Turner Novak, founding partner at Banana Capital, builds teams around smart, passionate people who balance hard work with humor. He stays the sole decision-maker for now but plans to offer carry and compensation to align incentives, targeting a 30% internal rate of return over 30 years.
Chapters
What is your philosophy on scaling your team as a venture fund manager? I think to work at Banana, you have to have a sense of humor. You have to be serious but not take yourself too seriously. We try to think about built-in distribution. We discuss as a team, it's just me and Alicia on my team right now, but we discuss everything together. So we want to be able to bring like everyone's perspective to the table. Like I'm the sole decision maker right now, but going forward it's like taking everyone's opinion, It's not just me. And so as I think about building the team, it's just like finding other really smart, passionate people, people that are like really in touch with, you know, how consumers think, people who, you know, want to work hard and have fun. Planning on giving appropriate like carry and compensation to everyone on the team. We're managing tens or hundreds of billions of dollars, but we put up 30% IRR over like a 30-year time horizon. So it just means you have to keep a certain fund size to do that.