The {Closed} Session

As serial founders, we’ve seen a lot of board meetings.Tom has even been in board meetings where the board has referred to him in the third person, in reference to how great his replacement was going to be! Not a great time (side note: Tom narrowly avoided dismissal - nobody else was crazy enough to take the job of CEO).A board isn’t a thing to be managed, but it also isn’t an opportunity to be “your authentic self.” Founders must thread the needle and effuse optimism while also seeing things as they truly are. Speak plainly - don’t treat your board like mushrooms and only feed them in the dark.At super{set}, we build trust with our CEOs and co-founders to a degree not typically seen on company boards. We’re intentional about when we put on our hats as fiduciaries, and when we take them off to put on our hats as friends.  We aim to show up with the context and calm that only comes from being operators and founders who have been in the same shoes as our leadership teams.Learn more about how we at super{set} found and build data-driven companies at superset.com.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

We have a venture fund at super{set} but aren’t Venture Capitalists. What’s the difference? We’re operators, while the VCs are helpers. The best VCs come in asking the catalytic questions that encapsulate risks and delineate opportunities, but they aren't hands-on with the company. They know when they are needed and when they are not.In the over-caffeinated recent years, seed investments have started to look like Series A. And it reminds us a lot of Tom and Vivek’s first foray into entrepreneurship - Rapt, which began in 1999. Rapt’s Series B was much larger than Krux’s Series B over a decade later, yet Krux had the more robust exit. It’s not that we are proponents of bootstrapping - taking on outside investors for your company is necessary to move at the speed of business today - it’s that the right sized check at the right time is what matters. That’s why part of our model at super{set} is giving seed-stage co-founders the space to be disciplined about product, product, product in the earliest stages. We create the soil conditions and the capital so that great entrepreneurs can focus on company-building, not pitching outside investors.Learn more about how we at super{set} found and build data-driven companies at superset.com.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

A core value at super{set} is passion. Life is too short to phone it in. We bring our authentic selves to work and give our employees the opportunity to do their best. Yes, this extends to the podcast, too - so Tom and Vivek bring their most authentic selves to the pod this episode with some hot takes as they call BULLSHIT.Whether it’s VCs, remote work and productivity, or fetishizing the CEO - we got the takes in this episode. Listen to what’s on Tom and Vivek’s “fuck-it list.”Learn more about how we at super{set} found and build data-driven companies at superset.com.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

At super{set}, the money from our venture fund exists exclusively to fund the companies emerging from our studio at inception and give the early team the time and focus to build. At inception, the last thing we want is the wrong CEO showing up, kicking up dust with too much certainty: the art in our model is finding the right CEO at the right time.The average CEO isn’t suited for the early stage - the soul-crushing ambiguity, the need for collaboration and humility rather than go-it-alone decisiveness. At super{set}, we look for CEOs that can simultaneously scale up and scale down, that can see the big picture while also tackling the point-to-point challenges, all while being the face of company culture and talent recruitment. This role isn’t for everyone, but what the super{set} team brings is the companionship of those that have done it before and been in the lonely shoes of the CEO. As special guest Dane E. Holmes from super{set} company Eskalera says, “Being a CEO is hard and lonely, doing it with other people who've done it makes it a little bit better. It's still very lonely, it's still very lonely, I wouldn't go to happy, I would say, but better.”Learn more about how we at super{set} found and build data-driven companies at superset.com.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

super{set} is in the business of solving real-world problems, meaning disentangling actual customer problems - not building a product in a vacuum because it looked cool to us. You can’t wait for every feature of your product to be built before you start having conversations - and testing the market-message fit. As your product launches, early customers are less about maximizing revenue streams (mistakes will be made along the way: customers will fire you) and more about earning valuable product feedback before the scale stage for your company. Metrics like ACV and ARR don’t matter in the earliest stages. What matters is losing the fear of failure to rally the entire company - not just a sales team in a corner - to land those customers and learn from them.Tom and Vivek chat about how founders must experience the thrill of being in the sales arena, even if they aren’t from a sales background, and how entrepreneurs must show up to those early conversations with high conviction, even if the product isn’t there. They then discuss the staging and sequencing for building out the anthropological customer profile, ensuring a feedback loop to product, and evolving from founder-led sales to standing up a proper BDR function. Finally, special guest Matt Kilmartin, CEO of Habu, joins to give his perspective on operating as a former Chief Revenue Officer and his current role as a founder and CEO scaling a Series B cloud data technology company.Learn more about how we at super{set} found and fund data-driven companies at superset.com.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

super{set} is unabashedly all about building great products. We have to be: all the low-hanging fruit has been plucked, and the easy things in tech have all been done before. It used to be a couple of engineers (or even a lone engineer), a bunch of functional and technical specs, and six months later you’ve built something. Doesn’t work that way anymore. The ecosystems, the platforms, and the problems to be solved are much more complex - and on top of this, the speed at which product has to be built and evolve has never been faster. The paradox is that even while the founder and the product team have to be on a swivel, moving at light speed, organized thinking and careful planning have never been more critical.Tom and Vivek describe how building the best product is like planning the perfect heist. Like Danny Ocean, it always pays off to spend the time upfront to plan every move and contingency carefully. It’s not about building cool tech for the sake of cool tech: always keep the big prize in mind. To get into the Casino, you need an insertion product - something perfectly timed for the market and your first customers. And you need to identify the perfect customer - the guy on the inside - to make it happen. Finally, to drill inside the safe and make the escape, know that no plan fully survives contact with the enemy. But that doesn’t mean your product roadmap can’t peer around the corners and anticipate the needs and challenges of the future.Learn more about how we at super{set} found and fund data-driven companies at superset.comSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Everything we do, every company we build is based on a philosophy of “People, Product, Customers” - in that order. We mean it: people first. We don’t build alone. At every company we start, we do it alongside a talented product-oriented co-founder whom we recruit to join us. Our success is predicated on starting with the best outside talent.Tom and Vivek share what they look for in the very first hire for every super{set} company: a Head of Product Co-founder with grit, humility, organized thinking, and clock speed. They discuss why the Head of Product is the first hire and their views on the Product Manager role and discipline in the context of their decades of experience in Silicon Valley. Finally, Pankaj Rajan joins for a Q&A - about where he was before super{set}, his previous startup scar tissue, what he is doing at MarkovML (super{set}’s new MLOps company), and how his experience as a super{set} co-founder has been so far.Learn more about how we at super{set} found and fund data-driven companies at superset.comSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Good ideas are hard work.Nobody plucks tech startup ideas out of the air like butterflies. Ideas actualize over time. It takes hard work and persistence to ideate a new formation opportunity that will have the wherewithal to become a company. Tom and Vivek make the distinction between ideas rooted in data versus software, and why super{set} pursues only these data-driven ideas.Not all ideas are easily comprehensible from the get-go. Some ideas are straightforward and clear - like making kids' boxed mac and cheese - and others take a bit more work to unfold - like a delicious, steamy, Michelin star soufflé.  At super{set}, we discern one from the other through writing a detailed Solution Memo.Similarly, not every idea makes it out of the kitchen and onto the dining table. At the ideation stage, Tom and Vivek think about market-message fit. Market-message fit is the proto product-market fit. It is estimating product-market fit before the product even exists.Learn more about how we at super{set} found and fund data-driven companies at superset.comSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

What's a startup studio? Is it just "venture capital" with another name?It's still early for the studio model - case in point, people still are asking "you have a fund right? aren't you just a venture capital firm with a different label?"Tom and Vivek detail just what we're doing at super{set} - what the model is, how we're different from VC, craftsmanship versus critique, what's in it for LP's, and most of all what's in it for co-founders?Learn more about how we at super{set} found and fund data-driven companies at superset.comSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Harpal Sandhu, a Silicon Valley veteran and friend of super{set}, joins Vivek and Tom and explains what the excitement about SPAC's is all about. How did we get from IPO's to SPAC's? What's a PIPE? And why does the $10 price show up? In this episode you'll understand why entrepreneurs might prefer a SPAC and how they navigate its possibilities and pitfalls with investors. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.