Paying it forward: the accumulation of small kindnesses
Last week, I was a panelist at the RAISE Global Summit, a conference for “emerging fund managers” and LPs who are interested in emerging managers. It was an honor to be included– apparently there were over 500 funds that applied, and ~100 were accepted. Indeed, I saw presentation after presentation of funds that blew me away, and scribbled many pages of notes on how to be a better fund.
Ben Black, who co-founded the conference (with Joanna Drake), opened the day with a talk about how far this community of emerging managers has come since they started building the conference series, and it was hard to not be impressed. So many great funds were essentially launched at RAISE that Ben and Joanna’s impact on our little slice of the world has to be immense.
For me personally, though, the conference felt like a “full circle moment”. Well before I arrived at the conference, Ben had already helped me enormously.
For most of my career, I have been a product manager. To the extent that I had been an investor, it was largely reactive: if someone I personally know and trust is starting a company, I would write a check. This strategy has worked quite well, and I guess that I am lucky to have trustworthy friends and good timing.
When I decided to join Foothill Ventures full time (back then, we were called “Tsingyuan Ventures”), I knew very little about building and running a small fund. Lots of people were generous with their knowledge– people like Ross Fubini, James Cham, Aaref Hilaly, Satya Patel, Patrick Chung and others spent time with me to understand the ins-and-outs of running a small VC (I’d like to think that I’ve paid that debt forward a small bit by publishing what we currently do to run our little VC here).
Two of my friends, Josh Becker (currently a California State Senator, but in a previous life an entrepreneur that our predecessor fund, TEEC Angel Fund, had backed) and Mark Jacobstein, a serial entrepreneur (who knew Ben from way back in Rochester), suggested I speak to Ben Black.
Ben took the meeting and met me for lunch in Hayes Valley. He was very quick to spot some problems in the way I was positioning our fund, and immediately gave me some useful advice. He also took action, emailing a bunch of LPs that he thought might be good fits for us.
Two of them set up meetings, and one of them–Eric Sippel — in addition to becoming an investor– became one of our most helpful and strategic advisors.
Eric introduced me to Jonathan “JR” Roosevelt, of Industry Ventures. JR and the team at Industry Ventures have been among the most supportive, helpful, and easy-to-work with institutional investors we’ve encountered (and we’re very lucky to have them as LPs).
The cynical view of this chain of events is that it’s the “old boys network” in action. This view is objectively correct– this is how networks self-perpetuate. The other objective view is that this is a group of people who were happy to help without expecting anything in return. I know that they do the same for lots and lots of people who are in no way in the “old boys network”, and I am happy to do the same.
So, at the end of the RAISE conference, when I had a moment to say hello to Ben, I wanted to let him know that he made a bunch of dominoes fall for me that he might not be aware of. I hope to be as helpful as him for the next group of emerging managers.
