GHP #72 - VC #1 - Investing in Companies of the Future with Leigh Marie Braswell!

Episode 72 is with Leigh Marie Braswell, Principal at Founders Fund!

Before joining Founders Fund, Leigh Marie was an early engineer & the first product manager at Scale AI, where she originally built & later led product development for the LiDAR/3D annotation products, used by many autonomous vehicles, robots, and AR/VR companies. She also has done software development at Blend, machine learning at Google, and quantitative trading at Jane Street. Leigh Marie is originally from Alabama, graduated from MIT, and loves to play poker, run long distances, and scuba dive.

Founders Fund is a San Francisco-based venture capital firm that invests across all stages and sectors, with a portfolio that includes Airbnb, Lyft, Spotify, Stripe, and Oscar Health. Founders Fund was the first institutional investor in SpaceX and Palantir Technologies, and one of the earliest investors in Facebook. Founded in 2005 by Peter Thiel, the fund currently manages over $11B in aggregate capital.

We sit down to talk to Leigh Marie about her journey through to tech. She details what makes a company and its founder investment-worthy, the future of data and machine learning, and provides advice for early startups looking to grow. She also touches on the future of work, Elon Musk, Universal Basic Income, and much more. This was such an insightful conversation that we hope you enjoy!

Founders Fund
https://foundersfund.com/

Timestamps
 2:43 - Leigh Marie’s Background
12:22 - Core Skills to be a VC
17:29 - What does it mean to “hustle”?
20:15 - The story of Founders Fund
23:11 - Advice for Building a Personal Brand
25:39 - Generalists vs. Specialists
27:15 - The Future of Data, A.I., & ML
32:28 - What Makes a Company Investment-Worthy
39:42 - Working with Peter Thiel
41:34 - Evaluating Start-Ups & Founders
46:39 - Learning from Failed Investments
49:44 - Missed Opportunities - Investment Regret
51:33 - Imposter Syndrome
53:10 - Elon Musk, A.I., & Universal Basic Income
55:29 - Advice for Protecting Future Job Security
58:13 - Lightning Round