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
they're real ones, right? Like we are in New York, which is where I'm sitting is at the center of 10 time zones, right? There's a 10 hour time zone, which makes San Francisco and London logistically a little challenging to get together. So sometimes we have meetings that are really early in the morning for San Francisco.
And if you're not am shifted, if you're not a morning person, you may not be at your best from a cognitive function standpoint, right? So I moved to New York, which is much more aligned with when I make high quality decisions. So I think trade-offs are logistical.
I really think that the sins of omission are much more significant than the sins of commission. The lessons to learn are don't be cute on price. Don't underestimate fantastic founders and don't overthink it. Those are far more valuable than thinking through how could we have improved on a selection of a company.
There's so much long tail risk in a company that I feel like the exercise around pattern recognition, benchmarking as just like two examples is Risk mitigation is a third. Our exercises in psychological safety. 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.
No, I think what happens is in the seed market, most seed investors are are using signaling as part of an objection to work with a multistage fund. Most multistage funds say that signaling doesn't matter and the seed fund doesn't provide any value. So you should work with us. Our strategy is a little bit different.
When I meet a founder at a seed stage, I'll tell him or her, I'll underwrite the entire round. So there's no financing risk, but we should split it into three sleeves. One sleeve is for index. One sleeve is for a seed fund. and the third sleeve is for angels operators because it takes a village. I don't have all of the answers to support a company at the get-go.
They can really benefit from multiple perspectives. I have the opportunity if I deliver value and if the company performs, to increase my ownership over time. And so I give that optionality to founders, which I think is actually super different, but I think is far more critical in development of a company than thinking about signaling. So I love that.
I think the hardest sleeve to accommodate is actually the seed fund, right? Because different folks have different philosophies. I've come across a number of folks that I really respect who are pretty rigid on, I need to have this ownership because I'm going to get diluted. And so, we tend to have a lot more flexibility than seed funds. Angels Operators is probably the most flexible.
I definitely don't encourage founders to have a party round. It ends up being an exercise of herding cats. So tend to be very selective around a few functional leaders, for example, kind of like what you do with your fund strategy in order to support a company in different phases of its development.
Yeah, I think about different kind of flavors, like There might be a chunk for rainy day, like someone who you don't expect or anticipate to call frequently, but when you really need something, they'll be there for you. Second, distribution, product, engineering, like take expertise that you really need. Don't take money from customers, right? It's fraught with a conflict of interest.
And then more to your original question, limit the number of people. I tend not to give advice on the size of the check.
Nice. I think the hardest competency to develop is winning. I think the sourcing competency is nuanced because we're rifle shooters. I'm not actually aiming to see every single opportunity on the planet. If I were, I would construct index in a completely different way, right? I'd have an army or maybe a huge data science team. That's not the goal.
So I think about these competencies perhaps in a different way than others. But if I could wave a magic wand, I'd be great at all three. So why are you best and why are you worst, Shado? I'm probably the best at winning, where I spend the most time thinking about is how can I become better at supporting entrepreneurs?
Well, I'm glad they said that. Good luck. You know, look, I think there's, of course, a merit to it. Like if you think about MailChimp, beautiful business, bootstrap, never raised a single dollar, phenomenal founder, great outcome. On the other hand, in very few strategic moments, I think having a valuable board is terrific. That board member may be an investor or could be an independent, right?
But I definitely believe boards are invaluable to businesses that want to dominate categories.
Do less. When I started as a board member, I was really excited about being a board member. There's this black box room. What happens? I want to be part of it. There's probably ego and power and influence, all of these ideas that pop into your mind. And then you want to help. And then you try to help everywhere. Right. There are very, very few things that matter.
One approach I take, which I think can be a useful tool, is to hold up a mirror. Right. So recently we were in a board meeting. Entrepreneur is talking about in a closed session, an executive that he works with. And the board starts going around the table on like what to do when kick the can down the road. And I'm like, hey, I want to hold up a mirror.
I heard you say toxic, irreparable, inevitable. You know your decision. It should be made tomorrow. And we made the decision tomorrow. And I didn't actually contribute perspective. All I did was play back to the entrepreneur what he'd already said. And I think that can be really valuable in asserting high quality decisions, which is a key component of building an important business.
Having the courage to say no to big opportunities requires deep relationships with maybe not every board member, but a few board members. And that's a place where, again, if you're positioned as like the first call, if you're getting calls from your founders on weekends, that's a really important role. Helping with decisions on
hiring executives, not just firing, but hiring executives, where you may have seen a range of sales leaders, or in your case, like the best growth or the best of the best in product, you may be able to create a really nuanced perspective on the performance of an individual, and therefore inform your entrepreneur with perspective that can enable them to make key decisions.
Showing 61–80 of 103 · page 4 of 6
← Previous
Next →