3 Lessons from Kelly Perdew, Co-Founder & Managing General Partner of Moonshots Capital

Recently, Kelly Perdew, Co-Founder & Managing General Partner of Moonshots Capital, came on our Demo Day podcast for CoEfficient Labs. In the episode, Kelly dropped a plethora of knowledge from his experience as a VC, entrepreneur, and military veteran.

Kelly, the season two winner of The Apprentice, loves helping other entrepreneurs succeed. He’s served in every capacity: Founder, Board Member, CEO, COO, CFO, Business Development, and Sales. He’s raised institutional financing, grown businesses, down-sized businesses, and sold businesses for 8-figure exits.

Moonshots Capital is a seed-stage venture capital firm that invests in extraordinary leadership.

Great leaders are hard to come by. Moonshots Capital believes the best ones are military-trained or trial-by-fire entrepreneurs who can motivate others to action, inspire trust, and plan heuristically. They invest with conviction when those attributes are present.

Moonshots Capital was founded by a team of veterans in 2017. They have collectively founded and operated 14 companies, and have personally invested in more than 70 ventures. Beyond capital, they deploy their military and entrepreneurial experience and network to help world-changing companies grow.

Below I’ll share a few of my takeaways from our interview with Kelly.

You Only Have So Much Time

As an entrepreneur, you’re always on, you always have to put your best foot forward, and, like anyone else, you only have so much time in a day.

Because of this, as Kelly mentioned in our interview, you must prioritize the most important tasks every day. You have to be able to consume information quickly, make decisions, and execute your plan.

I loved this and couldn’t agree more. Time is your most precious commodity as an entrepreneur and how you use it will play a huge part in your success.

Beware of Spotlight Rangers

“Spotlight Rangers,” as Kelly described, are people who only perform when the boss is looking and try to take the praise for their actions whenever they can.

Kelly warns that, as the leader of your company, this is a mentality in people you have to watch out for. Those people who have a problem operating as a team will end up causing problems for you.

As Kelly mentioned in the episode, there needs to be cooperation across the entire team, and when there isn’t, this is a big sign of trouble.

Letting Go Of Your Baby

One of my favorite parts of the episode, and often one of the most difficult things for entrepreneurs to do, is to “let go of your baby,” as Kelly says.

As your business evolves, your emphasis and mentality go from doing everything yourself to ensuring it’s doable by someone else. This means setting up processes, training people, and, what’s most difficult, trusting your team to execute.

This isn’t easy for a founder, but without this, without letting go of your baby, your business can’t scale.

Furthermore, Kelly stressed the importance of truly surrounding yourself with people who are better at those pillars than you are. When you do this, you put yourself in a great position to succeed.

Want to Learn More?

You can watch Kelly’s full video interview on our Demo Day website, or listen to his full episode on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

Tune in next week as I share more learnings from Demo Day. Sending love from the entire CoEfficient Labs Team!

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