Origins - Inside Venture Capital, Hosted by a GP and an LP

David Fauchier, co-founder of Cambrial Capital, discusses blockchain VC strategies, the benefits of a fund of funds approach, and the evolution of the digital assets space. Topics include generalized mining, long-only strategy, crypto market volatility, and challenges for traditional venture capitalists in the blockchain space.

Lindsay Larsen is a managing director at UVIMCO, which represents the University of Virginia's $9B+ endowment. At UVIMCO, Lindsay co-heads the endowment's venture capital investing, as well as hedge fund investing and the growth equity portfolio. She previously held roles at Sequoia Heritage and Bluestem Asset Management, and she started her career at Goldman Sachs after attending UVA as an undergrad. In this unique look into how a large university endowment is managed, we dig into how UVA sets its return targets and goals, and how that impacts Lindsay's time spent across VC, hedge funds, and growth equity. We discuss the increasingly global nature of startups and the asset class broadly, and how that's led Lindsay and UVA to consider markets outside the US, particularly China, as well as her bottoms-up approach to picking VC managers and investment strategies. Lindsay has had a particularly interesting vantage point into the VC business over the past decade, and for any VC considering approaching or pitching a large endowment as an LP, this is an important episode to give a listen.

Manu Kumar is the founder of K9 Ventures, a technology-focused Pre-Seed fund based in Palo Alto, California. K9 Ventures was the first "pre-seed" venture firm in the industry, and Manu was the earliest investor in companies like Twilio, Lyft, Carta, Crowdflower, and many more. Manu has a truly unique outlook on the VC business, and has a highly disciplined investment model that he's stuck with since the beginning in 2009. In this episode, we discuss Manu's time at Carnegie Melon and Stanford, where he received his PhD, his success as an entrepreneur, how he started K9 as a solo GP, his unique investment approach and portfolio construction strategy, and how he is planning to build K9 Ventures in the decades to come.

Conrad Shang is a Director at UTIMCO, The University of Texas and Texas A&M Endowment, where he leads the VC portfolio for one of the largest university endowments in the country. He’s been on both sides of the table, having also previously been a VC at Norwest Venture Partners and Bain Capital Ventures. This was a particularly fascinating conversation because Conrad now oversees what is probably the largest VC portfolio of anyone we've had on the Origins podcast to date. In this episode, we discuss Conrad's background and what led him to this new role at UTIMCO, the strategies that are possible and make sense for an endowment of that size, and how they're approaching the venture asset class overall, now and into the future. We also discuss topics that are particularly relevant today as we head into 2019, including LPs increasingly looking to make direct investments, how UTIMCO is thinking about blockchain investing, and how the endowment thinks about allocating through both bull and potentially bear cycles.

Zach Aarons is a co-founder and partner at Metaprop, an early-stage venture firm and accelerator focused on real-estate related technology. Zach has been working at the intersection of real estate and venture capital for the past decade, and he's the most active early-stage PropTech investor in the United States, having funded over 60 startups in the space as an individual as well as 40 startups (and counting) through MetaProp NYC's venture capital funds. In addition to early-stage investing, Zach is a project manager at Millennium Partners, and has worked on large-scale mixed-use development projects with experience in real estate development, commercial asset management, property marketing, and commercial leasing. In this episode, we discuss how Zach started in the NYC tech community, his time as an angel investor before Metaprop, and what it took to get Metaprop off the ground with his two partners. We also dive into Proptech investing, building a sector-specific firm, and their unique model that brings together startups, real-estate executives, and large real-estate companies across the U.S. and Europe.

On this episode of Origins, we interview Sarah Anderson and Emily Geiger, who are responsible for two critical components of Cintrifuse, a unique organization and public-private partnership established to drive the next phase of growth in the Cincinnati region. Sarah is the Managing Director of the Cintrifuse Syndicate Fund, a fund of funds that invests in VC managers across the U.S. Emily is the VP of BigCo Innovation at Cintrifuse, where she focuses on bridging partnerships, as well as exploring new potential areas for innovation and collaboration between large companies in the Cincinnati region and the broader U.S. startup community. Cintrifuse is a special organization - Unlike any other we've had on the Origins pod - made up of a diverse group of people, funds, startups, big companies, and ideas all dedicated to establishing a stronger tech presence in Cincinatti in order to improve the economy in the region. But it's also had a big impact on startups and VC across the U.S., and so we're thrilled that Sarah and Emily could spend some time giving us a look inside the Cintrifuse universe.

David Tisch is a founder and managing partner of Box Group, the most prolific angel and seed investing firm in NYC, where they're investors in companies such as Pillpack, Flatiron Health, GroupMe, Plaid, Roman, among many others. He previously co-founded Techstars New York, a fixture of the NYC tech community for many years, and is the head of Cornell Tech's Startup Studio. In this episode, we discuss how Box Group has stuck to its knitting over the years by continuing to focus on the earliest stages of startup investing, how investors do (and don't) add value to the companies they work with, how the NYC tech community has evolved over the past decade, and how Box Group may evolve in the future. David is one of the most colorful and genuine guests we've had on Origins, and so it's no surprise that this interview was one of the most fun we've done to date.

Rob Mazzoni is a principal and one of the earliest members of the TrueBridge investment team, an alternative asset management firm founded in 2007 and focused on the venture capital industry. Rob first worked with TrueBridge co-founder and general partner Mel Williams at UNC Management Company, Inc. (UNCMC) as an investment and performance analyst. In this episode, we discuss Rob's professional path as an LP since college, as well as the founding and evolution of Truebridge Capital Partners since 2007. We cover Truebridge's decision to partner early with now top-tier firms like a16z and Founder's Fund, as well as their decision to commit to seed as a category several years ago via firms like Lowercase Capital. Finally, we discuss their contributions to the larger venture community, including their work constructing the storied Midas List with Forbes.

Shan-Lyn Ma is the co-founder and CEO of Zola, the fastest growing wedding registry and planning site in the U.S. Before Zola, Shan-Lyn was the chief product officer of chloe + isabel, and an executive at Gilt Groupe. In this episode, we cover a wide range of topics, including Shan-Lyn's experience growing up in Australia, discovering the Internet at a young age, and eventually moving to the U.S. to go to Stanford and pursue her dreams as a technology entrepreneur. We also discuss the many lessons Shan-Lyn learned in product and strategy at Yahoo and Gilt Groupe, her recent activity as an angel investor and LP, and how she brings all of these experiences to bear in her day-to-day running Zola.

Mike Maples is the founding partner at Floodgate and has been on the Forbes Midas List since 2010. Before becoming a full-time investor, Mike was involved as a founder and operating executive at back-to-back startup IPOs, including Tivoli Systems (IPO TIVS, acquired by IBM) and Motive (IPO MOTV, acquired by Alcatel-Lucent.) Some of Mike’s investments include Twitter, Twitch.tv, ngmoco, Weebly, Chegg, Bazaarvoice, Spiceworks, Okta, and Demandforce. In this episode, we cover a wide range of topics, including Mike's decision to become a VC and how he raised Floodgate's first fund, how Floodgate's fund strategy and portfolio construction has evolved since, and how he and his partners think about building the firm in the years and decades to come.