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

Fabrice Grinda is the founder of FJ Labs, a company co-creation and investment firm, focused on marketplace businesses. FJ Labs has invested in companies such as Flexport, Shippo, Lime, Brightroll, among many others. Fabrice is also a serial entrepreneur, previously founding three companies - Zingy, Aucland, and OLX - All of which scaled to significant size. He was born in France and is an avid traveler, writer, and speaker. In this episode, we cover what it was like to come to the U.S. for college, starting his first company in the dot com in France at the age of 24 and riding it to massive scale before experiencing the fallout in the early oughts, as well as starting again, successfully exiting companies, and becoming a true expert on marketplace business dynamics. We also discuss the transition to investor, the unique aspects of FJ Labs, both from an LP perspective and an investment perspective, as well as making a personal decision a few years ago to live "asset-light."

Paul Mace is the Director of Investments for Private Equity and Real Estate in the Tufts University Investment Office. He is responsible for evaluating private market managers and their investment strategies to potentially include in the university’s portfolio. Before joining Tufts, Paul was an investment banker evaluating M&A and private equity transactions for a boutique advisory firm. In this episode, we dig into the many similarities and differences in evaluating private real-estate funds and venture funds, two areas that Paul is responsible for at the Tufts endowment. We also discuss how the Tufts endowment has evolved over the past 15 years, and their plans for the future, particularly their approach to venture capital and emerging managers.

In this special episode of Origins, Beezer Clarkson of Sapphire Partners hosts Anne Martin, the Chief Investment Officer of Wesleyan University. Anne was previously a Director of Investments at Yale University, where she oversaw the private and natural resource portfolio. At Wesleyan University, she oversees all aspects of the endowment and reports to the university's board and investment committee. Over the course of the conversation, Beezer and Anne cover exactly what it means to run and invest a university endowment, Anne's goals for the program, how she thinks about investing across asset classes, and particularly how she approaches venture capital and picking managers. Their discussion is a unique look into what is a typically opaque part of the Limited Partner ecosystem, and a must-listen for anyone considering raising capital from endowments.

Bryce Roberts is the founder of Indie VC, a 12-month program and venture fund designed to fund and support founders on a path to profitability. Before that, Bryce was a co-founder of OATV in 2005, one of the earliest seed focused VC firms, where they invested in companies like Fastly, Foursquare, Planet, Hipcamp, and others. On this episode, we discuss the earliest days of seed investing and raising OATV while Bryce lived in Utah, as well as the difficult decision to morph OATV into what is now Indie VC. Bryce has a decidedly different and refreshing perspective on venture capital than anyone we've had on Origins - He believes that raising capital should not turn a business into a binary outcome and that more founders should think about the road to profitability - What Bryce describes as "permissionless entrepreneurship."

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.