75: Nikhil Basu Trivedi, Former General Partner at Shasta Ventures

This week we dove deep on what in the world is going on in venture capital - we started off in March with a Black Swan Memo from Sequoia on how COVID was going to fundamentally disrupt the economy. There’s no question that happened, but what’s happened for startups and technology hasn’t been as intuitive - the capital markets are more active then ever, technology businesses are booming and deals are getting done at breakneck speed. This week I chatted with Nikhil Basu Trivedi, Former GP at Shasta Ventures to unpack what’s going on.

Nikhil coined the term “solo capitalist” this year and it speaks to a really interesting dynamic in the venture landscape. In this conversation we talked about: (1) agglomerators vs. specialists and how to chart positioning of different firms in the ecosystem, (2) price elasticity on venture deals and why different firms’ have different sensitivity thresholds when pricing deals, (3) what matters the most in a fundraise, (4) and the rise of solo capitalists.