Ramtin Naimi

I found that those founders tend to just be a little bit more high conviction in what they're building.

They tend to believe that every percent of equity they give away is 1% of equity they'll never get back.

And that's incredibly powerful because more so than negotiating with investors, which is great, they tend to maintain the highest bar of talent that they hire because they think about equity the same way, whether it's going to an investor, whether it's going to an employee, and they want to make sure everybody they hire is worth every ounce of equity they get.

those founders also tend to be the ones that aren't wasteful with their equity.

If someone's not working out, they're going to fire them before their 12-month cliff so that there's not deadweight equity with 30 to 40 people that no longer work at the company, which is also really great from an IR perspective in your investment because it makes it such that the option pool refresh in the next round is not as big as it would have been if they just loosey-goosey gave away a lot of equity.

Those founders who are the dilution sensitive ones in my portfolio that have the highest bar for the talent they hire, the companies in my portfolio where all of those things ring true and the companies are doing quite well, people are always shocked at how small the teams of those companies are relative to the scale of what they've achieved.

So I truly do believe incredibly high quality talent has like a multiplier effect on company efficiency.

It varies, but it's typically somewhere between three to four, sometimes five meetings, and then doing a lot of back channel work in between those meetings.

Sometimes you have the time to do that.

Other times you don't.

Having said that, the way our firm is set up, we have standing meetings multiple times a day.

So our whole firm is designed around speed.

And we've built our model around being able to do what might take another venture capital from two to three weeks we can do in two to three days.

Okay, so talk through that.

It's tons of pitch meetings.

That is what I think our time is best spent doing.

Pitch meetings and then helping our existing portfolio.

Founders pitching you.

Founders pitching us.

I probably always tell people it's not a flex to get a meeting with me because I pretty much don't say no to meetings.