Neil Mehta
speaker
321 appearances
2 recordings
2 series
first heard Apr 2025
last heard 4 May
Neil Mehta’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 1.
Appearances
I think that has resulted in essentially the private equitization of our industry. I think of a lot of our brethren and these are friends of mine. I really like them and I think they're doing a great job, but they essentially have like a matrix. They have industries on the top and I don't know, maybe geographies or stage on whatever their matrix is.
Something comes into their firm, they serve it to that part of the matrix, that little box of people goes and chases after it. And what they've done is they've said, listen, Everybody has a slide which says, what are the series A's or series B's or series C's that happened this quarter? And what percentage coverage did we have?
What they're explicitly telling you is they're saying, we are optimizing for coverage. There's too much happening. There's too many ways to make money. The world's a big place. We have five offices and all these great people, and we are a factory that's able to produce it. Now, I think that's actually the right end state for a vast majority of our industry.
I think 90 something plus percent of our industry should work that way. I think for the 10 to 15 best founders each year, that's precisely the wrong way to work. What you should definitely not do is meet someone in that little matrix, have it elevated to a senior partner at the firm, or maybe most of these firms are not found to run anymore anyway, but have it elevated to someone at the firm.
And then they chase it all down and bring some people in and try to win it. And you become one of... 35 or 40 investments they make that year. I think it reduces the purpose of venture capital, which is a little bit of validation, a little bit of actual company building and partnership, a little bit of speed and velocity.
And so I think if you're one of the 10 to 15 best founders, people like us should be able to find you before anybody else finds you. You shouldn't have to explain what you do all that much. We can understand from the outside in better than most anybody else on the earth. And you should get all of Greenhouse, not a little bit of Greenhouse, all of us.
And because we know that there's not more than 10 to 15 people we want to really meet each year, we don't need to bifurcate our firm into multiple layers and have investment committees or any of that. We should be laser focused on the vital few and basically leave alone the trivial many.
I think it's highly replicable. I think that one thing to know is we started when I was 27. We've got a long way. We have no beach houses. We like being in the office 80 hours a week. We like working with each other. We're extremely high performing. And we love understanding companies. There's nothing else. We're not on Twitter. We like basketball. We don't have to go to any games.
By just being ultra focused on this at the exclusion of anything else, surprising how much you can get done.
What a great question. Tons. It's funny. We learned the hard way on this too. Early on, we're building Green Oaks. It's like GCO1. We had heard some amazing things about Elon Musk at SpaceX, obviously. He was already Elon Musk at SpaceX and Elon Musk at Tesla. He was already the guy. But we had some mentors, some people in the venture capital industry.
It's actually the biggest mistake we've ever made at Green Oaks. It's a mistake I'm about to tell you. which as we had heard, he fires people quickly. He's hyper-aggressive. He manages down to the F layer. He micromanages people like crazy. He disappears for large swaths of time, comes back in and changes everything. And we're like, wow, this guy sounds like he's doing too much.
And we had mentors and friends of ours who were like, he's not packable. Oh, well, I guess we can't buy it. And we didn't do the primary work ourselves. We actually outsourced that work. This is one of our big learnings. And if you looked at the feedback we got, it read like it was much worse than it actually was. I'll never let that happen again.
Some of those characteristics are exactly what we look for in a founder. We like micromanagers. We like people that are in the weeds. We like people that fire fast. There's oftentimes we read about founders who have such divergent thinking. Their team thinks one thing and they are hellbent on going another way. And they have some data to back it up, but they're hellbent on going another way.
The thing about our business is the barriers to entry are very low, but the barriers to excellence are really high. You hear a lot about being excellent at Green Oaks. And so I think a lot of the challenges, anybody who starts a business has tons of challenges. They haven't always felt like that because we have a lot of fun with the way we do things, but I could give you in order to number.
Actually, I was just looking out the window and Benny and I first came out here. We didn't have a seed deal or we didn't have anybody that was going to back us when we left Deshawn and we had to go do it all on our own. And we raised our first 50 million of capital. I remember we came out here and we stayed at the Double Tree on Lexington.
I don't know if it's still there, but they give you the cookies. And we stayed in one room with two double beds. And I don't know if it's still there, but Blackstone used to be across the street. And we had friends. We were too cheap to go to a Kinko's and print out the decks. So we'd have our friends at Blackstone print out all our Green Oaks decks in the printing room.
And then we staple them together and we go up and down here. And we had some amazing investors who joined us. Who was in that 50? Oh, gosh. Henry Kravis was one of our first investors. What an amazing... I should talk about a couple of them because you always hope to get to a point in your life where you get to pay it forward. One of our first ones was Henry Kravis.
And Henry, we went to go see him at his old office at KKR. And we walked in, we didn't know we were supposed to wear ties. I maybe wore a suit jacket, but I was dressed probably something like this, what I wear every day for 15 years. And we walk in and Henry's in a tie and he walks into his conference room, it's breakfast. And he looks at us, he's like, nobody told you about the dress code. Yeah.
I felt terrible. He was a legend to us already. And he sat down and he listened to every word. He asked incredible questions. At the end of it, it's like, I'm in, committed. I'm going to invest with you at Green Oaks. And then he offered a number of other introductions, which we'll come to in a second. But not only that, about six months later, he came out to Green Oaks.
He came to our office just for our team to meet Henry Kravis. I remember he came into our bullpen and he's like, I hope you guys are making me some money and walked away. Just to do that for a young team, a young fledging organization that looked up to someone like Henry Kravis. By the way, the best part about that story, I'm not the only one that has that story.
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