Behind the Scenes of a 2-Person VC Fund with 120+ Investments - Vedika Jain (Weekend Fund) | E58

Today's episode is a little bit different. My guest is Vedika, who's running the Weekend Fund together with Ryan Hoover, the founder of ProductHunt, who hopefully most of you have heard about and we talk about. She gives us a bit of an insider look into how VC fund functions. She talks about what kind of trends she's seeing and where she currently invests in most, or what she recommends founders to start new businesses in. And she talks about what they definitely love to invest in, what they definitely don't invest in. And she also talks about the one experience that changed her life the most and it's probably not what you would expect. So I hope you're going to enjoy that. And if you do, please subscribe. Give us a review on Spotify, on Apple Podcasts, wherever you listen to your podcasts. And yeah, hope you enjoy. Cool. Vedica, welcome to the Founders lounge.

Thank you for having me.

So I think today's episode is going to be a little bit different because Vedika, you are part of a VC fund and basically I'll just let you introduce yourself. So can you tell me a little bit, who are you? Maybe just a quick history of how you got where you are?

Yeah. So I'm an investor at an early stage fund called the Weekend Fund. We are a two person distributed team. I'm in London where you are Matisse and Ryan, who's my only teammate, is in Miami and we work over the Internet and we invest in early stage companies all around the world. So we have about 120plus companies in our portfolio and in terms of the themes that they're building in, they're all over the place. But the unifying thread through these 120 companies is that they're all capitalizing on some sort of consumer behavior, technology or regulatory shift. So we really care about the timing for a company to succeed, to be right. And yeah, I can give maybe a bit of backstory about myself. So I actually grew up in Bangalore in South India.

I've actually been there.

Oh cool.

Years ago.

Okay. Yeah, so I grew up in Bangalore and I left in 2011 and now silicon Valley is, sorry, Bangalore is the Silicon Valley of India. But when, when I was growing up, Bangalore was producing a lot of back office services, but they weren't actually producing or building user facing technology. So I actually did have a lot of exposure to tech, but I had a lot of exposure to entrepreneurship. So my parents run a family business that my grandfather started. So those are always the topic of dinner table conversations. And overall I Think my brother and I, we always grew up with this idea that starting a company was a very meaningful thing to do with your life. And we also grew up in the Marvati community in India, which is extremely business focused. It's like the way to have like value as a Marvati is to start a business. And then in 2011, I moved to Berkeley, California for school. And I was surrounded, suddenly surrounded by all of these like 17 year olds and 18 year olds who wanted to build the future. And I was like, I have no idea what that means, but I just love like the energy of that. So I was like, I need to get involved in this building the future thing. And I really did as many internships as I possibly could in college. Like some summers I did three or four internships, sometimes in parallel. The last of these internships was at a venture capital fund called Mithril Capital. It's one of Peter Thiel's funds. And I was the intern. And they were extremely generous. I was a bit like their project for that semester. And they were like, we're just going to teach you everything we know about the world. And I always held on to that. I held onto their generosity. But the other thing is like, from the perspective of a 20 year old, I was like, how are these people getting paid to be hear other people talk about how they're building the future? Like, what? How is this a job? Right? This is so different to like, you know, the kind of businesses I saw built back at home. And they're also the reason I ended up at Stripe. I joined stripe in 2015. It was my first job out of college. I learned a lot about how businesses actually scale. And then I ended up losing the H1B visa, which led me to leaving the US. I took a gap year. Probably the best thing I've ever done for myself professionally, which was very counterintuitive at the time. And after that year, I ended up joining a startup in London called True Layer. True Layer is similar to the Plaid for Europe. They're basically built for financial infrastructure that opens up access to user permission financial data so that developers and companies can build applications on top of it. I was their first pm, helped them take their product to market. Truly, it went from four to 100 people in the year and a half that I was there. And about a year in, I always remembered the energy of working in venture capital. It was really that. And then I had this idea that the Internet should make it much easier to start doing the work that you want to do, right? Without Asking for permission. And I was like, okay, like what do VCs actually do? And I kind of like broke it down into like the parts of the job and I didn't have meaningful capital to actually like build a diversified enough portfolio to really be meaningful. And I didn't, I had, I mean, I had friends who were building things, but again, I wouldn't say I had like meaningful access, but the one thing I did have was I had access to the Internet and TechCrunch, the portfolio pages of investors I looked up to, like usv, for example, they publish like some version of their internal investment memo. And if they invest in a company that I thought was interesting, I basically tried to like reverse engineer the deal as if I'd seen it. So I tried to like write like a fantasy investment memo about the Fox founders, the team, the market. I wrote a bunch of these and one investment memo led me to the rest, to the next basically. And I kind of like jumped around from investment memo to investment memo. And as it turns out, when Ryan was hiring for the chief of staff role at Weekend Fund, he reached out to a mutual friend of ours, Harry Stebbings from 20 BC. And Harry recommended me for the job. I chatted with Ryan and I had sense that up to this point in my career I was choosing companies to work for. And I mean, it led me to like work at some, I think, incredible organizations. But ultimately I was like, I just want to choose the person that I'm going to work for, right? And it's very important for me to choose someone that I sincerely want to be like. And when I spoke to Ryan, I definitely had that conviction. And it was a part time role, um, you know, so because it was just going to be a two person team at Weekend Fund. So it's really important both for Ryan and for the other person to really like, you know, have that kind of professional chemistry. And yeah, it went very well and I think maybe a month and I was like, oh my God, I need to figure out how to make this my full time job, right? Not just my side job. And it kind of lined up with the timing of announcing our second fund. And I joined full time about six months later. And yeah, I've been at Weekend Fund since then and yeah, it's been the best job I've ever had.

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Yeah.

So he's quite a personality. And then you mentioned Harry Stabbing as well. And he's the vc, a London based VC with probably the biggest personal brand or one of the biggest kind of personal brands that he has. Obviously has a podcast 20 VC has a big Twitter account, probably other other social media as well. So one thing that's interesting is you just started writing memos, right? It's kind of like, well, you just, you just kind of start doing what you want to do, not really necessarily knowing where it's going to take you, but I guess you get the experience and the exposure to that. But I'm curious, how did you actually get connected to Harry? So you've been in London for maybe like, I don't know, a year or two or three years at that point. And I'm curious about that as well as in general networking in London, when you come to a new city. I think I feel like when you're working venture capital, networking, I think it's quite important. Correct me if I'm wrong, I'm curious how you see that.

Yeah, I think you're right. I think the quality and the relevance of one's network is helpful no matter what you're doing in life, but it's especially helpful for venture capital. And I think I would actually say up to a very large extent because venture capital is a very access driven game. The quality and relevance of one's network I think determines the returns of a venture capital fund, I think more than any other factor. And the way I got connected to Harry Was, I have a younger brother who lives between San Francisco and Seattle, and Farad spends a lot of time on Twitter. And he loosely knew Harry through Twitter and he DMed Harry saying, hey, Harry, my sister is moving to London and she didn't previously go to school there or have a job there, so she has no friends, and I think you should hang out with her. And Harry, as I learned later, he was like, this is the weirdest request I've ever gotten on Twitter. But he was like, okay, I'll hang out with her. So this is how Harry became my first and only friend in London for a few months. And yeah, that's that story.

Twitter is incredible. I love Twitter so much. I feel like I talk about it on podcasts all the time because I think it's such a. If you use it right, it's just such a great. First of all, at least a learning tool, but an incredible networking tool as well.

Yeah, yeah, that's true. And I think maybe one lesson is, in a lot of ways, when I actually kind of look back into, like, the look back on, like, the unlocks in my life, I think almost all of them are people driven in a way, maybe, except. And again, this is again, partially people driven as well. But, like, writing the investment memos and starting to do the job that I wanted to do. In some ways, like, it positioned me for Harry to be able to make that introduction, but still, like, you know, I can't really say with any confidence that I would have this job at Weekend Fund if Harry hadn't made that intro. Hundreds of other people applied for the job and I didn't have, like, I didn't have professional investing experience, which I bet a lot of people would have. Would have had.

Totally agree. I think. I mean, I completely relate to that. That, you know, all the unlocks or for me, all the great things that happen to me in life. Whether it's, you know, interesting or like financially successful or just something fun. It always starts with randomly meeting some person and then that leads to something new that ends up being really cool in one way or another. And it's not going to be every person. I always feel you need to meet a lot of people and then, you know, 1 in 100 is going to change your life. But you need to sort of create those opportunities to actually meet those hundred people and just, yeah. Not give up and open yourself to opportunities. Right.

I bet this podcast is a great way, you know, for you to do that.

It is. It is 100%. For me personally, that's part of a big part of the motivation to do podcasts. Right. On both sides, the guests, but also the listeners. Right. So both, you know, in both on both sides you're exposed to interesting people and just kind of out there and discuss interesting things. And I think you just find out what others are doing and others find out about you and it makes sense.

Yeah, maybe one last thought on that is because you mentioned both Harry and Ryan, I think one thing they actually have in common is they both figured out a way to help, you know, builders and investors at scale, you know, through their respective platforms, 20 BC and Product Hunt. And I think possibly my biggest lesson as a junior investor. Right. So this is someone, you know, I didn't have like, I didn't have this strongest personal brand going into weekend fund. Just truthfully is you really need to figure out how to be helpful to your fitness future sourcing network. And if you can do that at scale, that's even better.

That makes a lot of sense. Okay, so let's talk a little bit more about London, as we already started kind of talking about that you come from India, lived in the US For a while. You're in London now. You work globally, obviously. I think you guys invest in globally, right?

Anyway, pretty much, yeah.

Cool. Do you think, and you mentioned also before that Bangalore is basically like the Silicon Valley of India. You lived in the Silicon Valley in the US London is sometimes labeled as the Silicon Valley of Europe. What's been your experience? So you've, you know, you experience three different types of Silicon Valley so far. I'm wondering what are your thoughts about London and how, you know, how do you see the startup scene here?

Yeah, So I guess first thoughts about London versus San Francisco. And these are obviously just, you know, this is just my experience, but because I also went to school in the Bay Area, I think there was a lot of like homogenous thinking around, you know, like how you wanted to spend your time, what you wanted from your life. And there's, I think diversity is like increasingly a talked about topic in tech and in our industry in general. But that's how I think about diversity. Right? Like how do you spend your time, not how you say you'll spend your time, but you how you actually spend your time day to day and what you really want from your life. And for me, like the biggest difference between living in San Francisco and being, being in London is living in San Francisco. I think people like their answers to this question were like, roughly similar. Right. Like, and this kind of this like sounds the.