Ep#18: Building the VC Firm Founders Choose First with Jason Shuman

Business and startups. When I was a kid, my entire family, aunts, uncles, my father, they were all small business owners and entrepreneurs. And then when I was the face for a nonprofit when I was really young, because I actually grew up relatively sick, I used to go around raising capital for them. And the people who I would meet day in, day out, who were the people who that were donating money and donating their time, were entrepreneurs. And that just inspired me a ton to want to go and build a business and be able to give back and. And that eventually led me to getting into startups full time when I was 17, working in identity theft protection. Got into real estate when I was 18 to kind of pay a little bit for school, and then launched an e commerce business in 2011. That was when Shopify was very bad. And I would say Facebook was very cheap. So it was a lot easier because the market timing was pretty incredible. But by no means was a good operator. I was relatively a bad operator. But you could fall forward. And I think I realized after two years of running it, one year in.

School, definitely one of my favorites for a few reasons. But I'll let Jason Schumann talk a bit more about that. But first, Jason, welcome to the show.

Thanks for having me, Andy. Excited to be with you.

It's a treat. And I got exposed to primary with a podcast that Ben sun, your co founder, did on Samir Kaji's podcast. And just listening to him and his experience personally into why the thesis exists today is fascinating. I'd love to hear from you as far as your journey. You went from founder to investor. And it is a path we're seeing a lot more of now in the VC world. But I'd love to know your story.

Yeah, so it's a great question. I was born and raised outside of Boston. I was one of those kids who was always distracted in school. And I think the reason why was I fell in love with the idea one year out that it wasn't what I wanted to do for the next 10 years. And when that happened, I ended up deciding that I wanted to find something new. And venture seemed incredible to me because I could go out and learn about different markets, I could meet a better team, I could learn how to raise capital much easier. I didn't even know what venture capital was before. And then for me, it was very aligned with my why in life. And so I ended up literally deciding I want to get a job in venture. Didn't know how. I drove for Uber at night to make money and during the Day I just sourced deals for venture firms and mainly in New York, but I was doing it out of Boston and so that gave me an edge and helped me get into the market. About a decade ago or a little over that.

Great story. I mean, I grew up in Tasmania. For anyone that knows Australia, it's a tiny little island off the bottom. My town was 70,000 people and there were definitely no startups, no entrepreneurs, anything of innovation at all. Beautiful place, beautiful place, but nothing like that. So the contrast of what you experienced is fascinating. To get that front row seat at an early age and understand the ins and outs of what you're doing is fascinating. And I guess to fast forward to today, you're at Primary Ventures. Can you tell us a little bit about the firm and a little bit about the thesis as well?

Yeah. So Primary is the largest seed focused fund based in New York. The way we think about the world is we try to provide an unreasonable amount of resources to founders to try to create unfair advantages. And we do that by, by one having a concentrated seed investing strategy. So each one of the partners only does three, maybe four deals a year. The second piece of that is everyone specializes. So we go really deep into markets. We build expert networks, we build customer networks which inform our insights, but also help us with our due diligence and then help us win deals and then also helps us supporting the portfolio companies. And then more importantly, we employ, I think about 35 people now on our portfolio impact team. That team is run by three former executives at multiple hundreds of millions of dollars of ARR tight businesses. And they essentially have built up functions around the three things that we believe founders need most, which is people, customers and capital. And so we have a full recruiting and community team that's been built out where we can embed recruiters at companies. We have a market development team that can do outbound for you and set up over a thousand sales meetings last year at the same time. That team can sit down with you and coach you on your pitch, your sales and marketing materials, et cetera. And then we have a strategic finance and corporate development team that can help build up your financial models that honestly, many of the companies have used from seed all the way through, like Series D. And it's one of those things that if we can help founders in their early days, when every day matters, by increasing their output and their surface area and their velocity, then we believe that founders will be in the best position to succeed. And so we're just trying to take some of the things off their plate that might not be core to their day to day.

It's so important. And as a founder myself, having experience of people that give you direction, I remember so many good examples and just from a simple board meeting and having an agenda and minutes and from a compliance perspective, when you're going through a DD process on an exit, you to be buttoned up on details and major decisions, et cetera. And I wouldn't have known where to start on that. And obviously today there's a lot of information available, but having someone who's lived it for a period of time and have it as a co partner in that can make a significant difference.

It's very true. And I think a lot of people say like isn't it just marketing? And I tell them if it was just marketing, why would we be putting money into this program? Why would we have 35 people into this program? You know, every dollar that goes out the door into the program are dollars that could be coming into my pocket, Cassie's pocket, Ben's pocket, Brad's pocket. So clearly if we didn't see roi, we wouldn't be doing it. And for me, I genuinely believe that if you look across our portfolio, it doesn't matter if you are a second time founder who took a company public before or you're a first time founder who's literally never operated before. There are just different sets of offerings and different ways that these people use the resources that makes it invaluable to them. In the early days, yeah.

Great. And to set up today's topic, we're looking at how do you build a firm that founders choose first? And it's really important today. And we saw data that came out the last two years and there's been a lot of VC firms that have disappeared, which is now never good to see. But as far as the modern VC now, do you see the power balance shifting a little bit. There's a lot of talk around bootstrapping and different funding models now for startup founders in the last couple of years. What are some of the things that you're observing now as far as that dynamic between VCs and founders?

The market has changed completely. I mean, I've been in this a decade and it feels like it changes and evolves every five years. At this point, the observations that I have would be one, the big guys are getting even bigger and these folks are gobbling up a lot of LP capital and they're able to invest along the full stack, which means they could do a seed deal, they could do an A deal or they could do a series E deal. And at the same time those folks, I would say a very, very high percentage of those folks have become specialized by pods. And that really enables a few things, one of which is now everyone can go look at things in their market and become experts. And so they can bring a prepared mind into meetings, which is really important because bringing a prepared mind into meetings enables you to move faster on a deal and with more conviction on a deal. It also enables you to see all of the deals in your space and become known for something. So, so if you're a founder that you know is building a company in fintech, you are probably going to have seen tweets and blog posts and gone to events that, you know, the fintech person at XYZ firm has been putting on and that ultimately helps them with sourcing. At the same time, there's some dangerous stuff going on. You know, these firms are able to come down into seed and precede and write checks into the companies in the broader market. And for them, they're able to do it in a different way than folks that are micro funds or folks that are seed focused funds because they're able to write larger checks at higher prices. And that might not be the best thing for a company because a having a lot of capital in the early days might not give you the constraints needed to find true product market fit and, you know, the ability to scale on top of something that is a strong foundation. Additionally, they're able to look at it like it's an option bet. And I tell founders this story, it's like, I want you to imagine that you've got a bunch of money and you've got two homes and one of those homes is worth $35 million and the other home is worth $2 million and both homes are on fire. Which one are you going to go to first? The answer is probably the big one, right? And so I look at it and say, hey, you want to work with someone whose core business, whose like livelihood is seed investing. And that is something that we've seen evolve over the years for sure. And then the last point I'll make is we've definitely seen a rise of these like solo funds, emerging managers who are popping up, who have proprietary networks, like, you know, they came out of scale AI, they came out of Uber, and they are able to access talent earlier than most folks because of the connectivity that they have.

To double click on that a little bit. I think it's fascinating. And you've obviously really doubled down on people and process and things that you're investing in to be able to help drive returns for your portfolio. So it's not just capital that you're committing, you're committing resource and a significant amount to grow that. Do you think that, and this is a very sweeping statement, but do you think those bigger firms that are generating a large portion of the LP capital, that the care and attention they're putting in their portfolio is less than a smaller fund who is living and breathing the success of their portfolio? If you're investing a billion dollars plus, are you more flippant? And if you're getting access to the best deals just by nature of your brand, is there complacency in that?

I think it really boils down to the investment strategy and the number of deals each partner does a year and then the number of portfolio companies as a ratio to the number of people that somebody has on an impact team or portfolio platform team. You know, we don't call it platform here because platform just has a weird connotation to it. It honestly doesn't like strive for and have a North Star around driving real value, whereas impact does. And so if you kind of follow the history of primary, our impact team has probably scaled even faster than our portfolio team has scaled or sorry, our portfolio has scaled. And that is very intentional because if you want somebody to add value on sales and you think about a sales rep, one sales rep can probably only handle, you know, selling to five, maybe 10 companies a month and if they try to go to 20, 30, 40, 50, it doesn't do well. And there's a reason why it doesn't do well. It's because the service drops in value and the ability to have a strong relationship with those customers drops in value. And so our philosophy and our approach has just been how do we be really intentional about these ratios and working closely with founders in a way that they feel like they are getting one to one service?

Yeah. And I'm part of the VC platform community in Goto events and it's amazing, just the difference. I've talked to people that will have 1200 companies in their portfolio, which is obviously impossible to service at a personal level. There's not enough hours in the day and enough people to be able to do that. So the right ratio allows you to be able to support and nurture and sometimes those collective learnings as far as one company to another that's driven by a central resource within your own team is so powerful because there's a multiplier effect. You Always have this feedback loop and I've spent a lot of time with your impact team in your office and know a lot of those people and they're really good operators and I don't say that just to be kind to you today, but people who are genuinely adding value to the investments that you make. So it feels like a very valuable piece. And you've got over a billion, I think Aum, right?

Yep. Little over a billion of Aum. And you know, putting the final touches on our next fund here, which should take us up even more. So I think we've been lucky to say the least. When you look at the people on our team and you mentioned that you've met them and they add a lot of value, I would never try to give advice versus Cassie Young on the go to market side. I would never try to give advice on the recruiting side versus Rebecca Price. They just have done it before. They've seen it many, many times. They've seen every color of it across many types of businesses. And I think we are fooling ourselves as venture capitalists, especially if we have not operated and scaled the company in a big, big way, to believe that we can give better advice than the operators who are doing it day in and day out and are the top 1% of their core function.

Humility is an interesting thing in the world of venture capital and I've seen it firsthand and I'm not going to call out who they are, but I've seen investors in VC firms who come from an investment world who are very forthright on their opinions on operating procedures and things within companies that they've never done themselves. But just by virtue of being in that world for long enough, they're quite firm. And not to belittle their experience, but having subject matter expertise and understanding the co dynamic that you have internally is critical to your success. And obviously it's working. What fund are you entering into next?

Is it five Fund? Five on the core fund and then select four?

Yeah, yeah. So being able to have that relationship and just look at that a little bit further, how do you sit with your impact team and your investment team as far as the things that they hear on the front line, working with founders at a really close capacity and then how you're looking and thinking about the founders that you want to meet, how you invest in that and how your impact team can support, like what does that collaboration look like?

So I think there's two questions there, the first being like, how do we work with the impact team? We ultimately work Very closely with them at the portfolio level. Specifically one. Every founder has a one on one relationship with each one of my partners on the Impact team. They message with them regularly via text, via email. They even message with a lot of the junior folks on the Impact team because sometimes those folks are actually working at the offices of the portfolio company. I get updates from those folks on every company they're working with, on every project they're working with weekly. You even get updates from those folks in real time. For instance, if we land a hire that signs with the portfolio company, it goes into the hiring channel. If we land a customer that, you know, market Dev helped acquire, that goes into the customer wins channel. But the real meat and potatoes of it happens in our monthly meeting with the Impact team where we go line by line and we go through every portfolio company and they give a status update. We talk about, you know, as the investors, what we are viewing as the key needs for the company. You know, we call them glass balls. It's like what are the one or two things that you can't drop because if you do, the company's in a lot of trouble. And we just try to put together strategies on how can we, you know, act against that to drive ultimately, you know, world class returns.

And we will definitely get into that today. And I see founders that are bootstrapping more and they, they're very targeted and deliberate as far as when they are looking for capital, how they use it. And I've seen and heard stories multiple times where founders have a large injection of capital when it's almost they stare at each other blank face and don't know what to do with it or where to start and how they make decisions. And there's almost this paralysis that happens when they get there versus being very intentional with what you're doing with capital in advance and being self aware enough. And I feel that having an impact team like you have would be great on that because you kind of know what you're getting as a complimentary service on top of capital.

Yeah, you know, I probably have a few comments on that. The first one is I think the narrative of like people are bootstrapping at a much, much higher rate is a little off. It's a bit wrong. If anything, I'm out here in San Francisco today. The language that VCs use and that founders use is incredibly accessible today. It is very democratized and as a result, the generation of young founders that are getting started, they walk and they talk as if they've already raised a bunch of Venture capital and this younger generation and the new generation of founders that are coming in in this AI era are dreaming big and they look at the next three years as the gold rush and they really want to go and hammer growth. And as a result, people are raising much, much larger rounds in the early days, not only because they want to, but because they can. And the reason why they can is a result of what we talked about earlier, which is there's a lot of money sloshing around in the ecosystem that's looking for places to put it. And they also are looking at this as the gold rush. And so that is like definitely one theme that I'm seeing pop up the other, I think after a founder takes capital, but really ideally before you are having a conversation about the series of hypotheses that that founder wants to go out and they want to test. And really between rounds, we personally at primary sit down as an investment team member and a board member with the founder and say, hey, let's put together your future equity story. Let's come up with the what are we going to pitch the Series A investors that the company looks like in 8, 12, 14 months. And let's put together the path on how do we get there and if we're both aligned on what those milestones are and what you really need to prove to unlock the next set of hypotheses you really want to go out and validate and you really want to go out and prove, then we're in a really good place. And I think that that exercise is one that every venture capital firm should be going through at the founder before they invest. But if they don't, then 100% after they invest, great.

And it's important, I think having that roadmap because if you're a first time founder, you're always flying blind to a certain degree as far as milestones and patterns. And the combination of your investment team and your impact team allows you to have a very holistic point of view on trends that you've seen patterns historically at what level you need to get to on ARR to be able to drive certain investment levels and valuations. And that's something that again, looking back, I wish that I'd had and I think going back to mentioning around Ben, like his experience as far as having no support and wanting to create something where as a founder you would have support from your venture capital team was core to what you guys do today, that's for sure.

I mean, we all have a saying internally which is founders deserve deserve better. And we are trying to live that day in and day out. And we, you know, put our money where our mouth is so good.

And I set up at the start of the show that primary is one of my favorites. And I don't want to have favorites. But as far as the thesis that you have and the people that you invest in and how you support, it's really important. I mentor and support a lot of founders and they're just not getting that support. And I think it's critical to that journey to one, have an ear that will be empathetic to you. And I think that you as a founder going into investment side, like, you're naturally going to bring empathy because you've been there and you've done it. Maybe there's a double edged sword, maybe you have higher standards because you know that you've done it and they can do better, but maybe there's a little bit of empathy peppered in there too.

Yeah. And you know, one of the things that I really preach internally and to all of the folks on our investment team is just like, do no harm. And it's very easy to give advice. Advice is cheap. You know, it's just a little bit of energy coming out of somebody's mouth. But to make sure you're giving good advice, that's hard. And you might not be the best person to give good advice. But going back to the glass balls, for example, if one of the glass balls is around acquiring customers, you know, there are many strategies to do it. And oftentimes people have the inclination to leverage their old playbooks and leverage what they know and say, this is how you should do it. That's dangerous. That's very dangerous. And instead, like the approach that I tend to take is I'll go talk to 10 former operators, former heads of growth, former BD, you know, AES, former heads of marketing at companies that are in your space and selling to the same people. And I'll just go try to collect all my notes and all the learnings and share it back with you and let you take what you want to take. Because there's the saying that like history doesn't repeat itself, but it rhymes and it is very true, whereby there are many lessons that you can learn from folks that have, you know, walked the path ahead of you. And if you can avoid many of the mistakes that they made, oftentimes on the dime of other venture capital firms, then you might be able to grow your company more efficiently and have a much easier, relatively speaking, glide path. You know to success here.

And it's holding people accountable. Right. As far as if you're a partner to the portfolio companies that you invest in, you need to give the right advice and I think probably drop it in every episode, but I love it, which is strong convictions weekly held. So being decisive but also being accountable and accountability today means, you know, knowledge is accessible, but as you say, it's like also who you trust for that knowledge. Because a lot of people are sharing opinions either validated or not everywhere right now. So it's easy to get a false sense of what's real and what's not for sure.

I mean one of the reasons why I'm out here right now is I am going around to 40 different venture capital firms and I'm talking through our portfolio and pressure testing narratives in those working equity stories or future equity stories for the series A. Because the reality is the goal posts are moving every day in the world of AI. And so even though I have over a decade now of venture capital experience and you know, probably help companies raise north of $2 billion, things change. And if I don't take a beginner's mind to this game every day and I just make a bunch of assumptions about what certain things will look like, it's a very easy trap to fall into to start to give bad advice.

Do you think that's changed in your time in venture capital where firms are collaborating more and sharing insights to help collectively improve and grow the industry in a time obviously right now that is, to your point, changing every day. Is that something that shifted?

Well, one information is currency in venture, it's always been, especially for junior folks sharing data sharing companies. It's like that, that movie Mean Girls, you know, it's like a little, little gossipy. But the thing that has changed is the sheer amount of content out there that venture capitals firms are producing, that shares benchmark metrics, that shares like best in class tactics. And those insights I think are net new, you know, versus definitely versus 10 years ago. The volume at a whole is probably 5 to 10x that, that it was five years ago.

I've always been a big believer that connecting with my competitors is really important for our collective growth. Most markets, I don't know, maybe a sweeping statement, but a lot of markets there's enough customers and enough people to sustain it. Particularly as you get more established. I'm happy to be called out there, but there's, there's a bit of tension, but also there's value in SHAR as well.

Yeah, and I would Say I spend more of my time with like series A, series B late stage investors than I do as seed investors because they just see more stuff and they see what's working and what's not working. And so therefore I'm able to actually get net new value from them. And in return they get a lot of value because they get to hear about our portfolio companies that are working before anyone else in the market versus a lead seed firm. A decade ago we all wrote 250 500k checks. We all talked all the time. I mean I remember getting into VC and learning about two very well known brand name firms that had bi weekly deal flow calls sharing deals. That doesn't happen anymore. It's just like it's so competitive where like we want to get 15 to 20% ownership, they want to get 15 to 20% ownership. So you've certainly seen sharper elbows pop up. But at the same time there are symbiotic relationships at different stages of the capital stack.

Okay, so you're talking more around downstream. So you're creating a well trodden path to help elevate your portfolio for one. Insights that you get as far as what trends are happening that you can put back into the loop but you're also creating future investment opportunity and network and awareness to be able to help continue on scale what you're doing.

Yeah, and like I'm a better picker because of the conversations I have with later stage firms. I mean again, they're much bigger, they tend to specialize, they tend to see everything, they tend to see the numbers of those things in whatever markets like I might be looking at. And so not only can I be helping portfolio companies with more information, but I can be helping my own abilities to be more focused around finding the best deals and picking the best deals.

And are you seeing that within those conversations there's a consensus as far as common things that people are feeding back to you or is it going to be a little bit contentious or contradictory between firms?

There is definitely differences in the conversations. Sometimes I want to focus the conversation anyways on different things. But I would say the broader point of view, like your point of views can be different because one firm might be willing to take XYZ risk where they're saying hey, this is a very strong wedge. An AI scribe is awesome. It's growing super fast. Yeah, it might not be defensible but if they can get into this, this and this, then it becomes defensible. That's one, that's one view of the World versus another firm that writes checks at the same stage might say, yeah, an AI scribe is a great wedge, but it's not defensible at all. And there's seven other companies popping up and that company that just got their round done is doing 5 million of ARR. But that's incredibly risky to do at a $300 million valuation, and I'm not willing to take that risk. So really you do see where the edges are for people, and I would say that the edges are in different places.

Interesting. And I could talk a lot about the VC side, but I'd like to pivot a little bit as far as internally. And one of the evolutions of primary has been in the incubation space. Can you tell us a little bit about that as far as history and where it fits in with your portfolio and your thesis?

Yeah. So one, the history of it, I would say, goes back to the fact that almost all of us were founders before. But more specifically, my partner Ben, after selling his first company, started to incubate a number of companies and started to identify a number of themes that he was really interested in starting businesses around. And therefore he went out and he tried to find founders that wanted to launch companies with the ideas that he had. And one of those companies and people that he met that he shared a lot of the insights with was Bomb Kim, the founder of Coupang, who ended up launching a daily deal site in Korea way back in the day. Now, that business saw the writing on the wall around Groupon and Living Social and we, I guess Ben was really lucky enough to also share the insights of BOM and Bomb was a learning machine and also saw the writing on the wall and decided to pivot that business into what is today really the Amazon of Korea and is a publicly traded company that's worth tens of billions of dollars. And so I think when you kind of think about the base of the incubation stuff, a lot of the passion derives from, I think, our founding energy and our creativity and our optimism. But the other thing is venture capital is a very hard business. It's a very hard business. Not a great asset class for most people. You don't want to be in funds that aren't in the top quartile. You really want to be in funds that are in the top decile. And it's really hard to generate top decile returns if you have 10, 15% ownership, especially with the prices that are being paid today and the amount of risk that's out there in the market today. When you do that and you have 10 to 15% ownership. You need to have a unicorn hit rate that's north of 10% in order to return the fund because it's really hard to predict deca corn. So you kind of have to pack into the math with unicorn math. So if you think about the fact that you need 10 to 15% unicorn hit rate with that ownership, if you can go out into the market, because you have a very, very good idea of the way that the market works and you know a lot of the customers and you're sitting down with them regularly. Let's say I'm sitting down with these customers like a forward deployed engineer would, and I'm hearing their problems and I'm hearing their pain points and I get to say, hey, like, have you thought about X, Y or Z? Like we're seeing it work in that market, the ideas start to spin and you might get design partners really, really early who want to buy the product and you get validation of market pull. At the same time, you have unbelievable operators, like some folks that are the best operators in the world that could be unbelievable, incredible founders, but they're so locked in, they're so focused on the business that they're running, they have no time to ideate. And by the way, they don't have like a bird's eye view on like what's working in what markets, etc. And what themes could they apply to the market that they know in particular? And so if we can really marry the two and have slightly higher ownership, it changes the math to return a venture capital fund. And it makes it so you can return a venture capital fund with, you know, a seven and a half percent unicorn hit rate or a billion dollar exit instead of a $2 billion exit. And I think that that is really important for anyone in the market. And so we're just doubling down on that as well as the investments that we make in incredible founders who come up with ideas that by no way, shape or form we ever would have come up with on our own.

Makes a lot of sense to me. And when you have such a large impact team as well, and you're getting those insights and operating practices combined with the intel that your investment team has collectively across the board, to be able to use that to nurture something and have a bigger stake in the game, it changes the whole multiplier effect to your point. And within that, I'm curious too. We talked previously and you actually jumped in as a CEO for some of those incubations as well, like taking that back on, as a former founder and operator, like, how did you balance that time as far as trying to help nurture and grow these incubation companies plus run your own portfolio as well?

Not well, not sleeping a lot, like I think somebody said to me, I think it was my uncle actually told me a long time ago, you know, you get like one giant bucket of water, then you have five different buckets below that. You know, whether it's family and it's friends and it's work and it's your personal life, and you can only put a certain amount of water into each bucket. And at that time, you know, even within my work and professional life, I probably spent way more time focused on those businesses than I did on net new deals. And so I just had to have a much higher bar for what was great and who was great when I was looking at new investments, because I felt like the opportunity right in front of my face to like go out and validate these ideas and go out and scale them and acquire customers and recruit an incredible team to start the businesses was just such an incredible once in a lifetime opportunity that I wanted to make sure that those things were set up well for success.

Within that, having the vertical expertise, the way that you described each of your investment team, having their own specific lane that they're focused on does that skill and expertise in community, I would assume is really important to be able to allow you to jump in and play that role.

For sure. I mean, we have like an incredible operations that we've created around our investment team and built a system to make everybody more successful. And so we have things like we call it air cover, you know, internally, where we have technology to help us outbound and identify folks that are either starting companies or likely to start companies. But we have a content engine and events engine that Katherine Thayer, our head of marketing, and Hudson, who we brought on recently, really done well, whereby, you know, if I want to go and throw an event for heads of growth at vertical AI companies, like, I just tell them and like, the event's booked and the people are invited and like it's ready to go or, you know, my friends are joking with me because I. I also do a podcast and like a big YouTube video series. They're like, how do you have time for that? And I'm like, well, I just like a. I can't really go out at night that many nights a week anymore to go network. So I just created a list of people I really want to meet and I really want to sit down with and I really want to learn from. And instead of just going and doing it over coffee, I schedule it with them. And I have, you know, a briefing doc when I walk in the room that got made for me and the recording's ready to go. And then I get like the cuts of the videos and then I get copy that like I should be posting. And then like, yeah, I tweak it a bunch because it's not really in my language but like it's pretty turnkey. And so the sheer amount of output and the sheer amount of leverage that we get from our air cover is really powerful. And then you add in things like Tegus and our expert network, like we built an expert network now that's close to 3,500 people. Like I can get access to information within 24, 48 hours on a deal to really help me get up to speed on things. And it really is a powerful unlock for anyone on our investment team or anyone that comes into primary.

And the community effect is critical when you've got exited founders and people that are living and breathing something that can be a very small niche as well that is impossible to keep up with every day. That feedback loop, yeah, super valuable. And in the time that we've got left, I'd love to put you under the spotlight. Cause most of my audience are founders. What sort of things are you looking at now? And obviously deal flow is critical. And I think your thesis and the way you're working has proven that not only are you driving returns, but you're also building a big community of people that are aware of primary. They know what you stand for, they know what they get from you. When you're looking at people coming through the door, what sort of things are you looking at?

I mean we're investing pre revenue idea on napkin all the way through companies that have a million of revenue. So it just depends, depends on really the person and the market that they're playing in and the solution that they, that they're building. You know, on a human level. Like we need to be backing world class founders. And like what do world class founders look like? What do elite founders look like? They look like people who are incredibly driven with a very high sense of urgency. They're resourceful, they're learning machines, they're curious, they know how to sell, they know how to sell stock, they know how to sell people and recruit, they know how to sell their product, they understand go to market strategy and they're incredibly strategic. And if you can kind of bundle all that up Together in what is a great market and you can build a product that has fast time to value and is, you know, as Neil Mata says, like a jaw dropping customer experience, then it's the type of founder we want to be working with. And that could be that they have the product in the market already and they're generating revenue, or it could be that, you know, they're clearly able to articulate to you what that thing looks like and they can show you examples of their past whereby they were able to build products that were equally as beautiful and equally as powerful and equally as valuable.

And at early stage, I see common themes as well. I very much driven by a founder because even if they have revenue, they're still building a business and establishing some form of stability that they can then scale off the back of. What are the best ways for a founder? If they're early stage, they want to get in front of you, how do they get your attention?

I always tell people, like, getting an intro into a VC in the grand scheme of your business is not going to be the hardest thing by a long shot. And so finding an introduction path in is usually the best way to do it. With that said, I read every cold email, you know, that that comes in and someone on our team reviews it. It's incredibly challenging. Like we get hundreds of emails a day, you know, and I think that I'm not going to say what was me and like, you know, you should feel bad for me but like, it's not easy to process that many things and so you have to start to like identify certain signals. And for me it's like trying to figure out is it a product that fits the thesis that I have in the market today, or is a founder with an extraordinary background or that has shown some signs of extraordinary over the course of their life, which you can usually get to pretty quickly. Otherwise, like, look, attending primary events is like a great way to do it. Writing a very, very thoughtful cold email, you know, outlining your thesis, why you're great, you know, so on and so forth, that's also good. And being a thought leader, you know, can always help as well on social media just because you're putting your ideas out there into the ether and if people are aligned with your ideas, like tend to find you.

I tell my founders, like your own personal story is really important too and being able to articulate that and build your personal brand. And there's no excuse, I don't think today to be focused on that because it's important for fundraising. It's important for sales, it's important for recruitment. You need to be as big as your business, if not bigger.

Yeah. And you know, I think people need to like play their game. Like I wouldn't like, I hate giving like overly broad advice. I definitely think, you know, LinkedIn for instance, is like an underpenetrated platform where you can get a lot of customers, you know, attention and you can go out and you can add Target customers on LinkedIn and they can see your stuff and you can stay top of mind. But there are counter cases to everything. I have two of the best founders in the portfolio that I've backed. You don't find anything about the business online. You don't find anything about them online. They just go out, they put their heads down and they built a great business. And it's because really they built a jaw dropping customer experience. I think you got to figure out what feels right to you and then you should really double down on that.

Interesting. I had Mike McCombey. I don't know if you know Mike, he seems to know everyone, but he's got this amazing ability to network. But his investment thesis, smaller scale investments, but it's very much around that symbol, overachieving founder. So the person who the product speaks for itself. They don't need to hype it up or oversell it too much. It's just a very strong business model, strong product, things that he's looking at. And I think hype can often end in tears as well if you're overselling and overstating where you're actually at, which can be, you know, it's bad for everyone ultimately if you're doing that.

Yeah. And really what it boils down to is if you are posting a lot on social media, are you measuring the roi? Simple. If it works, double down. If it's not working, don't waste your time.

Yeah, great advice. Okay, so we're coming up to time as far as what's on the year ahead. Is there anything that's new that's coming up in the world of primary this year?

You know, we're closing up our new fund and we're just doubling down on the things that we want to do, whether it's in San Francisco or New York or, you know, any other areas? I think everyone's gone very deep in their markets of specialization. We have some pretty clear theses that we have now that we want to be putting dollars behind. And I think if we can just go out and find the best founders to work with and win those deals then ultimately we'll be successful. And so for me that's really doubling down on vertical AI. It's doubling down on vertical integrators, you know, that do manufacturing a lot like our portfolio company Dandy. And if I can go and find the best deals here, I think we'll be pretty happy in five to 10 years. Is it does certainly feel like the best time in the history of my life to be starting a business.

Amazing. Jason, it's been so good to have a conversation today. I a big fan of Primary and it's been good to unpack it and hear it through your lens. Really useful. So thank you sir.

Thank you. Appreciate you having me. Andy.

You're listening to Startups Decoded. My name is Andy Walsh. I'd appreciate it if you share with friends that would love this as well. We've had some really interesting conversations. Ratings definitely help too. So put some positive ones on there and I'll see you next week for another episode.