The Importance of Institutional Knowledge in Fundraising

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I think a lot of it, honestly, is institutional knowledge in history that I frankly benefited from during the dot-com days. And if you want to make a 10x fund or a 15x fund, you know, you got to have a small-sized fund, not a big-sized fund. A lot of companies are having to go back and actually think about how we really build the business. We gave money back, right, in Red Point 2. Excell did, battery did. There was a handful of firms that did as well. It's hard for me to sit here and say, hey, giving founders a lot of money at high valuations is a bad thing

Scott Raney and Satish Dharmaraj are Redpoint's most senior investors and both appeared on the Forbes Midas List in 2022. Having invested in companies like Stripe, HashiCorp, Snowflake, and Sonos - they go through their perspectives on where everything's headed, AI, the venture ecosystem as it stands, how our partnership works, and more.

(0:00) Intro

(1:24) Welcome Satish and Scott

(7:27) Venture firm structures

(19:02) Partner dynamics

(27:31) Operating with imperfect information

(32:52) How do you think about pricing?

(37:10) Great managers vs great leaders

(40:16) Getting into venture

(48:32) Thoughts on AI

(54:04) VC Industry dynamics and trends

Show Notes:

https://www.redpoint.com/our-people/satish-dharmaraj/

https://www.forbes.com/profile/satish-dharmaraj/?sh=5567bf761409

https://www.redpoint.com/our-people/scott-raney/

https://www.forbes.com/profile/scott-raney/?sh=6f67cc227fbb

Satish Dharmaraj is an American entrepreneur, speaker, angel investor and venture capitalist, who currently serves as a general partner with Redpoint Ventures. In 2021, he was placed #6 on the Forbes Midas List of top 100 Venture Capital investors. Prior to Redpoint Ventures, Satish Dharmaraj founded Zimbra, which he then sold to Yahoo! for $350 million, in 2007.

Scott Raney is a Partner with Redpoint Ventures focusing on information and consumer technology with a particular emphasis on cloud computing, on-demand software, enterprise infrastructure, and mobile apps and platforms. In 2022, he was placed #39 on the Forbes Midas List of top 100 Venture Capital investors. Prior to venture capital, Raney worked at two startups that ultimately went out of business.

Mixed and edited: Justin Hrabovsky

Produced: Rashad Assir

Executive Producer: Josh Machiz

Music: Griff Lawson

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About the Show

Logan Bartlett is a Software Investor at Redpoint Ventures - a Silicon Valley-based VC with $6B AUM and investments in Snowflake, DraftKings, Twilio, Netflix. In each episode, Logan goes behind the scenes with world-class entrepreneurs and investors. If you're interested in the real inside baseball of tech, entrepreneurship, and start-up investing, tune in every Friday for new episodes.

Executive Producer: Rashad Assir

Producer: Leah Clapper

Mixing and editing: Justin Hrabovsky

Check out Unsupervised Learning, Redpoint's AI Podcast: https://www.youtube.com/@UCUl-s_Vp-Kkk_XVyDylNwLA

🎙 Listen to the show

Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-logan-bartlett-show/id1606770839

Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/5WqBqDb4br3LlyVrdqOYYb?si=3076e6c1b5c94d63&nd=1

Google Podcasts: https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9mZWVkcy5zaW1wbGVjYXN0LmNvbS9zb0hJZkhWbg

🎥 Subscribe on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCugS0jD5IAdoqzjaNYzns7w?sub_confirmation=1

Follow on Socials

📸 Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/theloganbartlettshow

🐦 Twitter - https://twitter.com/loganbartshow

🎬 Clips on TikTok - https://www.tiktok.com/@theloganbartlettshow

About the Show

Logan Bartlett is a Software Investor at Redpoint Ventures - a Silicon Valley-based VC with $6B AUM and investments in Snowflake, DraftKings, Twilio, and Netflix. In each episode, Logan goes behind the scenes with world-class entrepreneurs and investors. If you're interested in the real inside baseball of tech, entrepreneurship, and start-up investing, tune in every Friday for new episodes.