Ramtin Naimi

How can I be helpful?

I really did focus on just being likable.

I just wanted to be somebody that the founders were like, he's a good guy.

He's working hard.

Let's get him on our cap table.

And I wasn't aggressive about my check size.

I don't care if it's 25,000 or 500,000.

Anywhere in that range, I'm happy with.

I made myself flexible enough that it became hard to say no to me.

If you give founders hard constraints on an allocation you need or ownership target, you make it very easy for them to say no to you because they're like, sorry, I can't make that work.

But if you're flexible, people just generally, if they like you, want to work with you.

But after I financed those companies, three most frequent co-investors we had were Founders Fund, Andreessen, and Coastal.

And I didn't have a relationship with any of those venture capital firms.

So

individuals I was tracking turned out to be the right individuals and the firms that I wanted to co-invest alongside ended up being the firms I ended up co-investing alongside by the nature of finding these individual founders to back.

And that's kind of when my journey picked up was when Cyan Bannister, who was a partner at Founders Fund at the time, but had spent a lot of time at AngelList, she had noticed me and her and I spent some time together and she introduced me to her close friend, Kevin Hartz.

And Kevin Hartz at the time was a partner at Founders Fund and Kevin Hartz is a legend in Silicon Valley.

He founded Zoom, X-O-O-M, Zoom in the early 2000s.

And Eventbrite too, right?

And Eventbrite as well.