grab lunch. I'd love to meet you. And I was like, I'm totally prepared to be like catfished. Like, I'm gonna walk into this restaurant, there's gonna be nobody there. I get in the restaurant, there's 3 of them there. They're the nicest people in the world. The nicest people in the world. They, they've done all of our funds and like, they are, they are in the true believer camp and I like love them. And I just was like, I was so, so, so skeptical that it was real.

I, yeah, I, I feel like I'm, I'm curious, like as As your firm has grown, have you grown less skeptical or does that like skeptic in you kind of like—

I don't wanna fight. This might be a little woo-woo or meta, but like, I never wanna lose like that sense of wonder. Mm-hmm. You know, like I think in this business you can become really cynical and jaded over time.

Yeah.

'Cause you see so many things not work out and I try really hard like to not have that happen. So I still like wake up every day thinking like, hey, there might be something in the cold queue. Today, that's the best company we've seen in ages. Or I might get a random DM or message from somebody who, who's legit, who just happens to not know a better way to get to me. So, and I feel like I get just enough positive signal every now and then to like keep going in terms of people I meet.

That's awesome. So before the show, I was digging into the Edgar archives. To find a recent Form D from Precursor. And what I found online was that you've raised $73 million for your most recent fund. And as you've grown your firm, what has changed and what has stayed the same since the beginning for Precursor?

I think the thing that's changed is honestly how I spend my time. Going back to the time management thing, in the early days it was just me, then it was me and Sydney. I basically had almost no management as part of my job. Sydney's pretty independent. I have one, I had one person who worked for me. It was pretty easy.

Yeah.

I mostly invested in sort of trying to figure out how to run the firm. Now I would say like a non-trivial, and I also didn't do as much future planning. I was mostly just trying to make sure we survived. So it was a very like narrow aperture.

Yeah.

I'd say now I spend a lot of my time thinking about The future, the future for all the people who work for me. What are their career aspirations like? Where are they? Where are they in their development? What, what can I be doing better to support them? What do they need to work on? Are they all getting along? Because we have, we have more people and I care about them. So I spend more time on that. Also, Precursor is a more complicated firm. We've got multiple funds that are in different stages of deployment and distribution. I've got different LP bases for each fund. I've got new LPs I'm trying to cultivate. I've got existing LPs I'm trying to make sure that they are getting from me what they need. And I would say like the existential dread of will we get our next fund done has been replaced by like, will I screw this up?

Mm-hmm.

And like through mismanagement, like break the thing I've tried really hard to build. And so that's the thing. The thing that's the same, and I really try to make sure that it's the same, I always want us to be open to people that we don't know. And I, someone I know who's been doing this longer than I have, who's been very successful, said, look, the real problem is the longer you do this, the better your close, the tighter your, you know, your, your network of people you know really well can easily crowd out new people. Mm-hmm. And I've long believed that like the, what ultimately kills venture firms is that like you become inaccessible. And then eventually, like your close social network, they're successful, they retire and stop starting companies, so they're not meeting new people. And you wake up one day and like, you don't know anybody in the next generation and they don't know how to find you. So I think that's like my deep paranoia is that we become a firm that's like, which is why time management is so important.

Yeah.

Where like everyone's like, well, don't bother reaching out to them. You'll never get a meeting. Or like, you have to, you have to be way up here in order. So I, I worked really hard to say like, hey, are we as accessible as I want. And this summer I was like, we're not as accessible as I want us to be. There are too many things that I'm doing that are getting in the way of an, of me meeting founders. So we're gonna have to rearchitect a bunch of, and we're like halfway through it and it's getting better.

Mm-hmm.

But it's one of those things that I'm like hypervigilant about. 'Cause I, I always, I assume, you know, I'm in my 40s now and I don't run a, I don't run a company where I'm getting 20, 30, 40, 100 new people coming in the door every day where I can meet, which when I was at Google, that was amazing. You just met so many Great people. So I'm like hyper-focused on how can I make sure that our firm feels and actually is accessible to people. Mm-hmm.

I love that. I, so speaking of incredible people, we're co-investors in a handful of incredible founders, including Lauren from Bloom and Maggie Norris from Eataly. I would love if you could speak a bit more about your unique sourcing style at Precursor.

I think sometimes the moment when you start your fund creates advantages that are hard to replicate. And so when I started working on Precursor in late '14, early '15, there weren't a lot of people out there who were saying, I want to meet companies that are really early. If anything, the seed market was going the other way. People were looking for more traction, more data. So it was very easy for me to go to all of my seed and Series A VC friends and say, look, any company that you think is great, but it's too early for you, just absolutely send it.

Mm-hmm.

And I was able like for a couple of years to kind of pound that message into people's heads and it still pays dividends today. 'Cause people are like, oh, he's the guy who does all those crazy wacky early stage deals. Second, and this is something I did a poor job of communicating to LPs, but I believe deeply, which is that like portfolio size properly, uh, harnessed is a, is a feature, not a bug.

Mm-hmm.

And they were always like, well, how are you gonna manage all these relationships? And I was like, well, let me flip the question around. Think about how powerful the model could be if most people who interact with Precursor have a positive experience, because you know where you find the next generation of founders, the current generation of founders, and ask for advice.

Mm-hmm.

And so if I look at like part of, I think of the magic of YC is they've built a really amazing community around the experience of going to YC.

Mm-hmm.

And there's sort of an instant, I don't know, kinship's probably too strong of a word, but there's, there's, you know, a certain amount of reciprocity among YC founders. And I was like, what if I could create that at Precursor? What if I could create a feeling that like, this is a community and that people help each other? And if the founders that we back are really happy with the experience of working with us, they will tell their friends and they will tell their friends when I'm not around. Which is really what I need. And so that's the other thing I'm like hypervigilant about is just like, are we living up to the promises that we've made to founders? And sometimes I'm like, we're not in this dimension. And so we gotta fix it. But I think a lot of our sourcing strategy is honestly, Paige, just trying to present our firm as open. Like, we wanna meet you. Can't guarantee we'll give you money, but like if you have a reasonable idea and you've thought it through, we wanna meet you and take a look. I'm always like, how can we meet more founders? My team's like, you're crazy. We already meet a lot. I'm like, but that's not the end. Like, how can we meet more? What would have to change for us to be able to have more capacity to meet and touch more people?

Mm, I love that. Zooming in a bit on your LPA in specific, so the limited partner agreement for those of you listening, not as familiar. We were talking a bit before the show about terms, and one of the things that you mentioned that was unique is that you have different LPAC, which is an LP advisory committee. And different quarterly letters for each fund. So I'm curious if you could explain more around your decision to have those as part of your strategy.

Yeah, I mean, the separate LPACs kind of was out of necessity because we have, for our first couple funds, each one has a different core set of LPs. We have a few people who are core LPs in all of our funds. I feel bad for them. I'm like, you can skip this one. You've heard half of this content before. But over time, what I also realized is, you know, our newest fund is still very much in deployment mode. We're still making new investments. Our first fund is in harvest mode. Those conversations are really different. They're really, really different. The fund 1 conversation is like, how big do we think the winners are? What do we think is a reasonable expectation for return now that we've deployed everything and the dust has settled? Should we think differently about secondaries than we did 2 or 3 years ago when the fund was still sort of— So I feel versus for Fund 4, it's kind of like, hey, in this environment, how are you thinking about pacing? How are you thinking about sizing? The conversations with me are very different depending on where that fund is on its lifecycle and its vintage year. So I actually enjoy the fact that I don't have to try to figure out how do I cram 4 funds worth of information into a 1-hour meeting where the majority of people are only there to hear about one thing. Instead, I get to spend more time on each fund. It does create some redundancy. It's like if we have a staffing issue or some big thing happens, I have to tell people about it 4 times, which is kind of inefficient, but it's fine.

I really like that. We didn't have an LPAC for our first fund. We'll have one for the second, but I remember when Josh and I decided to part ways for fund 2, one of the Well, talk about redundancy. We, I think we called and told almost half, if not more, of our 120 LPs about it. So after that point in time, I was like, an LPAC would, I could see where the benefits of that lie.

And I also just felt like, you know, we have a lot of LPs. We've got probably 50 or 60 LPs per fund.

Mm-hmm.

I was just like, I think I'd be a better fund manager if there was a small set of people who were really in tune with the decisions that we're making. And I have to say, during COVID I was really glad we had an LPAC and that we had history working together. Every time I go out to raise a new fund, I'm glad because they're like, hey, remember what we talked about last fund? How do you feel about those things you were worried about last time? And they're, um, they're really helpful, particularly for a solo GP to have a set of people who've worked with you for a while and have context on you and the institution. Incredibly valuable.

I love that. I think to go down one layer of abstraction on the context piece, this is actually like in my most recent investor update. I thought a lot about context and how I could provide more context to our investors, but I'm curious, like on your side, from the portfolio standpoint, I would love to hear more about some of your maybe favorite updates on the portfolio side and who provides really great context into their business so that you can best support them.

Oh, wow. That's a really good question. There's a handful. I'm gonna exclude any company where I'm a board member or board observer because I have sort of an unfair level of access to information in those companies. There's so many people who do a great job. If I were to pick on a few people, I would say like Lindsay from Dispatch Goods does a really good job of like giving me context on the business. Also on sort of performance, the person who can like really write a great update is Samir from Neck. His updates are like incredibly thorough. I'm always like, I don't know how much time you put into this, but it's very impressive. And I just wanna like acknowledge that I know this was a lot of work and it's incredibly useful to me as a founder. That's as an investor trying to get to know you as a founder.

Are there like certain aspects of the investor updates that are particularly helpful if for any of the founders listening that are thinking about reshaping the ones that they write today?

You know, cash and burn is always nice. It's good to just like get the basics outta the way. I mean, we have a little template. We tell people, I'm like, this is the template.

Yeah.

If you don't know what to do, if you use this, it'll, it'll solve 80% of your problems.

Mm-hmm.

But you know, mostly when I read these, I don't know what it's like for you, Paige. When I read 'em, I'm mostly like, how do I feel about this company's performance based on what I read? And do I feel like the founder's antenna are properly oriented? So sometimes I'll read an update, everyone's like, Everything's going great, but we have 2 weeks of cash. I'm like, well then everything isn't going great because like the headline is you have 2 weeks worth of cash. Other times, like the tone is like overly negative and like they're focused on, I'm like, hey, I know you might not. And I'll call people and tell 'em like, I read your update. Like it felt like you were kind of negative. They're like, yeah. I'm like, you're doing actually quite well. All things considered, like I read this in multiple ways and like you're actually doing quite well. So a lot of it for me is trying to calibrate like Mood? What's the focus? Where's the attention? And then does it match kind of what I'm feeling based on what I know about the company?

Mm. I love that call and recalibrate. I might, might steal that from you.

A few times I read 'em, I'm, I'm not, Paige, I'm like, I'm genuinely concerned. I'm like, wow, I read this, this person feels, sounds like negative or down or burned out just from like the tone of the writing and the presentation. I'm just like, is everything okay? Like, and sometimes the answer is no. Like, Sometimes there's like, there's nothing wrong. You read, you read into this something that doesn't exist. In many cases, there is something going on.

Yeah. Okay. I know we're running a bit short on time, so I'm gonna pick one of my questions that is personal to me. I coach a, teach a venture capital class at San Diego State, and it's one of the highlights of my week every week.

Okay.

And you are a professor at the Stanford Graduate School of Business teaching entrepreneurship from Diverse perspectives. So I'm curious, how did you start teaching and what keeps you coming back each fall?

I never envisioned that they would trust me to be in front of a classroom at the GSB. It was a funny story. So I teach the class with Fern Mandelbaum. She started the class. She is the creator of EDP. And one year she's like, hey, do you want to come be a speaker in my class? I'm like, what do I have to do? She's like, you have to come up and you have to just show up and speak. You don't have to present anything. You don't have to prepare anything. I was like, I could probably manage that. That's like within the realm of things I could probably pull off. So we had a conversation and she kind of convinced me that it was not a crazy idea for me to do this. So I agreed to do it. The next year she's like, hey, you should come like hang out in the class, like observe. Like you don't have to teach, you don't have to do anything. Just like, I'd love to have like a second set of eyes. At the end of that, at the end of that quarter. She's like, I want you to join the teaching team and here's how much work it is. And she like totally sold me and I was a little scared and I was like, but this is like a cool experience. It's an honor to be able to teach. So I'm going into my 4th year teaching. I did one normal year, one COVID year, and one kind of COVID-ish year in person. And I feel I have so much respect for, for the profession. Second, I feel like it's forced me to become better at explaining a lot of the concepts I thought I knew pretty well in venture, but maybe couldn't articulate. And I take it super seriously because GSB students are very demanding, as they should be. I've really enjoyed it. And, you know, my friends are always like, oh, do you teach for deal flow? Is it— I'm like, Well, no, I teach cuz I enjoy teaching and it's a nice break for 3 hours a week to go down to campus and teach and focus just on trying to deliver a great experience for the students and getting to know them as people. That's why I teach. Not, it's not some like, if we get companies out of it, great, but that's not the goal.

I was laughing at your comment about it forces you to really dig into like what you understand and don't, because I remember For example, we don't send out term sheets yet since we don't lead. And so a lot of what we explain in our venture capital class is term sheets. And so you better believe that that has taught me a lot more about term sheets now that I have to explain it to folks who don't, are super excited and have deep, deep questions about why and the context and how this relates to the entrepreneur-investor relationship. And so I've, I feel like I've learned a ton from the experience as well. Well, Charles, thank you so much for joining us today. I so enjoyed connecting with you. And if you would like to connect with Charles, please visit their website. I'll also drop his Twitter and LinkedIn in the show notes. But thank you so much for coming on. I so enjoyed this.

Thank you for having me. This is awesome.

Thanks so much for tuning in today to Seed to Harvest. If you enjoyed this episode, be sure to subscribe wherever your favorite podcasts I'll be releasing new episodes weekly, and if you have any questions or comments, feel free to let me know on Twitter. That's Paige Finn, Paige and then Finn with 3 N's. Thanks, and see you again next week!

Bye!