‘Why I’m Joining’ posts can feel indulgent. But they’re helpful to reflect on what matters, and what we’re all collectively building.
Fuel
Since arriving in the Bay Area a decade ago, I’ve been fortunate to see over 13,000 pitches, work directly with 1000+ founders, have very close relationships with a dozen, and officially advise a handful of teams. That kind of immersion, before you write a single check, gives you a personal view into what founders go through, day in and day out. Co-founder splits, executive struggles, missed months, unhelpful investors. Self-doubt, self-confidence, deep joy, and true pain. Through it all, what you also see is good people moving their visions forward, moving their teams forward, and moving themselves forward as humans. Founder as Hero is a trope, yes, but it’s based in something deeply beautiful. It’s hard not to be inspired in our industry, every fucking week.
A few weeks ago I joined Ridge as a Partner, with a dual focus on actively investing and building the infrastructure of the firm. So now I get to work closely with founders for many more years. (Required plug: we love investing $3–5M in $5–10M Seed and Series A rounds, to back enterprise founders who share our vision of a founder/investor relationship! :))
Quietly Awesome People
Ridge isn’t yet a fancy name in Venture, because it hasn’t been a name for long at all: it only emerged in 2017 as the firm evolved out of IDG Ventures. What I found as I worked with the team over most of the past year was a team with a deep commitment to the founders they support. There’s the data: every founder funded by Ridge has come back for their next project, they’ve quietly funded more female founders than the industry average for years, and they’ve never asked a founding CEO to leave the company. And then there’s the anecdotes. An experienced portfolio founder described it, unprompted, this way: “There’s always a power imbalance between investors and founders. That’s inevitable. But there are investors who use that power to benefit themselves, and there are investors who use it to support you. Alex [Rosen, my Partner] is the latter.” That view extends beyond Alex to the whole team here.
The fact that the team who holds this ethos is quietly great at what they do was the second piece of the puzzle. Ridge has backed great companies like Fastly, Braze, Krux, Minted, ThirdLove, and many more. They understand how to evaluate, how to win, and how to support. They’re not loud about it, and they don’t take themselves too seriously.
Venture Capital
Venture is quietly and fitfully moving towards transparency, efficiency, and intelligence. Transparency has come in many forms, from shedding light into the process for founders, to the speed at which reputations are built and lost, to the ubiquity of deal flow and access to secondary shares. Efficiency is coming from market pressures, where in places like Silicon Valley you can no longer drag a founder along for months and expect to win a deal. You need to make fast, streamlined decisions, though there’s still a long ways to go. And intelligence is coming from many directions, but my favorite is via system, code, and data. Building this way helps you spot different opportunities more efficiently than your competitors (and not just finding founders who can negotiate warm introductions), and make decisions that are based more on tested insights than individual biases.
Sometimes these are step changes, like with AngelList or Y Combinator. But more often it’s a series of smaller, deliberate innovations within a firm like Ridge that at the end of the day, add up to an unfair advantage and collectively move us forward a little bit. Building within venture firms hasn’t always been the norm, but it is the future, and those who invest in how we work will win in the long run. I’ve long cared about how we experiment and build in our industry, and now get to do that for many years at Ridge.
Appreciation
In Silicon Valley, we tend to confuse individual progress with collective support. While I’m not about to take a victory lap before I even start, I do want to take a moment to appreciate those who have supported me over the past decade, including the folks at AngelList¹ and Greylock², and a couple dozen important partners, friends and collaborators³.
And I want to appreciate that in a world where individual progress is built on hundreds of conversations with different people, and where each of those conversations is subject to bias, I’ve gained a healthy amount of compounded benefit from being white and male. We’re moving forward as an industry, but we’re not there yet.
I can’t wait for the next decade. I can’t wait to work more closely with quietly awesome founders. I can’t wait to find and support more founders who come from backgrounds traditionally neglected by our industry. I can’t wait to learn from my new Partners. And I can’t wait to work every day to help build a firm that reflects what venture can be.
___
[1] Naval and Nivi
[2] John, David, James, Ben, Ryan, Kevin, Tom, Dan, Ali, Reid, Jerry, Jessie and others
[3] Meghan, Melissa, Chad, Marta, Sean, Parker, Aaron, Andrew, Brett, Doris, Josh, Mike, Beth, Alicia, Lindsay, Lee, Brian, Ben, Tracy, Ash, Tony, Kelsey, Peter, Rajeev, Martin, Raf, Nick, Boris, Ange, and many others
