Most investors say they want to back outlier founders. Jeffrey Becker is trying to find them before the company even exists.
As General Partner at Antler, Jeff co-leads the firm’s US Fund from New York, investing at what he calls the “inception” stage: before a polished pitch deck, before obvious traction, before the market has voted. Antler’s model is built around a simple but difficult premise: spend time with founders in person, understand how they think, watch how they operate, and back the ones who seem capable of building something massive from zero.
Jeff calls it “backing maniacs.”
Not reckless founders. Not loud founders. Not people performing ambition for investors.
The kind of maniac Jeff is looking for is someone with deep obsession, extreme urgency, resilient optimism, and a personal relationship with the problem they are solving. Someone who does not just want to start a company, but almost cannot imagine doing anything else.
That distinction sits at the heart of this conversation.
From LinkedIn Hypergrowth to Day-Zero Venture
Before joining Antler, Jeff spent nine years at LinkedIn during one of the company’s defining growth periods. He held nine roles across sales and leadership as LinkedIn scaled from roughly 1,500 people to around 20,000.
That experience shaped the way he thinks about company building.
Jeff points to LinkedIn’s leadership, culture, communication, and focus as major lessons. The best leaders he observed did not simply tell people what to do. They taught people how to think. They gave teams frameworks, principles, and operating systems that created leverage across the organization.
That matters in venture because founders are not just building products. They are building cultures, decision-making systems, and teams that must survive chaos.
For Jeff, the LinkedIn years gave him a front-row seat to what high-performance organizations look like before they become obvious from the outside. That now informs how he evaluates founders at the earliest stage.
Why Antler Invests Before the Noise Starts
Antler is not trying to be a traditional accelerator. Jeff frames the firm as an inception-stage investor: a place where founders can answer the questions that come before the company.
Should I start this?
Who should my co-founder be?
Is this the right market?
What problem do I understand better than everyone else?
Am I actually ready to live this life?
Antler operates in 27 cities globally and has backed roughly 1,900 portfolio companies. The firm brings founders together in person through a residency-style model before equity or capital changes hands. That gives founders a chance to meet co-founders, test ideas, sharpen conviction, and decide whether this is really the arena they want to compete in.
Jeff believes this stage is less noisy than later pre-seed or seed investing. Once there is a product, a few customers, and early revenue, investors can get distracted by signals that may or may not matter. A customer loves it. Another hates it. A non-customer says they would never buy it. Suddenly the investor is buried in conflicting information.
At inception, Jeff is focused on the person.
Can they sell?
Can they recruit?
Can they learn fast?
Can they move with urgency?
Can they attract people into their orbit?
Do they understand something deeply?
Are they resiliently optimistic?
Are they unusually spiky in at least one important way?
That is the core bet.
The Founder Who Talks Too Much About Money
One of Jeff’s sharper views is that founders who lead with “I want to build a billion-dollar company” can make him nervous.
At first, that sounds counterintuitive. Venture capital depends on massive outcomes. Shouldn’t VCs want founders with billion-dollar ambition?
Jeff’s point is more precise: if a founder talks about a billion-dollar company too early, it can reveal that they already have a price in mind. If they would sell at $100 million or $400 million, that may be a perfectly rational life decision—but it may not fit the venture model.
The founders Jeff trusts more are often less obsessed with the financial endpoint and more obsessed with the problem. They may understand the economics. They may be realistic about acquisition offers. But their relationship with the problem is deepening over time, not weakening.
The rarest founders are the ones doing their life’s work. They are not building because a market map looks attractive. They are building because the problem has grabbed them by the throat.
That is the magic Jeff is hunting.
Why Antler Increased Its Check Size
Antler’s US fund is now writing checks of up to $600K at inception. That is a meaningful jump for a stage where many companies may not yet have meaningful revenue or even a finalized product.
Jeff’s explanation is straightforward: the quality of founders is rising, and great founders can do more with capital than ever before.
AI and modern software tools have collapsed the cost of building. A small team can now prototype, launch, and iterate faster than at any prior point in startup history. The right founders can turn early capital into real leverage.
But Jeff also sees a dangerous funding gap. Too many companies get stuck between not having enough traction to raise and not having enough money to get traction. Antler’s larger check is designed to break that paradox.
The firm typically splits the capital into two parts: an upfront check that gives founders room to build, and a follow-on check intended to help catalyze the next round. The goal is to let founders spend more time building the company and less time endlessly fundraising.
The Most Overrated Metric at Pre-Seed
Jeff’s answer is blunt: customers and revenue.
That does not mean customers are irrelevant. It means that at the earliest stages, traction is often noisier than investors want to admit.
A founder might have five customers, but those customers may represent five completely different stories. One loves the product. One is lukewarm. One hates it. One bought because of the founder’s personal network. Another may churn in two months.
At that stage, the investor can confuse motion for signal.
Jeff gives the example of Harper, an Antler portfolio company that later became one of the standout companies in the fund. When Antler first invested, the company had a different name and was pursuing a different idea. Jeff did not love the original concept. But he believed deeply in the founders, especially their intensity, speed, and ability to build.
The company pivoted into insurance and took off.
Had Jeff evaluated only the initial idea or early traction, he might have missed it.
That is the danger of over-indexing on metrics too early. At inception, the founder may matter more than the first version of the business.
The Case for Diversification at Inception
Jeff is also direct about portfolio construction. At the earliest stage, he believes diversification is not a weakness. It is a requirement.
If you are investing before the company is fully formed, you are taking extreme risk. The way to manage that risk is not by pretending you can perfectly predict winners. It is by building a system that gives you exposure to enough exceptional founders while maintaining the ability to follow on when the winners begin to emerge.
That is the logic behind Antler’s global model.
The firm sees an enormous top-of-funnel: around 150,000 global applications per year, with roughly 400 investments. In the US, Antler sees around 15,000 applications and makes roughly 60 to 70 investments.
But Jeff is clear that diversification alone is not enough. A great inception fund also needs a strategy to concentrate capital over time. You need the sourcing engine, the selection engine, and then the follow-on engine.
That combination—broad exposure early, concentrated capital later—is where the model becomes powerful.
AI Is Changing Startups, But Not Everything Becomes Software
Jeff acknowledges that AI is collapsing the cost of company creation. Founders can now spin up products, automate workflows, and launch businesses with far less capital than before.
But he pushes back on the idea that this means venture capital is dead or that all major companies will be built by one-person teams.
Yes, AI will create enormous leverage.
Yes, more founders will reach revenue without raising.
Yes, some software businesses will require fewer people and less capital.
But Jeff argues that the world is still full of hard problems that require teams, systems, complexity, and capital. Data centers, satellites, longevity, quantum computing, stablecoin infrastructure, physical-world systems—these are not trivial products that can be one-line-prompted into existence.
The future is not just “AI makes startups cheaper.”
The future is that ambitious founders can now attack bigger problems with more leverage.
Why Being Different Is Not Optional
One of Jeff’s strongest beliefs is that to be better than average, you have to be different.
That applies to founders. It applies to investors. It applies to how people pitch, build, hire, and distribute.
Too many founders show up with the same deck, the same language, the same AI-generated polish, and the same safe narrative. Jeff sees that as a problem. If everyone looks the same, sounding competent is not enough.
Founders need to understand where they are different and exploit that difference. Their wedge, insight, personality, obsession, speed, or worldview has to stand out.
Venture is not a game designed to reward average behavior. It rewards outliers. So the founder’s job is not to look like the median fundable company. It is to make investors feel that they are seeing something rare.
The Cave Walls Test
Toward the end of the conversation, Jeff shares a story from his managing partner about “the cave walls.”
The idea is simple: life is like leaving a cave, collecting experiences, and returning with stories, memories, and symbols that end up on the walls. At the end, the question is not just what you achieved. It is what you want to see on those walls when you look back.
Jeff uses that lens when thinking about where to spend his time and which founders to back.
Would he be proud of this investment in 15 or 20 years?
Is this founder building something worthy?
Does this company belong on the cave walls?
It is an unusually existential frame for venture capital, but it fits the way Jeff thinks about the job. The best investors are not just underwriting markets. They are deciding which people and problems deserve their finite attention.
The Real Job: Back Great People Before Everyone Else Understands Why
This episode is ultimately about what happens before the world has evidence.
Before the revenue.
Before the Series A.
Before the TechCrunch headline.
Before the perfect pitch deck.
Before consensus.
Jeffrey Becker’s job at Antler is to identify the founder before the market knows what to do with them.
That requires judgment, pattern recognition, emotional discipline, and a willingness to look past the obvious signals. It also requires comfort with being early, wrong, and occasionally mocked by the data that later becomes obvious.
The best founders rarely arrive fully legible. Sometimes they look too intense. Too early. Too weird. Too obsessed. Too different.
Jeff’s bet is that those are not bugs.
They may be the signal.
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00:01 - Introducing Jeffrey Becker and Antler’s Day-Zero Model
00:57 - Jeff’s Origin Story: Competition, Sales, LinkedIn, and Angel Investing
03:48 - Backing Maniacs at Inception
04:33 - Lessons from LinkedIn’s Hypergrowth Era
05:58 - Why Jeff Tells People Not to Become VCs
08:22 - How Antler Works Before a Company Exists
10:54 - Why Antler Increased Its Check Size to $600K
12:49 - How Antler Differs from YC and Traditional Accelerators
14:52 - Antler’s Global Founder Funnel and Selection Process
16:05 - How Founders Can Stand Out in an AI-Generated Pitch World
18:43 - Why “I Want to Build a Billion-Dollar Company” Can Be a Red Flag
21:57 - The Magic of Founders Doing Their Life’s Work
23:00 - Risk, Diversification, and the Math of Inception Investing
24:30 - Why More Early-Stage Bets Can Improve Venture Outcomes
26:40 - Using SPVs and Follow-On Capital to Double Down on Winners
29:03 - The LP Retreat and the Future of Emerging Managers
30:56 - How AI Is Collapsing the Cost of Building Startups
32:44 - Agentic Company Builders and the Limits of AI-Generated Startups
34:24 - Jeff’s Content Engine: Substack, Podcasts, and AI Workflows
36:35 - The Hidden Risk of Overfunding and High Valuations
38:42 - Boards, Governance, and Staying Aligned with Founders
40:31 - Antler Founders Who Redefined What a Maniac Looks Like
43:12 - Why Meeting Great Founders Keeps VCs in the Game
45:06 - The Sharpest Writing in Venture Today
46:26 - The Best Advice Jeff Lives By: Be Different to Be Better
47:48 - A Cold Intro That Turned Into a Standout Founder Bet
50:15 - The Most Overrated Metric in Pre-Seed Venture
53:14 - Why Jeff Changed His Mind on Valuation Discipline
54:18 - Breaking Rules to Avoid Missing Generational Founders
Transcript
Jeffrey Becker (00:00:00.131):
To be better than average, you have to be different. There is just no other way around that. I truly believe that if you obsess enough about things, you need to pick the things that you believe should be different and you need to exploit them. And I don’t think enough people look at the whole picture and try to find the exploitations. I don’t think they try to be different. I don’t have a lot of founders who change their pitch intentionally to stand out. I don’t have a lot of people that change the motion and the way they do things in an effort to stand out. I think that most people believe a good story, showing up and doing things when other people do it, is enough and it’s just enough. It’s just, it’s like, A, it’s boring and B, it’s like uninspiring, but it’s also just not enough. If you want any better than average, you gotta be different. And I think you gotta be different in order to stand out and you gotta stand out to raise capital and do attractiveness. That’s the thing I’m always challenging people to really think about and do and just lean into.
Brian Bell (00:01:09.782):
Hey, everyone, welcome back to the Ignite podcast today. We are delighted to have Jeff Becker on the mic. He is the general partner at Antler co leading the firm’s US fund out of New York. Antler is the day zero residency based pre seed model now operating in 27 cities with roughly roughly 1900 portfolio companies including some that you’ve probably heard of like Lovable, Aralo, Micro One, Pixverse and many others. Before Antler Jeff spent nine years at LinkedIn in sales leadership through its run to almost a billion members and I think like 20 over over 10 billion in revenue and so we’re delighted to have him. He writes the Monday morning meeting Substack and hosts Antler’s Further Faster podcast so I’m looking forward to learning how to do my podcast better. And so thanks for coming on, Jeff.
Jeffrey Becker (00:01:56.791):
Yeah, Brian, thanks for having me. Excited to dig into all things for you soon.
Brian Bell (00:02:00.353):
Yeah, so I’d love to get your origin story. What’s your background?
Jeffrey Becker (00:02:03.075):
Yeah, well, okay, so I grew up a little brother. I say that because I always talk to my founders about like, you know, what was it like growing up? Who were you? And I say that in part joking, but really because it made me very competitive. I was always competing with my older brother in sports and baseball and school. We went to the same college. How many years apart are you guys? We’re about three and a half years. So I just missed each other.
Brian Bell (00:02:23.422):
My boys are two years apart. And so I see this even more viscerally. Yeah. Now that they’re teenagers, they don’t even talk to each other. They don’t even like barely acknowledge each other.
Jeffrey Becker (00:02:32.464):
Yeah. My mom always said we were like, you’re destined to be best friends when you get older. And we always said, no, we beat the crap out of each other. But, you know, now we’re good friends. Yeah I mean that’s sort of like core to my DNA and I think you know being a baseball player you know being in sales really my career was always competing and trying to find ways to get an edge in something and I always felt like you know to be better than others you had to be different in some way and try to like find and really kind of elevate yourself against others you had to pick things that you could be different at. specifically especially in sales but then you know as I became angel investors I started a another company on the side as I worked at LinkedIn those are things that I felt gave me a bit of edge against others and so it’s always really kind of just about winning like drop me into any arena and I just want to compete on that thing but yeah LinkedIn as you mentioned is a great experience a rocket ship from you know 2012 to 2020 I did nine different jobs there over nine years basically all in sales but across three departments and lead our key accounts program for sales solutions before I left and then more recently angel investor founder of a company called Earhooks we kept earbuds in your ears for 10 years and sold those to a quarter million people around the world and then the center of all three of those things being at LinkedIn you know hyper growth and tech you know being a founder nights and weekends and scaling that thing globally and angel investing really to me was being a venture capitalist but you know I was never in finance and I hadn’t built my own SaaS business and so you know for me I really just had to go do the job and I started writing checks I wrote checks into you know loyal which just got you know their first two FDA clearances and are on the path to their third which would be the first company in history to, you know, sell anything FDA cleared for extending life of any kind. But the focus on dogs, which is super exciting one, Headspace, Misfits Market, Public Goods, Alto Pharmacy, just some really cool stuff that I got to angel into in the early days. And then now full time at Antler for four years, we’re, you know, really trying to do the same thing, which is back people and do that by getting to know them, spend time with them and underwrite the maniac and, you know, buy the basis of the future. and so yeah that’s that’s kind of me in a nutshell from you know personal life through to what I’ve been doing last 10 15 years that’s amazing so you guys
Brian Bell (00:04:45.298):
internally actually refer to it as picking maniacs that’s what I refer to it as you
Jeffrey Becker (00:04:49.540):
know I think there’s sometimes these words right when you say them other people resonate differently with and maniac is one of those like it’s just one of those things that I say that people seem to pick up on so Yeah, I call it backing maniacs at inception. My posts that you see on Substack are like screening for maniacs, you know, maniac mentality. It’s kind of like a little bit of a brand play, but I think it causes this like visceral reaction and some resonance with people on what it really takes to persevere, to hire great people to compete at a world class level, to have a deep relationship with a problem. And so it just sounds like it’s all-encompassing for something that is kind of esoteric.
Brian Bell (00:05:26.202):
I mean, you spent nine years at LinkedIn and probably had a lot of ups and downs there. What do you think you kind of take away from that as a VC now?
Jeffrey Becker (00:05:34.806):
It’s interesting. I mean, I think that at LinkedIn there’s a few superpowers of that organization, not the least of which is the leadership. I mean... I think you learn from people year round and having a front row seat to people like Jeff Wiener, Dan Shapiro, Mike Gamson, Shannon Stubo.
Brian Bell (00:05:49.544):
You were there kind of during the late golden age is what I might call it of LinkedIn.
Jeffrey Becker (00:05:53.869):
Yeah, right? Like post IPO, but we were there, you know, from 1,500 people to 20,000. Right. And seeing those people operate It really taught me a lot. I mean, it taught me a lot about culture and values and the importance of it. It taught me a lot about focus. Fewer things done better. It taught me a lot about communication. I think one of the real superpowers that those individuals I mentioned have is the ability to teach other people how to think as opposed to telling people what to do or, you know, which is kind of like a moment in time, kind of visceral, emotional thing in business often. Teaching people frameworks and the ways to go about decisions and the ways to operate in the confines of the culture and values I think creates an enormous, enormous amount of leverage. And I think that’s really overlooked. And I think people kind of gloss over, glaze past it. But when you’ve been inside of an organization that was that focused and operating that kind of way, I think it’s really clear that it’s the only way to do things.
Brian Bell (00:06:46.715):
Yeah. So you probably get a lot of young people in their 20s reaching out and being like, how do I become a VC? Right. And I remember like 10 or 15 years ago, I was like, how do I become a product manager? Yeah. What do you advise them now, given, you know, you can kind of look back at your career and kind of connect the dots?
Jeffrey Becker (00:07:03.376):
I mean, first, don’t do it. They absolutely definitely don’t do it. I just wrote a post, why you should never go into VC. It was like by far my best performing venture post. It kind of broke down the economics of it. It broke down the time horizons, the, you know, the math and potentially winning and actually making any money doing it. And the bottom line there was like, don’t do it unless... I can’t talk you out of it because you really just like anything you really have to be completely obsessed you have to be really giving it 150% if you want to compete on you know a real stage or a real level so I think first is don’t do it and you kind of see like does someone jump over that wall or not I think the second thing is if you do want to do it you should you should just go do the job right I think a lot of people try to figure out like almost like double dutch like when do I get in you know like waiting for the job interviewing and yeah yeah like talking to people when do I do this how do I go to that and the real answer is like go find deals write your own personal checks if you can’t write personal checks syndicate SPDs talk to the investors talk to the founders get out there and do the grind and like you know find out a if you like it b if you’re good at it you know see if the founders like you and appreciate you You know, so on and so forth. Actually, it’s advice that I got from Mike Amson, the chief revenue officer at LinkedIn, you know, back when I was there. I had an offer to leave LinkedIn at the time and he was like, what do you want to do? I always want to be a venture capitalist, which is another story which we can get into. Yeah. He was like, well, if that’s what you want to do, don’t take this job. Stay at LinkedIn. You clearly have control over it. You’re doing well. Get yourself promoted. Do whatever you need to do and take the free cash flow and go do the job and find out if you like it. And that’s what I did. It gave me a track record and a resume. that I just, it just was an excel, you know, of like the deals I had done and the things I’d gotten. And I used that to kind of get into VC rather than just trying to sell someone on my potential. It was like, here’s what I’ve done. You know, well, well done is better than well said.
Brian Bell (00:08:55.387):
Yeah, I love that. So let’s talk about Antler, you know, walk us through like how you guys operate what’s actually changed in the last couple years you know now you guys are up to I think 500k at day zero which is crazy you know before companies has any revenue or really a product why the job what’s new there and how you know how has the strategy changed
Jeffrey Becker (00:09:15.680):
yeah for those that don’t know antler is the world’s largest inception fund we have 27 offices around the world the thing that ties us all together and the way that we operate is working with founders in person before any equity or money changes hands so that those founders have a chance to meet co-founders work on their ideas not over commit to the cap table and to the endeavor before they even know if it’s something they want to do it’s such a such a hard hard hard life you know to go do and go live that way And so to spend a little bit of time around other people that are just as crazy as you, just as smart as you, and really find out if it’s the way you want to spend your time, if that’s the arena you want to compete in, it’s really important. Finding co-founders is super important, picking the right game to play, making sure that you are around people that are supportive and helpful as opposed to in your apartment trying to code something into existence. I think that is something that brings all Gantler locations together under a common thread. And by working with those people in person, you get to know them super well. What are their motivations? How do they operate? How do they sell? How do they think about the future? What do they know better than anybody else? How do they attract people, customers, investors, all these sort of things? And that is actually, in my opinion, a much less noisy stage to invest at compared to Six months later or seed where there’s a product, a customer, a team and, you know, there’s just a lot of things that can go right or go wrong. And it’s an emotional thing when you’re in that stage of investing. Whereas when you’re in the inception stage and you’re just talking to the people and understanding them, they are things that are just like absolutely have to be true now and in the future. And when you can identify those things and identify if they’re extremely spiky at them, I think it’s actually a really interesting place to write early stage checks and deploy capital. Typically, we’ll write a check in like two to four weeks. So you’d be in the office for a couple weeks. In some places around the world, you might stay as long as like two or three months. So, you know, people do it differently in different regions. In some regions, you might get 100 or 200K. As you mentioned here in the US we’re actually writing 600k now and the reason for that change is honestly like the founders are amazing and it’s very obvious to us that the quality just keeps getting better and better and they know what to do with the money they can create more leverage than ever before with the tools at their disposal and you know my personal belief is like if you have this much conviction in people Lighting them 200k versus 600k is the difference in them spending their time building the company and then spending the time fundraising. Because the previous kind of earlier version of this, what we found is that companies were stuck between not enough traction to raise and not enough money to get traction. kind of a paradox whereas this you know 600k we usually break it up into two checks usually it’s like 350 or 400k up front and then we give them an uncap check to the next round to help catalyze it and so it’s both enough money for like a year year and a half some team building some technology go get customers prove there’s you know real need for this and it’s a catalyzing check to get the next round. And for all those founders, we’re basically setting it up with something like 40 investors on average each for their seed round. So 75% of them are raising money within three to six months of our first check. So that’s kind of the headlines. We do have a Series A fund that follows into these thousands of companies around the world, which allows us to go all the way to IPO. We’ve deployed, you know, money all the way through to Series B and C. Oralo, our first unicorn, you know, we backed them, you know, seven years ago. I think they just had like a unbelievable, you know, record month that Bahadir just posted on LinkedIn, you know, some crazy number, tens of millions of users and Ibiza. And it’s just incredible. So we’ve been able to back them through every round, which I think most firms Operative Inception don’t typically do so yeah so a lot of founders listening would be
Brian Bell (00:12:58.796):
probably asking themselves, okay, how does this differ from like a YC Techstars kind of model where it’s a residency, you know, 12, 16 week kind of program accelerator. It sounds, it’s almost like similar in a way, but different.
Jeffrey Becker (00:13:12.026):
Yeah. I like to think that we’re at a bit of an earlier stage. The way I think about it is like, should I, shouldn’t I? You know, like, should I start this? Should I not? Who should my co-founder be? You know, what is the right way to start positioning this or who are the right customers? And that’s a really interesting time. because everyone goes through it right whether you’re like the best found in the world or or not everyone goes through that moment and if you are there in those moments it’s very revealing about how the founder will think about making decisions how optimistic they might be how creative they are how resilient they are how much clarity they can lock in on something and on an idea the slope and the speed at which they can move there’s a lot of information in that stage but if I look across at my peers and they’re I mean they’re phenomenal and I never have anything bad to say about folks I think there should be more and more firms doing this they really require a pitch deck a team you know clarity over what you’re building because they’re giving you the money right away and what we’re saying is like look maybe you should maybe you shouldn’t that’s okay it’s important that you’re around other maniacs you want to be around a ton of people and find a great team and go founders and figure out what that sixth gear is and if we can do that in two weeks or four weeks you’re going to be better off for it and then we’ll give you that money and then we’ll go do the exact same like let’s go get to a seed round as fast as makes sense for your business so we will also help people fundraise and run that kind of second phase which is akin to what like a 15-week sprint to a demo day would look like but we’re doing this first part that’s a bit unique and I think very additive to founders and culture as a product is a thing that I think goes back to those LinkedIn days we were talking about the culture is just it’s everything the team you build is the company you build and you know that’s what we’re trying to create around the founders the very beginning
Brian Bell (00:14:49.549):
Yeah, it’s really interesting because you guys are capturing, you know, the startup interest and helping right from inception, you know, from like, hey, like, I think I might want to do this, right? And you guys are only accepting something like 3% of those applicants. which is interesting so you have this huge funnel what does each stage of that funnel look like what are some of the milestones you’re looking at obviously when you’re going you’re picking zero you’re picking from zero that’s that’s a whole different kind of thing yeah it sounds like you know three percent you know go from hey I want to work with antler to I’m working with antler and I’m you know coming into the office and figuring all those things out and then there’s another step which is I think it’s something like ten percent actually get the the first kind of money in and then you obviously have the natural transition from there raising a full pre-seed or seed and then an A and everything but maybe you could walk us through a little bit for founders listening considering applying at the highest level forward how do they kind of tell you that they’re maniacs so that they they’re one of the three percent that gets selected for the for the
Jeffrey Becker (00:15:53.511):
residency yeah honestly the my tools on defining a maniac have to change because the presentation layers change like everyone’s pumping out a Claude deck you know and like honestly all the fonts are the same you can tell everything is AI generated so I’m updating my own system at least tell Claude to change the the font yeah change at least change the font yeah I love that at least change the font yeah You got to do something to stand out, right? I said that earlier, but like as founders, for sure, you want to be different. You got to stand out.
Brian Bell (00:16:19.308):
I’ll give you the numbers and I kind of get through some of the questions you asked me. I think at the highest level, 150,000 people apply every year globally.
Jeffrey Becker (00:16:25.874):
From that, about 4,000 people get, you know, a really serious look. And then from that, about 400 investments. That’s how you get from that number, you know, down to about, you know, 3%, which is then about half a percent of an investment. And that made us the most active investor in the world last year. The way we’re able to do that is we’re running these 27 cities. So we actually have 200 people. Globally, you can think about it like a platform with lots of venture firms sitting on it. Here in the US, those numbers are a bit different. We have three cities. We just launched San Francisco last year. we have New York and we have Austin Texas we get about 15,000 applications a year and we’ll make about 60 to 70 investments so that’s kind of our purview inside this
Brian Bell (00:17:05.412):
global because they kind of started I think in Canada right we actually started in Singapore yeah in Singapore and then it kind of spread out from there yeah yeah
Jeffrey Becker (00:17:13.362):
that’s right That’s kind of how the funnel works in terms of the numbers. But I think to your question on standing out as a maniac, like each of the partners has their own things that they’re looking for, right? Part of the value in this is that we’ve hired extremely smart people who’ve done incredible things, starting their own companies, building their own firms. And what they’re looking for is different. So I am one person in one brand of investor. I really like to understand people’s psychology, the hard things they’ve done. I like to know their relationships with a problem they’re working on, the reason for being and why they’re doing that. I also just want to see the sense of urgency and the slope. I want to understand how resiliently optimistic they are about the work that needs to get done. You got to be front loading that time. And so I typically try to meet people over three to five meetings. I will kind of plot those data points in my head of like, who are you psychology wise? You know, tell me about your obsession. Tell me about your execution. And let’s evolve that like week to week really, really quickly and find out if you spike on anything that is extraordinary. And if that’s the case, then I’m probably going to take it to an IC, do some research, build a business case around that founder and around that business and try to write that check as quickly as possible.
Brian Bell (00:18:21.151):
So in your 50 million lie essay, you said founders who lead with, I want to build a billion dollar company make you nervous. And the ones that barely talk about money are the ones you trust more. So this kind of contradicts the standard VC kind of pattern matching, right? So tell us more about that.
Jeffrey Becker (00:18:37.492):
Yeah, I think if you think about those two, you are talking about building a billion-dollar company, your intentions are to make money. So in my view, given the opportunity to sell that company, you already have a price on day one in your head. You better be talking about a trillion, not a billion, because if you have a price in your head at a billion and you get offered 400 million, my LPs and I, we’re not going to be building a 10X, 100X fund out of that. The ambition’s not high enough for someone that’s just talking about a billion dollars, especially if they have a price tag on day one. Their ego is already going to be a problem here.
Brian Bell (00:19:12.728):
There is an entire... I just look into a casual conversation sometimes with a founder. I’ll be like, what’s your number? If Google wanted to buy you guys for 100, would you sell? And I kind of do it in a very coy, casual way. I can sometimes fish it out of a founder. Like, yeah, we’d sell for 100. Yeah, definitely.
Jeffrey Becker (00:19:30.263):
Great, yeah.
Brian Bell (00:19:31.303):
Thanks for letting me know.
Jeffrey Becker (00:19:32.333):
yeah and that’s okay like venture capital is not for everyone there are tons of ways to finance your business and build your business and that’s not to say that I don’t appreciate earnestness and honesty and intellectual kind of you know appreciation for reality but the way you answer that question to me is important there are other tells other than like yeah I’d sell for 100 million someone could say to me hey yeah if someone offered me 100 million today it’d be kind of silly not to take it but my relationship with this problem is deepening I think there’s a trillion dollar opportunity here let me tell you why let me walk you through that I don’t know if it’s true right now, but there are some risks that I need to reduce or things that I need to figure out. And if I can figure those things out, it’s going to be harder and harder for me to sell in the future because of what I think we can do here. And I think that that’s a really honest way to go about that question. And it tells me something about the founder. It tells me something about how realistic they are, how well they understand the complexities of things. And then there’s this other side of the spectrum, right? Like you have the, I’ll take the money now. You have the people like, I would take the money because I built nothing yet and that would be insane. But the problem is hard and here’s what I’m doing. But then you also have these people that are just like doing their life’s work. Like, I don’t care how much money you give me. Like, I’m just going to keep going and building because this is the thing that I was put on this planet to do. And there’s just like so few of those people. yeah but when you find them it’s so fun to talk to them you know that’s magic yeah
Brian Bell (00:20:47.317):
yeah because it’s a little bit it’s all about the mission when it’s all about the mission for them it’s not about them yeah and it’s like jealousy right because
Jeffrey Becker (00:20:54.568):
you’re like I would love to feel that way and be like
Brian Bell (00:20:57.832):
That’s what most people don’t get about VCs is like how jealous we are when we found great founders. It’s not like, oh, I want to be you, but it’s like, I wish I felt like that about something. And maybe we feel like that about being a VC, but yeah, those are the best founders, right?
Jeffrey Becker (00:21:16.221):
For sure. For sure. I think when you see something so clearly, sometimes you have to go do it. And being a VC, you see how hard it is and you see how low the odds are. And actually, it’s funny, our managing partner here in the US on that happened recently he saw an opportunity that he was just like I cannot believe we’re not building this and he spun out last year and he’s just doing amazing building an unbelievable generational company and you know we’re excited to be his first backer so obviously that’s you know there’s not too much that’s public yet but it does happen to some of us we get the itch and the bug and and yeah I’m really excited to see what he builds
Brian Bell (00:21:47.965):
That’s really cool. Yeah, and I think I think this is like a secret. I love that story because I think it’s like a secret wish that all VCs have is to have something grab us so by the horns by the antlers to like and we just have to like go do that and shut down our venture for stop making investments and just go be a founder and work on something that drives us like that yeah so there’s there’s this thing in VC where you pass on things that you should have invested and you invested in things that you should not have how do you guys kind of adjust your process you know personally and at the organizational level and how do you avoid becoming too risk on or too risk off in that process
Jeffrey Becker (00:22:24.580):
That’s interesting. I don’t know if there’s something to risk on. I think you’ve got to be taking the risk. We’re trying to build trillion dollar enterprises, right? We’re not here to make a little bit of money. We’re not here to take part. We’re here to take over, right? As Conor McGregor would say. And I think to do that, you’ve got to be extremely ambitious and you’ve got to be thinking about how to create something generational. Because if you’re just trying to return two or three X, which is better than most VC firms, you’re better off being in the S&P 500, right? This is a part of an asset class, in my view, at least at this stage, can be an insurance policy and a lottery ticket at the same time. Makes the math very attractive. If you do enough investments at this stage, you’re going to get that two, three, four or five X pretty systematically. At least that’s what we’ve seen in the data. But you’re also going to have this lottery ticket of being so risked on that you expose yourself to the Anthropics, the Calsies, the Cursors, the Airbnbs of the world that had early stage finance things like this. And so we want to keep that risk on as much as possible. But the way we take the risk out is not by the investment itself. It’s by the diversification. It’s the number of investments we make. And that’s how we can balance those two.
Brian Bell (00:23:27.874):
And I love that so you’ve got completely into diversification it sounds like and this is something that I get into disagreements about with other VCs LPs especially as I’m raising my fund and because we’re very diversified pre-seed funds right we do 100 investments a year and I’m like just look at the math this is how like the math works this way I literally have a tool on my website it’s a Monte Carlo tool which with the probability distribution and you can actually assign all the different probabilities on the distribution and you know pretty much any assumptions you you grab from any data set cartas you know whoever it just the math says do more investments so it sounds like you’ve fully bought into that
Jeffrey Becker (00:24:06.814):
It’s yes and to that question. So a few things. One, I mean, look at SV Angel, look at YC, like just look at the people that have done diversification well. It’s storied levels of multiples on their phones. I think that when you do good diversification at this stage, you get high multiples. And I think that’s important. However, you also need to be able to concentrate the portfolio as you go. You need to find a way to deploy more capital to increase gross returns, right? And so, you know, you see that in YC continuity, you see that in a few other places. And we have a strategy for that here as well. And I don’t think that it’s one at the exclusion of the other. You have to build a world-class sourcing engine, a world-class way of making decisions, a world-class way of getting ownership and diversification. But then you can’t just leave it there. You also have to figure out what is a world-class way to follow on and actually create, you know, systematic value and major, major gross returns for your LPs.
Brian Bell (00:24:57.480):
Yeah, and it is to follow on. I’ve noticed this in my portfolio because I haven’t reserved capital yet. You’ve got to increase ownership. I mean, you guys do a really good job of this, right? Because you’re grabbing 10% of the company very early and then you’re following on to maintain that ownership. Something I struggle with as a small check writer. What I’ve noticed is... My SPV strategy, my follow-on, actually performs even better than the fund because I’m sort of picking the winners coming out of the fund and doubling down and increasing ownership through SPVs. So it’s something that I need to lean on probably more in my fund as I go along.
Jeffrey Becker (00:25:28.676):
I think you have asymmetric access to those deals and you’ve got asymmetric information. And if people want to be in those SPVs, they should be required to invest in your underlying inception funds and it’s the same thing you see at Sequoia right like everybody wants in the seed vehicle you know that’s where you got Instacart that’s where a lot of real returns land and so you got to participate in the rest of it too and you know if you deploy a billion dollars and get 3x you make amazing gross returns that’s very hard to do at inception to deploy a billion dollars at inception you’d have to write you know hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of checks right we do we’ve done 2,000 checks across 27 cities to do that and so the infrastructure you need to be across that much deal flow is you know it’s antler however I do think that like relative to your fund size you can get enough diversification you build up good systems to monitor that portfolio and stay close to those companies. Yeah, you have a right to win and you’ve got a source of deal flow. And so those STVs is a way to basically plow money into the best companies. And that’s where you can get gross returns. So you get your multiple here and you get your gross here. I think collectively, It’s a really powerful strategy, especially when you’re close to the founder. It was like, you know, you’re not only helping them, but they’re helping you. And in some way, like you’re building it together. I think that’s really part of the magic, too. Like if we do this for a few decades, we’ll look back and we’ll have a network of people that not only that we love and love us as humans because we did this thing together. but like it’ll just it’ll be more fun right and if you just give them that first check and never do anything else with them it gets quite complicated later and I think it’s important to be there for the long haul.
Brian Bell (00:27:02.092):
Yeah so you recently cited Dan Gray’s LP survey showing 57% of LPs went back emerging managers this year which I am which sucks up from 33% the year prior so you guys are now institutional what does that LP retreat mean for you guys and for the industry at large?
Jeffrey Becker (00:27:20.945):
Well, you know, look, I wrote that looking a little bit backwards. I’m not trying to project onto the market or like, you know, tell people how things are going to go. What do I know? But the last few years, LPs have retreated, right? Like there’s a big decline after the 22, 23 timeframe. I think we lost 74% of the LP capital into funds. We lost something like 60, 70% of the emerging managers evaporated. However, At that very same time, there is a huge swath of people that have just worked in a bunch of amazing hypergrowth companies over the last two or three years that are now going to spin out. They’ve become millionaires themselves, whether they worked at Anthropic or Lovable or wherever it might be. And they have an amazing network of engineers and other leaders that were exposed to that culture and that leadership and that hypergrowth. And I think those people will be well-suited and primed to bring in emerging manager money again and tell a really good story about asymmetric access, the AI narrative and the platform shift we’re seeing. And so I don’t know if what has happened will continue to happen, but certainly there’s a moment right now and every manager that I’ve spoken to is closing a fund, raising the next one. They’re all in that moment of like, can we capture this lightning in a bottle? And that’s another topic in itself, right? Are we capturing the token value? is it a bubble or not so lots of variables but it’s just fun it’s like the energy is back and that’s a fun time to be an adventure for that reason
Brian Bell (00:28:44.783):
Yeah, yeah, totally. Speaking of tokens, AI is collapsing the cost of building a company. So there’s a real argument that early stage funds are being disintermediated, right? Solo founders or duos do not need a ton of money to get going and get traction. I see this all the time, but we haven’t raised any money. We have a million of ARR, right? Now we’re starting to raise and that’s like, that creates a little bit of gap. How are you guys seeing that in the market? And how is, you know, this time the same but different?
Jeffrey Becker (00:29:12.408):
yeah I mean there’s like that chart I don’t know if you’ve seen it it’s like number of employees per million dollars of revenue or something and it’s just like going to zero it’s just like it’s very clearly on a trajectory towards like more and more and more efficiency and higher and higher leverage right yeah it’s I mean you can do more you and I could go to Lovable right now go to Antler Portfolio Company and type in I want to build a fund you know or a deck you know analyzer for founders it costs $10 sync up your Stripe payment gateway you know So load in an investor database, build a little algorithm with natural language, and founders could be paying you $10. You’ve got distribution for that. You’ve got the know-how on how to build that thing. You can do it with basically a keyboard and a screen. You can start a business. Is that a trillion dollar company? I don’t think so. I don’t know. But you can start a business. And I think that is really interesting because you can do a lot more, a lot less. You can execute in places where you may not have been able to last year or the year before. And those models and those businesses are the worst they’re ever going to be. So will we have agentic situations where you can just one line code of business into existence probably it seems like it but that’s also a very
Brian Bell (00:30:22.110):
online go like oh that that’s a trillion dollar company and just spin up like a swarm of 10,000 agents to build it yeah well there is a company that’s doing that
Jeffrey Becker (00:30:29.957):
there’s actually two I saw one that just joined YC and I saw one that got funded this week yeah I saw that one right it’s got like AI slot backwards like Pulscha or something So those things are coming and they’re cool. I think it’s interesting. Will the companies that they build be trillion dollar companies? No, I think that’s a lot more like Shopify, right? Where 95% of those people that start stores like don’t actually spend millions on advertising, driving traffic and revenue, but 5% of them create a ton of value for Shopify. So I think you will have company builders, agentic company builders like that, that build lots of long tail businesses. I think if you want to build a real business that is, you know, hundreds of millions in revenue, That’s still going to require people and complexity and structure and systems and teams and capital.
Brian Bell (00:31:10.328):
I also think it’s a really small kind of,
Jeffrey Becker (00:31:11.869):
not small, but like a myopic view on the market, right? Because in the same breath, we also have companies building data centers in space and launching satellites and fixing you know longevity and working on quantum computing things that are still you know atoms instead of bits and I just think that the news media would have you believe that like everything’s going to be AI and I think that yes AI will create a lot of leverage but we also still have like this massive physical world and a ton of value to be created there as well and so as generalists as people that get to work with you know 150,000 people applying every year get this massive data set on like what are all these smart people thinking about like what do they think the world’s going to look like and that’s just like a cool Yeah, that’s awesome.
Brian Bell (00:31:53.108):
Let’s talk about the content engine. You know, you’re writing a blog, you’re doing a podcast, you know, asking for a friend, like, what are some learnings from that? If you could start over again?
Jeffrey Becker (00:32:02.399):
Yeah, if I could start over again, I probably wouldn’t do it. It’s the same answer as VC. No, I mean, I think that it’s I’m the kind of person like when I commit to something I commit like I just failure is not an option it’s not like a thing that I understand or maybe my ego can’t deal with it but I just right and so I committed to writing this blog every Monday I’ve now done it for you know five or six years straight every single day every single Monday rather recently I built a content engine around it so it’s basically a set of MCPs that plug into things like granola slack email etc I try to record the calls I’m doing them and then I have a like a master prompt one for coming up with topics so try to figure out like what should I talk about where are their angles and things where is their data that supports you point of view and then another agent that I just kind of drop that context into where I edit and I work and I try to like revise my thinking and sort of do the mental tennis with the machine and then a third agent that does all the branding so I elevated the brand of theSubstack elevated like the content generation which you and I are doing all day every day talking to founders like why do I have to sit there and redo that on a Sunday or Monday morning when I can have the machine sort of ride shotgun with me and then the distribution of it is like how do you write LinkedIn posts or how do you write tweets or how do you do things that amplify and magnify the work that you’re doing so I’ve been getting a little bit better at it you know it’s sort of a compounding effort the graph kind of chunks its way up slowly but surely on the podcast actually I found a studio here in New York you just literally book it and show up they do all the editing they do all the stuff and so it’s actually quite a simple lift but again what we really want to do is bring great people into the studio and really just talk about Inception like talk about the stuff that no one talks about You can see the headlines of so-and-so does a $500 million round, so-and-so is worth a gazillion dollars. But there’s actually an inverse relationship with the amount of money people raise and the level of success. That’s a Dan G favorite, right?
Brian Bell (00:34:01.707):
Tell me more about that. What is the inverse relationship?
Jeffrey Becker (00:34:04.130):
It’s like the overfunded companies spend money in ways they shouldn’t. They lose focus and they die. Or they get overfunded and the valuation is too high to catch up with. Or the liquidation preferences are too much and they can’t outrun it. And it’s really just like a tale as old as time.
Brian Bell (00:34:17.228):
Sometimes you look at a company that gets, you know, they raise a bunch of money and what they don’t tell you is the reason they raised a bunch of money at such a sky-high valuation is there’s like a 2x Lickpref on the stack there, right? Which is just going to just cut them off at the knees. Yeah.
Jeffrey Becker (00:34:33.067):
And then you, you know, you bring these founders into the studio, ones that build unicorns, like we’ve had founders of Superhuman and Rent the Runway and, you know, Cameo and others. And, you know, they all tell you the same thing, right? Like the job of building a company is to find a customer and keep it. It’s not to have a high valuation, right? David Politis the founder of BetterCloud he runs a podcast called Not Another CEO he’s interviewed like hundreds of CEOs and he’s in there telling me the exact same story he’s like you need a valuation that gives you options right you don’t want a valuation that leaves you no option other than to build a you know a trillion dollar company because it’s unlikely the market might change the customer set might change there’s COVID might happen there’s so much that’s out of your control and so as a founder How do you remain in control? And how do you kind of remove the ego of the valuation and focus on finding and keeping a customer? And doing that at a rate and a speed that allows you to gain market share and just do that for an extremely long amount of time. And you’d be lucky to find a second or third act. Chesky talks about how Airbnb is trying to find their second act. just the greatest companies of all time yeah some of them still are on their first act you know and Amazon obviously found a second act and AWS and you know a third act but I think people underestimate that just like doing one thing extraordinarily well and you know ignoring some of the hype and valuation kind of ego game are you
Brian Bell (00:35:53.267):
on any boards do you kind of aspire to sit on boards does Antler sit on boards like how do you guys approach that
Jeffrey Becker (00:35:58.201):
I technically am on a couple, but I don’t aspire to be on boards. There’s reasons for the ones I am. But the reality is like, I just want the founders to be successful and I don’t want to be at odds with them. I want to make sure that we have, you know, major investor rights for our LPs and make sure that we have information rights and then the things that we need to manage the portfolio as opposed to just like, you know, YOLOing uncapped notes into, you know, AI companies and crypto companies when things are hot. I want to make sure we have the right management in place and the right sort of governance. But on the board thing, you know, I’m happy to do it if founders want me there but really what I’m because I’m coming in so early what’s good for me is good for the founders and vice versa right like if they get to a place where this is like no longer their life’s work and they want to sell it at you know 100 200 million dollars or whatever the number is you know sure take the check like we have the same economics here we’re both starting from basically zero together and if you don’t want to sell it then don’t and I feel like being on the board it just creates a bunch of other paradigms I’m also not an expert in any specific industry. You know, I sold for a long time and there are things that I know well, but I think the founders are better off having people that are like just absolutely legendary and have done that thing for decades. And they can really make sure that those companies succeed. So I think that relative to our position on the cap stack, we share very similar incentives. And also there are people that are better suited most likely or most often to sit in that seat and guide the founders. So I’m happy to just kind of be there as a friend and, you know, give them the real talk and, you know, be the person that they can call when, you know, they’re missing payroll or can’t raise a round or, you know, do the founder therapy thing because that’s the moments when their relationship’s really built, you know?
Brian Bell (00:37:34.940):
Yeah, I love that. Let’s wrap up with some rapid fire questions. Which Antler founder has changed your mind about what a maniac looks like and how?
Jeffrey Becker (00:37:43.644):
Oh my God, there’s so many. There’s so many founders that have just taught me so much. Like, I just to rattle off a few like Casper Barnes from Amino Chain has showed me what life’s purpose is about and really swinging big I mean it’s an unbelievable company you should look into it it’s just one of my favorites I have a founder who’s building in Africa right now who I swore I wasn’t going to invest in Taylor Rowan from Honeyguide and he’s showed me how a quant mind can really manufacture economics inside of a business that are just like undisputed and it’s unbelievable what he’s been able to do on a business that maybe seems less than interesting from the outside but then once you start to get in there and see the spreadsheets and the numbers the idea of manufacturing just like incredible amounts of value it’s really made me appreciate the quant kind of mine and Casper Life’s work if you meet Shosh from Doorstep this is someone who just is magical like I really believe that like everybody is going to know this guy in our futures he’s just someone who if you spend 15 minutes with this guy the level of magic the level of optimism the way that he speaks the way that he the way he appreciates the things that you’re supposed to appreciate and ignore the things that you’re supposed to ignore I just have never seen it in someone his age he’s so young he’s so full of raw talent if you talk to Arthur from Argentio he is just absolutely obsessed with the quality of his team and the culture and the types of people they hire and how important important recruiting is and so like as I’m exposed to these different people you sort of like manufacture this ideal person in your head of like who is the can I take this person this person this person and put them together but there’s no right way to build a company right like that if there were a playbook people would be coding that into an agent and building unicorns and what makes these people interesting is that they’re all so different and they’re all outliers in different ways and that superpower is what they’re leaning into the most to build their companies you know or like Dakota from Harper you know he’s like a darling adventure right now in the valley emergencies led you know series a is really storied round I mean that guy is up at 5 a.m in the office and I don’t know if he ever sleeps he’s always like an instant responder and he just is so switched on and his sense of urgency is so so high and I think it’s just it’s really incredible when you’re exposed to these people and what you learn about world-class what it looks like yeah I love that and I love
Brian Bell (00:40:01.027):
that response because it just reminds me why I like being a VC it’s meeting really amazing founders and I’ve written some articles and tweets on it it’s just like you know sometimes you don’t want to come to the office you’re just like I just want to like stay in bed and like you know not go to work and then you go to work and you just meet this amazing founder you’re like oh this is why I do this you know
Jeffrey Becker (00:40:18.892):
Yeah. You sit down, like I was just sitting with Zach from HiFi and we’re just talking about this like quadrillion dollar token problem. You know, Ramp just raised at 44 billion and they talked about this idea that like the ROI and the measurement of AI and the tokens that are being consumed is going to be like the crux of the next 10 years. And how do you measure that? If you could tokenize your spend, and understand almost like a stablecoin infrastructure or tokenized infrastructure. If you could really understand the ROI the way we understand the ROI of advertising dollars, for example, like the reason Google is Google, I mean, it’s going to be a mega trillion dollar industry. And, you know, HiFi is building these APIs for stablecoin and it’s unbelievable what their customers are doing. just sitting with him and talking to him about some of the use cases. It’s like, even if it ended today, we have moved so much money around the world in a way that was never possible. And you’re just like, wow, by some extension, or Redditus, which just raised their Series A, they went to YC after us, and they’re going to take this satellite into space and do research in microgravity. And it’s just like the level of ambition of these people and the things that they’re going to accomplish and the things that are going to develop you know it’s I always feel lucky to be a VC and be like a small part of that because I’m not qualified to do any of those things but by virtue of doing what we do we get to be the people that invest in them and believe in them and give them that shout to realize their potential and I tell my team that all the time it’s like such a blessing to be Robin Hood you know to you know
Brian Bell (00:41:44.917):
I love that so you’ve written a little bit about some writers you admire what’s the sharpest piece of writing in venture in the last I don’t know year or three six
Jeffrey Becker (00:41:57.200):
months yeah I mean we talked about Dan G a lot I mean I think that he’s just kind of come onto the scene for me in the last year year and a half I you know everyone’s following you know Peter Walker is doing amazing work with the data Carta I wrote a post recently about the people really doing the work so if you want to check out Monday morning meeting on Substack you can kind of see who I’m reading and staying up with I think Constantine from Sequoia has really sharp takes it’s really I think a unique point of view his agent swarm’s thesis was pretty interesting to me I think you know obviously Beezer on the LP side I think she’s really unearthed what it means to be an emerging manager raising and what LPs are looking for David G or sorry David Clark but also I mean back to Dan G I think his writing is some of the most like thoughtful and well researched for this inception stage I don’t think that a lot of people I just appreciate how deep he’s gone and how you know objected he’s being about the whole system so yeah I would highly recommend
Brian Bell (00:42:53.477):
people check that out what’s the best piece of advice you ever received oh you
Jeffrey Becker (00:42:57.641):
mentioned this is rapid fire and I’ve just been giving you long answers
Brian Bell (00:43:00.335):
No, you can give me a login. It’s rapid-ish fire is what I normally call it. Yeah. Wrap up questions.
Jeffrey Becker (00:43:05.438):
Honestly, I don’t know if this is advice from someone or something. I just have been evolving to believe. But we said in the beginning, to be better than average, you have to be different. There is just no other way around that. And I truly believe that if you obsess enough about things, you need to pick the things that you believe should be different and you need to exploit them. and I don’t think enough people like look at the whole picture and try to find the exploitations I don’t think they try to be different like I don’t have a lot of founders who change their pitch intentionally to stand out I don’t have a lot of people that like change the motion and the way they do things in an effort to stand out I think that most people believe a good story you know showing up and doing things that other people do it is enough and it’s just not it’s just it’s like it’s a it’s boring and B it’s like uninspiring but it’s also just not enough and I think you got to be better than if you want any better than average you got to be different and I think you got to be different in order to stand out and you got to stand out to raise capital and to attract people so that’s the thing I’m always challenging people to really think about and do and
Brian Bell (00:44:03.835):
just lean into can you think of a founder that and you’ve talked about some really great ones but you know maybe came in pretty cold cold DM cold email that just
Jeffrey Becker (00:44:12.225):
really stood out cold DM cold DM cold email I’m trying to think about this one I’m sure there are I’m sure there’s plenty I’m just trying to think of like that moment the Shosh the one I mentioned is like a just a magical human being we did a we did a further class where you can go listen to him he talks about like you know doing his investor calls at 3-4 in the morning and like you know trying to shoot arrows blindfolded and Arjun who’s like a famous mythology character but anyways the origin story of that one is I had this intern who worked for me we both went to Emory and he asked me for a job and I was like I don’t have a role but if you want to you know do an internship or come spend a few weeks here and do some stuff no problem and this guy showed up once and never saw him again never really heard from him again I figured it was just like you know maybe he had it paid off or somewhere and then a few months later he calls me and he’s like hey I’ve got this kid Shosh he also went to Emory and you got to meet him and I was like I don’t know man I don’t even you know like we didn’t even really interact I’m not sure how good this would be and so I took the phone call with Josh just kind of cold and easily in 15 minutes I was just like man I don’t know what you’re doing and what you think you’re going to build but if you want to come to New York you are more than welcome to be part of this we just started two weeks ago so you’re late but you’re more than welcome and Josh quit his job that day he was sleeping on a friend’s air mattress like basically mapping out apartments getting close to the problem and he quit his job and he flew to New York the next day he was in the office you know within 48 hours and the first day we get in the meeting we just had a session and we sort of like jammed on what we’re gonna be able to do together and I come in the next day like 7 8 a.m. he’s still there just hadn’t left just still working and it just went from like kind of cold like I don’t know what this is gonna be to you’re not really part of the cohort you’re showing up late to like wow like this kid is just gonna run circles and yeah he also just raised his seed from Canaan Partners they let Instacart Steve as well he’s got a great board and great cap table he’s just building something incredible the doorstep AI and yeah I just felt lucky to be kind of like in the ethos of that intern he thought of me to make that introduction so sometimes the best ones are just come from places you don’t expect yeah I love
Brian Bell (00:46:13.241):
that speaking of evaluating founders what’s the most overrated metric and pre-seed
Jeffrey Becker (00:46:18.343):
venture right now I mean customers revenue it’s like business changes like Harper is a great example this company I just mentioned that Raise, you know, 37 million Series A. We invested. It was a different name. It wasn’t called Harper. It was a different business. It was not in insurance at all. But if you had spent 12 seconds with Dakota, you just know that the guy is a maniac. And Tushar too. And they had built something previously. They kind of knew what needed to be done to be good builders. And so we both to check on the belief in them. Even though candidly, like I didn’t love the idea. I thought he was going up against really, really hard competitors on the previous company idea. But he, to his credit, learned that very quickly. and pivoted made a right-hand turn and pivoted into insurance and it’s been a rocket ever since and so I think like if I was only basing it on the traction at pre-seed or only on the idea I would have just totally missed it you know and now it’s you know one of the best companies in our portfolio yeah sometimes you’re yeah
Brian Bell (00:47:11.514):
I mean traction and momentum are important but so is everything else right and so everything’s a unique crystalline structure every startup’s a beautiful snowflake and you have to like evaluate that beautiful snowflake for its traction is such a
Jeffrey Becker (00:47:24.142):
noisy thing like you’re a VC and you want to be like one stage later than me you want to be like a pre-seeder seed instead of inception and you have five customers what do you do you got to call the customer as a VC your job is to get information so you call the customer one of them loves it one of them is not so sure one of them hates it now I’m confused right I’m like oh I loved it but now I’m kind of thinking not so sure then you call some people that are not customers do you need this do you like it well now you’re selling a pre-seed product it’s like what are the odds that that’s true then you kind of go a little deeper there there probably is a problem there maybe the product needs to change a bit you know it’s just it’s just the further you dig the more conflicting signals you get right and humans are emotional decision makers if you know we use the limbic part of our brains to like figure out if we like this thing or not and so you gotta like You gotta remove the noise and that’s why I like being early like if you can remove the customers and remove that stuff no one’s in your head no one’s like telling you that there’s no traction there’s traction you’re just trying to find out can this person sell or does this person know what good looks like or can this person build product or can this person move fast and so those are pretty like obvious and legible when you’re working with someone but as soon as there’s like numbers and customers you know you start to wonder is because the price goes up you’re starting to wonder is this really worth 10 15 20 million dollars and that’s a really low probability game when you look at the math of entry capital and so I try to just stay away from it I try to get the belief in the founder and that I think is less noisy and you know in some ways opens you up to these opportunities like Harper where the founder is the thing that
Brian Bell (00:48:52.690):
matters more than I love that what’s a belief that you held strongly that you changed your mind on
Jeffrey Becker (00:48:57.542):
yeah this like low price high diversification thing is like a mountain that I’ve been on you know talking about for a long time and I think there are creative ways to do deals that allow maybe a higher entry valuation with similar and sound economics for a venture fund just gotta be willing to get creative and work with founders and We’re trying to come up with ways to be a bit more flexible so we’re not missing out. You don’t want the error of omission, right? You don’t want to miss the one.
Brian Bell (00:49:22.937):
I want to say we passed on Google because we couldn’t get $500K into a $5 million cap or whatever. We couldn’t get our 10% into Google. And then you’re like, dude, you missed Google.
Jeffrey Becker (00:49:32.587):
I mean, SpaceX was certainly overvalued at $27 million after the third rocket blew up, right? That’s pretty much certainly overvalued for a company that couldn’t get off the launch pad. And nobody wanted to write that check, but the people that did are looking like geniuses right now, like David Sachs, DBL. These are storied people that actually saw it in New Milan and believed in the founder as opposed to what had happened on the launch pad.
Brian Bell (00:49:59.384):
Right.
Jeffrey Becker (00:50:00.520):
Yeah, I think that I was on this high horse about low prices and high diversification, but I’m evolving a bit on that and just coming up with new creative structures for deals that are good for our LPs that can return a lot of money, but don’t cause us to miss out on great people.
Brian Bell (00:50:15.247):
Yeah. Yeah. Rules are meant to be broken. You have to be flexible, you know?
Jeffrey Becker (00:50:18.528):
Yeah. Yeah.
Brian Bell (00:50:20.169):
Last question. What do you want your legacy to be?
Jeffrey Becker (00:50:22.670):
You know, I want to tell you a story. I don’t know what my legacy will be, but my managing partner here, who’s one that left sort of company, he’s got this idea of the cave walls, which I just love. It’s this idea that, you know, you’re born in a cave and you leave that cave and you collect firewood and you come back and light it up. And then you leave the cave again and, you know, you make memories and stories and you bring those things back and you adorn the walls with those, you know, carvings of those paintings of those memories of those thoughts. And then at some point, you know, you get married, you have kids, you know, do all these things in life. But at the end of the day, it’s still a single player game. You’re on your deathbed by yourself and you’re back in that cave and the eyes are closing. It’s like, what do you want on your cave walls? What do you want to be there? And I think about that way more often than I’m sure he thinks I do since he told me that story. I think about it a lot. I don’t know what I want the legacy to be, but I think through that lens a lot when I make decisions about, do I want to invest in this company? Will I be proud of this thing in 15 or 20 years? Where do I want to spend my time? What things do I want to do? You know, so I think the question that people should ask themselves is like, does this go on the cave walls or not?
Brian Bell (00:51:26.036):
I love that. And I think you touched on something that I think I see in a lot of, I’ve interviewed, I don’t know, probably 100 VCs on this podcast at this point and met, you know, probably hundreds more. One of the things I noticed about really good ones is the metacognition that you just described, which is thinking about how to think. How do I think about things? What’s my purpose? Would I be proud of this? It’s a lot of existential questions almost. Who do I want to be in five to ten years? You’re just constantly thinking about that stuff. I don’t know if like maybe that’s like maybe VC attracts people like that like the good like the good ones right I’ve just noticed that a lot and I’ve been I’ve been that kind of thinker for my whole life I’m just like I just think about that stuff when I worked on Wall Street 20 years ago I was like if I had 10 or 20 million in the bank would I want to keep doing this you know yeah no I don’t think I would okay like what who am I you know like there’s a lot of like medic like
Jeffrey Becker (00:52:21.773):
I think a lot of us are thinking that way right like is money the goal here right because it’s going to take us 15-20 years is this the reason I get up I don’t think
Brian Bell (00:52:31.917):
it is the goal right you look at like all the great VCs I meet they’re just like passionate and living their best lives you know and they’re not worried about like
Jeffrey Becker (00:52:41.402):
can I fly private or not who cares like yeah so you’ve interviewed quite a lot of people I’m curious to put you back on the hot seat what’s some of the best advice you’ve gotten on the show
Brian Bell (00:52:49.969):
I can’t think of anything off the top of my head you know it’s a lot of those kind of lessons though right like if I think about it a lot one of the books that I read was Seven Habits of Highly Effective People you know begin with the end in mind you know sharpen sharpen the saw you know all the all those like little lessons those little life lessons so I spent a lot of my 20s like doing a lot of that you know Tony Robbins kind of self-help stuff and trying to figure out like who I am and like what do I believe in and who do I want to be and so I’m always curious to ask people similar questions right and I just pick up it’s it’s nothing profound it’s just always like little like things like that that you sort of accumulate along the way that add up to more than the the sum of their parts kind of thing yeah I love that yeah well had a really fun time talking with you Jeff thanks so much for coming on where can folks find you online
Jeffrey Becker (00:53:37.911):
Thanks Brian I appreciate you having me here and asking questions and taking an interest in what we’re doing and also helping amplify what we’re doing I think there should be more people backing great people that’s like you know I think why we’re here and I think it’s a worthy endeavor to create real economic opportunity and change and all those things that we did at LinkedIn and that we’re doing all the way through Antler you can find me on LinkedIn obviously and on mondaymorning.substack.com is the blog you mentioned But yeah, honestly, reach out if you’re building a great company or know someone who is and would love to chat with the best, craziest, most maniacal.
Brian Bell (00:54:09.882):
Chat with the maniacs. All right. Thanks, Jeff.
Jeffrey Becker (00:54:11.947):
Thanks, Brian.
