Scott Nolan

People just had a lot of battle scars over the late 90s.

felt like maybe they had been too excited.

So by early 2000s, a lot of conservatism, a lot of looking for more classic, easy to predict and understand businesses like enterprise software, and viewing businesses as a horse and a jockey.

So the jockey might be the founder or the CEO and the horse is the business and the technology.

And hey, you know, maybe the horse is great, but the jockey is not so good.

Let's swap out the jockey a couple of years in.

And so that was the mentality of venture capital, which was look for good businesses, look for businesses that

are pretty easy to understand.

Let's not take a ton of risks.

We did that in the late 90s.

That didn't turn out well.

We overestimated how big these companies can become.

And let's view our role as venture capitalists, and this is all before Founders Fund started, industry mentality was let's view the role of venture capitalists as helping build these companies and replace management and bring in new management as we need to.

And so when Founders Fund started in 2005, it was actually coming from those experiences of some of the team at Founders Fund, really the founders of Founders Fund, Peter, Luke, Ken, lived out that PayPal experience where they had investors that were much more that conservative attitude and didn't trust the founders of the company to run the company.

And so Founders Fund came about in 2005 with the purpose of empowering founders to run their companies forever.

And so the thinking was, hey, all the best companies that exist are going to be founder-led.

That's companies that started in the 90s or even earlier.

So if we think about Amazon, still founder-led.

Apple founder-led for a very long time.

And so there was this belief that founders should run their companies because they have the moral authority and the vision to do that.