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.
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Appearances
So I think there are very few things that matter.
Yeah, I mean, I'm really fortunate to be working with some of the best in our industry. So I'm absolutely impressed. Who is the best from your perspective outside of Index? Outside of Index, it's really case dependent. Gilly, Renan. Fantastic board member. Doug Leone, great board member in a very, very different way. Mike Spicer, tremendous board member. How is Doug good in a different way?
Doug is incredibly intuitive. He can inspire confidence in a decision, which is really, really different. Grady is also like, I respect Grady. I respect Vishria. Where do you find VCs can be damaging in terms of boards? Yeah. Sometimes VCs put their interests ahead of entrepreneurs, which can be disruptive. And their interests are what? Varied, right?
It could be finding a path to liquidity for themselves. In that path, they may not be clear-eyed on a capital allocation strategy. One of the key things a board should do is help inform the level and direction of capital investment. And if you're seeking near-term liquidity, you might be much more conservative in how much capital is being allocated. That's an example of misalignment. M&A.
It might serve you to encourage a company to have a robust M&A strategy to buy capital fallen seed stage companies, which may be completely antithetical to the appropriate strategy for a business, which I have seen. And through a torpedo ad, investors can be disruptive.
I probably am more in the Charlie Munger school of like, the goal is to buy and hold and let other people help inform when to sell. And that's true for kind of the winners that make up the power law contributors, which is the business that we're in to find fund returners. For a non-fund returner, I think what are tools that you can use? If you come across an entrepreneur...
who you believe is on the spectrum of unethical to incompetent, you should sell immediately.
We're a large investor in a company. We invested early stage. Company got acquired for about a billion dollars by a public company. And within a week of receiving our proceeds, I asked our team to distribute the whole position. A couple of weeks later, price rocketed up. I got a few phone calls. A couple of months later, stock tanked and I got zero phone calls.
So you're rarely congratulated for making the right call. You do get phone calls if temporarily it looks like you've made the wrong call. But you don't lose any sleep over it when you know you've made the right decision.
It's a super tough one. We try not to be smarter than Mr. Market and like the invisible hand. That's real. There are people who are professionals at public market trading. That said, I do believe as a venture investor, you can have differentiation in terms of duration of hold. I do think you can have an advantage here.
in terms of understanding the business in more detail, and therefore you have more texture and nuance and context. But again, you've got to always be aware of that line between delusional and conviction. So often people kind of have rose tinted glasses because it's so rare to see a company go from point of investment to a public company that you believe it's going to continue and sustain.
And so we create some guardrails within index. It's not an individual's decision. We have a group of people that help, again, with agreeable disagreement to get to the best possible decision.
I think you won't be surprised when we talk about Rolex, Swatch, and the Apple Watch. And so I think a little bit less about who are winners or losers. Generally, I believe in a competitive industry, not changing seems... It's not the strategy I would take. If the world around you is changing, adapting seems to make sense.
But given the industry is so driven by the power law, I think people can withstand cycles longer than we probably give them credit for.
Yeah, I think we noticed that when we opened up New York, right, 25% of series A's in New York are related to healthcare. That's a really different mix than San Francisco. And so we've redoubled an existing healthcare practice to make many more new healthcare investments. And so
definitely like AI is a draft that's playing into tailwinds for existing markets, as well as enabling us to invest in new ones.
Three elements that I would think about. One, like, have fun. Two, be yourself. And third, probably watch yourself. What do you mean watch yourself? Like, record and then play back. Notice your own tics, how you phrase things. Did you land the point that you wanted? What's the biggest lesson from opening up the New York office? I love Martin. Marty is Captain America.
So principled, sets such a high bar. Although we've worked together for a decade, it's been an incredible experience.
Every week, there's minutiae of...
decisions that we can make there's complete trust between us in terms of who makes what decision that's completely different and when you're working side by side with somebody in a new office where is the office going to be what's the seating chart going to be what's the color palette what's the art choices and you go on and on and we're completely indifferent to who makes what choices what's your worst trait that's also helped make you successful
Showing 81–100 of 103 · page 5 of 6
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