00:20:56 · David Senra, Scott Kupor
[00:20:56] S0: service of the entrepreneur. [00:20:57] S1: That's exactly right. And so that was a huge major, major difference, you know, that they did, which also played out really well. And we got a lot of shit from all the other VCs on Sand Hill. They're like, look at, you know, for boating to market and all this other stuff. We would, I remember, because I was talking to all of our LPs every day and they're like, oh, so and so, you know, we heard this from, you know, one of your competitors and it was always, look, these guys talk a big game and they, you know, tell people stuff before they've done it. And we're like, you know, we're doing Sounds like an entrepreneur to me. We're doing exactly what any entrepreneur would do, which is like, we were trying to create a category. You have to tell the category, you have to actually tell your narrative. Look, we had to deliver on it at the end of the day, which we did. It was just such a unique way to approach the business, not just foundations of the business model, but the idea that we were going to actually create a marketing strategy around that, that, you know, enabled, you know, the firm to kind of grow at a pace that I don't think anybody's ever anticipated. [00:21:48] S0: So it sounds like at the beginning you were much more operational. Yes. As your tenure continues, did you switch over to investing or you always were operations?
00:21:56 · Scott Kupor
[00:21:56] S1: How did I did, yeah. So I remember when I first came, I was like, you know, what do you want me to do? And they're like, well, we're gonna invest and you're gonna do everything else. And I have to admit like, you know, my ego for a little while was kind of hurt. I was like, okay, well, why can't I also invest, right? When I came to realize, particularly what they were at the time they were doing early stage investing was, I'm not a deep technologist like these guys are. And so much of that game, believe, is your ability to actually understand the technology at a way more granular level. So we sit in pitches all day long and if you don't understand databases, for example, can hear 10 pitches about database companies and unless you have that depth of knowledge, the honest answer is you have no fucking clue like which one is the right one to invest in. And so I ultimately assuaged my ego by saying, okay, look like that's not my strength basically. And so I need to focus on the stuff that I think I can do. What happened over time was we changed the nature of the firm. This is another thing that I heard Ben talking about this on another podcast not too long ago, which was we started with a centralized firm, right? So everything reported to me, we grew that for about ten years till about 500 people or something. So all of those like operating functions reported to me, like the investors essentially reported to me, Marc Andreessen didn't really have any direct reports. What they realized over time, which was brilliant was you can't scale a venture firm in that fashion. So there were two reasons. One was, they said, look, like we can't have 20 people sitting around when we're doing software in the world and we've got crypto and healthcare and bio and, you know, American Dynamism and all these other things going on, you have to specialize. And so we started a process ten years into the firm where we basically decentralized the firm. And we said, look, like we're gonna have smaller investing teams that are gonna be domain specific. So we're gonna have a crypto fund that Chris Dixon runs, and we're gonna have an American dynamism fund that David Ulevitch runs, and we're gonna have AI infrastructure that this guy Martin runs, and and on and on. And then we said, look, in order to do that right, the needs of the entrepreneurs are different.
00:23:43 · Scott Kupor
So all of these like ancillary operating services we built, they all also need to feather in into these different verticals that we can do the things that are appropriate for the entrepreneurs. So like what a gaming entrepreneur needs in terms of business development support is totally different than what a life sciences entrepreneur needs. And so we went through this process of basically, you know, disaggregating everything into these structures and we just kept a few things centralized that made sense like, so legal and finance, core compliance functions. Look, you don't necessarily want people doing those separately on their own. Let's keep those centralized, you know, investor relations, right, from an LPs perspective, their views look like, I want to interact with Andreessen Horowitz as a firm. I don't wanna have to like build completely independent relationships. So we kept keeping it centralized. And so what that did for me, which admittedly I will say, and you know, Marc and Ben know this, I fought initially because when you go from owning everything, right? You go from owning everything, you're like, wait a second, I've all of sudden feel like my domain got a lot smaller. In fact, actually, I heard him talk about this on a podcast. He said exactly what I felt, which is true is like, anytime you do a reorg in a company, you know, you always get a lot of hurt feelings, right? Because by definition, somebody in a reorg has fewer things than they used to have, basically, that's just the nature of it. And it took me a while before again, this was another one where my ego got hurt. Was like, wait a second, like I thought I was doing a pretty damn good job like managing these things. And Marc Andreessen to their credit, like look, we're not saying you're not doing a good job, we're saying like the needs of the business have changed, the needs of the business demand that we do this and so let's go find other ways in which you can add value to the business. And so that was kind of when I finally got an opportunity to start doing some investing and what I recognized again was, look, I can't do early stage tech investing because I'm just not a domain expert and so we started a later stage fund, we call it later stage venture for lack of a more creative word.
00:25:25 · Scott Kupor
And we started that in 2019, we brought him in a guy named David George from GA, General Atlantic who had been doing this, he was great. And so I basically started working with David and carved out more of like doing stuff on the healthcare side. So by the time I left for government, I had about 15 companies that I had invested in, about 10 of which that I was sitting on the board of. But doing stuff where the evaluation of the company was more about the operational successes and kind of the opportunity for the company from, like, one to infinity as opposed to the zero to the one side of investing, which I just didn't feel like I had the right skill set to do.
00:25:56 · David Senra, Scott Kupor
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00:27:16 · David Senra, Scott Kupor
[00:27:16] S0: I sure think so. Into government. Why? [00:27:20] S1: Yeah, my wife asked me that a lot too. So look, this seems to [00:27:24] S0: be a reoccurring theme with your My wife questioning