Shardul Shah
speaker
103 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Sep 2024
last heard Sep 2024
Shardul Shah’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsNo recordings in the last 12 months.Older appearances are listed below; set an alert to hear about the next one.
Appearances
The lessons to learn are don't be cute on price. Don't underestimate fantastic founders and don't overthink it. TAM is a trap. Go back and look at the S1s of some of the biggest public companies today. Their market caps are bigger than what they thought the TAM would be. The best founders find and expand market opportunities. We are in the business of finding fund returners.
The power law dominates our business. Not being in a $10, $20, $50, $100 billion company is actually painful.
Thanks for having me back. Tell me, in all of the time you've spent interviewing so many people, what's the number one lesson you've learned? There's no right way to de-adventure.
Yeah, it took me a long time to figure that out. Growing up, I grew up outside of Chicago. And so my childhood hero was Michael Jordan. And all of the advertisements are, be like Mike. Like be yourself is actually the message in life and as an investor.
No way. I think, you know, I learned this from Josh Mata, who's the founder of Coalition, sent me The annual reports from Stone Ridge, which is a hedge fund and everywhere, kind of a Warren Buffett style kind of annual report comes out. And in one of the reports, founder alluded to a culture of belonging and the spirit of belonging. is for people to be themselves and not to assimilate.
If your goal is to be the best version of yourself and your firm's goal is to be the best firm on the planet, there's no room for assimilation and confirmation conforming to other norms. So I think it's absolutely wrong. I think if you try to assimilate to be someone who you're not, you're setting yourself up for failure.
I don't know. What can I tell you? I've been with Index for 20 years. So I don't have actually a lot of experience with other venture cultures. At Index, there's this deep acknowledgement of the importance of mentorship and apprenticeship. That's how you evolve in your career. And I've been super lucky to have seven mentors in my career. Not once was I coached or not once did I play
a game around doing X to climb up a corporate ladder. Like every time I was promoted, I was surprised. So maybe you're right. Like if you're in a institution, you know, of 200, 300 people, perhaps there's like machinery that you need to navigate. But in my home at Index, it's about finding fund returns.
How did Danny shape you?
I think if I had to distill it to the essence, it's intentionality. I've become much more intentional with my time. I've become much more intentional with my communication.
When I started my career, every meeting default was an hour. Danny reminded me that I probably know the answer in 15 minutes. And so now the default first meeting I have is 30 minutes. That's huge time savings across the number of meetings I have.
Every meeting, ideally, would have two people in it. So that's a super high bar for taking any meeting. I'm asking to prioritize someone else's time in addition to mine, which means the threshold for a meeting is super high. Now, in terms of handing off a meeting to someone else, I only do that if I believe one of my colleagues will have more chemistry or is more relevant.
Like we were talking about vertical SaaS. Like if you're starting a vertical SaaS company, you ought to talk to Nina or Paris. They're geniuses. I don't know anything about vertical SaaS. We go for two people in a meeting.
Little nuance. I'm a liberal arts graduate from University of Chicago. So I believe in concentrations, not majors. That being said, yeah, I kind of fell into cyber. One of the areas I actually started in at Index was biotech. So I think there's a lot of utility in each of the three competencies that you think about, like selection,
you know, winning and supporting by having some amount of focus, especially for me, but similarly at index, I wouldn't recommend this to the vast majority of investors. Each of us is stage agnostic, right? We're investing at seed venture and growth stages. The vast majority of investors on the planet specialize by stage.
Starting point is actually the same across stages, right? It's all about the founders. Like there's this canonical question, I think, in our industry. Is it the market or is it the team, right? And many great firms would argue that it's market. In my view, it's very clearly the team.
And as a consequence, when you're trying to think about even paying high prices at late stage businesses, you're still fundamentally taking a view that that team will find adjacent market opportunities. Over time and so the in some sense the plasticity required to evaluate a team at stage is not a requirement How has what you love to see in founders changed over time?
Oh, interesting. I'll try to think more about that. Look, I mean, if I step back, you know, in our industry, there's clearly a power law. Bill Gurley has talked about this at early stages. Lafont did a good job at East Meets West, bringing real attention to how seven companies are driving the returns in public market indexes. So the power law exists, I think, at every stage. That's a pattern.
When it comes to patterns of selection and patterns within people, the only pattern is there is no pattern. Now, to your question of what has evolved, I think I've become much more conscious of two components of my decision making. One is intuition. And the second is an analytical framework. And venture is a craft, and so you're constantly refining it.
And intuition, I have a harder time kind of putting to words. You know, it's a feeling. I know it when I see it. My partners definitely know it when they see it in me. But that intuition and conviction has definitely evolved and grown.
Showing 1–20 of 103 · page 1 of 6
Next →