Cantos’ end game, and welcome Grant!
Our founder on building an enduring firm and taking our next step
When I think about hiring, usually in the context of supporting our portfolio founders, I think of Steve Jobs. Two of his quotes on the topic live rent-free in my brain (thanks, David Senra). The first,
“Assume you’re by yourself in a startup and you want a partner. You’d take a lot of time finding the partner, right? He would be half of your company. Why should you take any less time finding a third of your company or a fourth of your company or a fifth of your company? When you’re in a startup, the first ten people will determine whether the company succeeds or not. Each is 10 percent of the company. So why wouldn’t you take as much time as necessary to find all the A players?”
Or, “no compromises, especially for small teams.”
The single hardest thing about building a startup may be navigating the tension between the criticality of hiring extraordinary (and therefore scarce) people on one hand and of speed/scale on the other. One advantage in building a venture firm is that you can elect to focus entirely on caliber and culture fit, biding your time until you find an unequivocal “A player”.
Investment firms diverge on this topic, of course. Some optimize for scale, hiring junior investors who meet their minimum threshold in furtherance, typically, of some combination of growing AUM &/or the GPs keeping a higher share of the economics. This is a perfectly acceptable and rational strategy; I don’t mean to belittle it. It is not the path I’ve chosen for Cantos, however. I believe venture capital is at its best when approached as an artisanal craft rather than mirroring the operating companies it supports––its Platonic ideal closer to a Benchmark or USV than an NEA or General Catalyst. (I have incredible respect for those latter two firms; my uncle, Dick Kramlich, co-founded one of them. It’s just not me.) Which brings us to our second Jobsism,
“It doesn’t make sense to hire smart people and tell them what to do; we hire smart people so they can tell us what to do.”
Or, “hire up.”
This approach is at odds with the pyramidal structure of most financial firms. It implies a flatter, intensely meritocratic structure where the goal is, ideally, equal partnership. When true partnership is your end game, the sole purpose of “junior” hires is to vet and train them as future GPs, and unless you plan for your firm to decline in relevance and returns, their potential should be greater than that of the founding/current partner(s).
Early-stage venture capital––that is, true venture capital––is at its core about betting on high-potential people, usually before it’s proven or otherwise obvious. Cantos will live or die by such bets. Yet, when you run a venture firm as described, the biggest bets you take by far are the investors you hire. Your potential partners. Your prospective successors.
It has been apparent to me for some time that Amee is on this trajectory. I tell our portfolio founders, LPs, prospective LPs, and anyone else who will listen that I will be working for her one day. She is a true unicorn. Call me greedy, but I wanted to find another. While Amee spends most (but not all) of her time in bio & AI, I’ve had my eye out for another Principal to rise parallel to her who was more hardware-centric.
As you might imagine, and those of you in VC know, this job entails spending a LOT of time with other investors. (Too much, I’d argue. No offense.) Our “VCRM” includes over 600 firms and 1,000+ VCs I’ve met since founding Cantos. Every time I’ve interacted with one of them for the past few years I’ve asked myself, “could they be it?” 99% of the time the answer was “no”, but there was one name founders we respected kept bringing up…
From his time at Andreessen Horowitz as a deal partner and as a Susa Ventures Fellow before that, we built a wide breadth of common connections, three co-investments (Radiant, Salient, and Apex), and diligenced many more in parallel. Grant’s signal spiked across many attributes but chief among them was that founders he had declined to invest with raved about him nonetheless. If you forced me to distill a venture capitalist’s future prospects to a single leading indicator, this would be it.
It took some time. He took seriously his commitments to his prior team at American Dynamism (whom I deeply respect and most of whom I know personally) and their portfolio founders––an indicator of his fit to Cantos’ “integrity first” culture. So I am thrilled, at long last, to announce that Grant has joined Cantos as Principal, the third member of our investment team and fourth teammate (the other being our awesome head of talent, Natalie Estrella).
Grant will be running point on all things ex-bio going forward and backing me up on our existing hardware investments. If you are a hard-tech founder or investor, reach out to him. (You can guess his email.) If you are a Cantos LP and haven’t met him already, don’t let me stand in your way! If you stick with us long enough, he and Amee may be your primary points of contact one day anyway.
-Ian (Cantos’ first and last solo GP)
