memes & millions: story time with paige | Ep62

She said, in fact, I'm worried that if you set a billion-dollar firm as your goal, that you'll burn out trying to compete and this ecosystem will lose a valuable spark and educator. And that was, that was really hard to hear. I think her questioning echoed a voice that I hadn't listened to in a very long time. It was, it was the voice that I listened to when I first joined Twitter, when I started shitposting, when I was funny and light and just enjoying things. What's up everyone? I thought I'd do something different today. I'm gonna do a little story time. I was talking to one of my friends and I was going through my whole— I have this like a little spiel I give where I'm like, you know, I'd never seen anyone that looked like me in venture. Like I always thought it was like an old dude's mahogany library type beat. And then he was like, I don't think that's why I didn't see myself in venture. Like he was just like, I just, I wasn't rich. So I was just like, That felt like what I had to be to be in venture. And I had this light bulb moment of like, oh, it's not that there's not young people in venture. I think the common perception is that you have to be wealthy to get into venture capital. And there are a lot of wealthy people. And for reasons that I'll go into later, like all of the fun tax side of venture, it definitely is helpful to be wealthy to start a venture fund. But I was not by any means when I started BGV. And I wanted to tell you a little bit today about how shitposting on Twitter led me to manage millions of dollars. For those of you who haven't met me yet, hi, I'm Paige. I am the founder of a venture firm based in San Diego called Behind Genius Ventures. We invest in early stage startups at the future of work and the future of play. To date, across 2 funds, we have 34 portfolio companies, including great Um, companies like Pallet, Averon, Beacons, um, and yeah. Okay, so before I get started with my story, if you're a listener, long-time, short-time listener, please be a first-time caller. I get emails from folks and I absolutely adore them. And one of the things that my, my brother Tate edits the podcast.

Shout out Tate.

He's graduating Saturday, which means when this episode is released on Monday, he's going to be an SDSU graduate. One of the things we were talking about is we'd love to get feedback from our listeners on either like different ways that we can improve the episodes or the flow of the show. So if you have any feedback and you want to do like a 15, 20 minute feedback session, I'd really appreciate if you reached out to me and Paige at behindgeniusventures.com. Okay. Without further ado, I'm going to take a sip of my coffee. Let's see if it's burning. Okay, not burning.

That was good. Wow.

Okay, there was this really great video put out and I'll link it down below, but it was by, oh, I forget who it was by. It was this guy with a great sense of dry humor. He's interviewing all these venture capitalists, like, what do venture capitalists actually do? And if you think about it from a satirical point, it's all these people talking about like, we invest in the future of, you know, exactly what I just said. In the beginning of this episode, but it's very opaque. And I think it's opaque not only to people outside of venture, but also inside of venture. A lot of investment practices are based on principles, which I'll talk about later on in the episode. And these can feel kind of, I don't want to say woo woo, because I do think that they're like deeply grounded in personal experience, but from an outside perspective, you're kind of like so What do you actually do? So I, I think that this video explained what venture capitalists do really well, and it also talked about how they all hang out on Twitter. This is very key. Basically, like, I grew up in San Diego. I went to SDSU. We don't have a huge venture alumni network, so I had no connections in venture. My dad's an engineer. My mom's an artist. It was not a world I grew up in, and so I had to build my own network. And then I realized that everyone was hanging out on Twitter, like all these VCs, and they would reply to like random people. You ask them a question and they'll like reply pretty much instantly. And so I still remember the first time that I felt like Twitter was magic. A tweet of mine went viral. I was in my parents' house. It was like April 2020, deep COVID. And I was refreshing, refreshing on this tweet, an absolute banger. It was MasterClass is the ad budget. Of Shen Yun, and I was like on the dopamine hamster wheel. I was like, I've cracked it, we're good to go. I had trolls, famous people liked my tweet. John Cena followed me. Huge. A reporter from the New York Times reached out to interview me, so I was like on the phone with him, like talking about my thoughts behind creating this tweet, which were literally like, I drank 3 cups of coffee and I was Cracking up about a Shen Yun poster somewhere. I did not make it into the New York Times for that, so which I'm kind of happy I didn't. So I rushed off to tell my family. We were hanging out at the table together, and I was in my senior year of college then. I was living in my parents' house in San Diego. My professors pretty much had lost the plot on our Zoom classes, and I felt so bad. But it was also like I had a lot of free time. I had discovered my passion for venture through binge-watching Silicon Valley, competing in a venture capital competition that I now coach at SDSU, and working at a growth equity firm in San Diego. And that internship I landed through doing the VC competition. But my girlfriends from college at the time were all living together in Pacific Beach, and I was craving social time. So I ended up turning to Twitter, and I was posting about different things I was reading about, woodworking with my dad, and my love and interest for venture through memes and threads. So Twitter for me filled a gaping hole in my senior year of college, and that summer it became my world. I must have spent like 7+ hours a day responding to tweets, laughing at memes, DMing people, and writing. And I had this one shitpost about dating an entrepreneur is like full-time training for a chief of staff role, which indirectly ended up catching the attention of an early stage CEO. Michael Greenwich, he's the CEO of WorkOS, and he emailed me to ask if I wanted to interview for a job at his company. Sounded pretty awesome. I also didn't have a job. I had turned down my job offer at a venture firm in Boston, OpenView, which I'm actually like writing a piece with now, which is pretty cool, to stay with my family in San Diego. So I actually started at WorkOS the Saturday after I graduated on Facebook Live from SDSU. Working at an early stage anything, by the way, chaos. Perfect fuel for an extremely online person. So during the day I was on demo calls with early stage companies. WorkOS is a single sign-on API, so we help companies like Webflow and Hopin scale as they were experiencing really dramatic growth throughout the pandemic. And it was really cool. So I was on demo calls and I was making memes in Slack with my best friends from work, Taylor and Allie. And at night I scoured Twitter for interesting nuggets of info, posted memes, and generally amused myself through shitposting. Speaking of chaos, I was part of the viral movement, Eye Mouth Eye. If you ask anyone to explain it, I don't think you could get a clear answer if you tried. All the news stories are like, so different about what it was, but at the end of the day, it was 69 kids from all over the world building a made-up app that became real, making memes, and directing the attention that we were garnering to organizations supporting Black lives. So we ended up raising over $200K in 48 hours. Um, and I actually made the majority of my internet friends then, which I think is interesting because when I talked to my friends that graduated pre-pandemic, not a lot of them made internet friends, but because I was just like at home alone on my computer working remote, I made so many internet friends. I met 3 girls specifically who I've stayed in really close touch with. Keep an active group chat every day for almost 3 years, and we've done 2 offsite weekends. So shout out Simp Squad. They brought so much joy into my life. So I would say like Twitter, it really felt like the town square for all of these people who were interested in technology and venture. And it was just like, I didn't really have an outside life, and so I built online community. In my bubble, and I got really good at it because there was kind of no other option. Like I was going on my little suburban walks with my parents. To flash forward a year later, April 2021, I met my business partner Josh through Twitter. We had conducted our first close on our first fund, so we'd raised $1.6 million, which was a third of our first fund, and we could start investing. So in venture funds, you usually do. A first close, which means, yay, we've closed like a third of the cash, file a Form D with the SEC, and then you start investing. You keep fundraising, you just can't talk about your fundraising until your final close. And excuse me, the reason why is we were a 506 fund, and the delineation between like a 506 fund and a 506 fund is very important because Building in public might be considered general solicitation by the SEC. So what is general solicitation? Basically, you're not publicly allowed to advertise a security like a venture fund. You can get fricked. So, inexhaustive thing, or inexhaustive list of things that legal counsel will absolutely not approve you to say if you're a fund manager that's fundraising. Fundraising sucks sometimes. It is a grind. Wow. Today, cashed my first physical check from an investor today. What a cool milestone. Raised X more than last month. Here's some good example emails from my fundraising. We had an investor pull out of their commitment today, and that was really difficult. We adjusted our target. Mentioning the word fund if you're still fundraising. So I think for me, this was something I really struggled with. I was so used to being so transparent online and suddenly I couldn't talk about what I was working on, like All day, every day, and no memes. So I didn't really like swear as much online. And for someone that had spent so much time nourishing an online community, I think that transition for me was really tough. I really enjoyed sharing what I was learning when I was at Workwest and building venture resources to educate the next generation of investors. I don't really know why there's such a strong aversion to being a 506 fund. But it was extra cost from a compliance standpoint, required like additional fund administration. And basically it just seemed like a headache and expensive at a time where we didn't, barely scraping by with our management fees. And then things on my plate kept increasing, so it fell on the back burner. I think the other thing that happened is like, I had started out as an underdog. I wanted to break into VC. I was like this state school grad. I was working at an early stage startup. But then I became a fund manager and so I got roasted a lot. I—

This is—

So I, I was the COVID of Forbes 30 Under 30 for the 2022 Venture Capital Award. And I remember I shared it in one of these like fund manager group chats and this manager who I'd really looked up to like roasted me and was like, yeah, just like message me privately. This was like on the day it came out and I was like, hey, like I think you should change the language on how You announced this. And I was like, thanks. Um, like that was the only interaction that we had. I got roasted for not replying to a founder on this anonymous VC review site. Sucked. I feel bad that I hadn't gotten back to him. And then doubly bad when I was like, oh, I'm tweeting when I feel like I should have been like working. But also the email thing is tough because sometimes things go to spam. Sometimes things fall through the cracks. Like I think giving myself a margin of error on that was really important. And I want to be really responsive to our LPs and the founders that we back. And that's like my top priority. So I think that was something that I struggled with a lot was like, okay, if I'm shitposting and like making fun and like being not serious, like how are people going to take me seriously? But so I think that was challenging. And then it honestly got a lot worse when my business partner and I decided to go our separate ways for Our second funds to focus on different investing strategies, which we talked about in a previous podcast episode that I'll link down below as well. But I felt really alone. Like, I not only could I not share what I was like feeling or building online, I also didn't have a partner anymore and didn't make memes or crack jokes. I was just like serious.

Hmm.

I just worked and worked and like everything felt so like serious and adult and I got like anxious and overwhelmed and I just felt like the stakes were a lot higher. And then Twitter kind of turned from magic into work and fiduciary duty and KPIs and an overflowing inbox of DMs. And it was interesting because I was talking to one of my investors and she, I think like one of the things I'd talked about before was like building a billion dollar firm. And she was like, well, your magic to me is not that you're building a billion-dollar firm. It's that you're, you have a personal touch. Like you want to educate the next generation of investors and leaders through investing community and content. So you don't need a billion dollars to get to that goal. And she said, in fact, I'm worried that if you set a billion-dollar firm as your goal, that you'll burn out trying to compete and this ecosystem will lose a valuable spark and educator. And that was, that was really hard to hear. I think her questioning echoed a voice that I hadn't listened to in a very long time. It was, it was the voice that I listened to when I first joined Twitter, when I started shitposting, when I was funny and light and just enjoying things. And I think like the dull roar of worry had overpowered it for so long that I feel like I'd kind of lost the plot. So it's like a competitive undercurrent that I Felt that was everything has to be younger and bigger and better and faster. And I remember after she said that, my shoulders just like instantly relaxed and I felt way less tense. Like, I was like, what? Why? Why am I so serious? My Twitter feed had really become like an echo chamber of seriousness and the uncertainty of what the platform would become after, you know, Mm-hmm. Acquired it and scared me a little bit and Yeah, so I feel like that's been my journey with shitposting on Twitter. And I feel like as I've gotten more comfortable as a venture firm manager and running my business, I'm starting to realize that like the magic of what I do is that I am informal and don't take things too seriously. Like I have very strong investment principles that I think about that have been developed through my experience backing CEOs in our portfolio. And I have strong principles around like operational excellence. But aside from that, like the, uh, the thing that makes me unique is the energy that I bring to the work. Like I love when at our annual meeting that we had a couple weeks ago, one of the things that people were really excited about is like, it was informal. Like I hosted it in San Diego. It was at this wonderful music and arts library called the Athenaeum. We had 3 founders give presentations on the companies that they were building. I gave an overview of our firm. Our investment analyst Andy gave a presentation on the investment process and how it's changed over the past 2 funds. And Tate gave a presentation on how we think about running the podcast. And so I left the whole afternoon open for open-ended conversation, and I definitely heard a couple people say they wanted to move to San Diego, and they're also like, I don't know how you could get anything done here. But I think as I've matured in this role, I've come to understand that my whole job is to make 10 to 12 really, really great decisions a year. And in between that, like continue learning, continue being excited by the work. And a lot of that comes from kind of like doing non-traditional things.

So yeah.

I think that that's what I've been thinking about. So I just wanted to reflect on my journey and really share like how Twitter enabled me to build connections in an industry that is very much populated by wealthy people. But I think that by using Twitter and writing online, I was able to break in and I see people doing it all the time. I get emails from people that have Started funds, started syndicates, started angel investing because of Twitter and what they were learning. I don't think that you know it's challenging to keep up with textbooks because venture changes dramatically depending on the market and also because of the flexibility of how it's structured. Each fund can have very different operational principles. So yeah, let me know if you like this episode. I feel like it was kind of a freeform story time. I hope you have a wonderful day, and thank you so much for listening.

I so appreciate it.

New episode next Monday.

Special thank you to producer Riley Jennings and podcast editor Tate Doherty for your help on this episode. If you're listening and you'd like to connect with me, follow me on Twitter or LinkedIn, Paige Finn with 3 N's. Thanks again. Thank you so much for listening. I really appreciate it. You can look out for new episodes every Monday at 5:00 PM PST. And if you'd like to learn more about the strategies and tactics of seasoned institutional investors and rising venture stars, check out our YouTube channel @SeedToHarvest.

Also, my TikTok channel is SeedToHarvest, where I post a lot of behind the scenes.

And if you like this episode, please rate and review this podcast wherever you get your podcasts, if that's on Apple or Spotify. Anyways, thank you so much for listening. I hope you have an awesome rest of your day. Bye.