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
[00:25:56] S0: Deel is how the best founders turn the world into their talent pool. I've been studying how history's greatest founders operate for a decade. And one thing they all have in common is they understand that recruiting and hiring the very best talent is your most important priority. A players recognize other a players, which is why top companies like Ramp, Shopify, ElevenLabs, Uber, and DoorDash all use Deel. Many of the top founders I know have personally invested in Deel after using their product. And what they discovered is that Deel is the best company in the world at building infrastructure for global hiring. Deel will help your business hire, pay, and manage any worker anywhere in the world so you can retain the best talent anywhere and spend the rest of your time focusing on what you do best, delivering value to your customers. The founder of ElevenLabs has a great description of the value Deel can give your company. He said, we built ElevenLabs to break down language and communication barriers, With Deel enabling us to hire and support exceptional talent anywhere, we can accelerate our innovation and bring more voices, stories, and ideas to every corner of the world. Deel is trusted by over 40,000 companies and growing fast. Learn how they can help your business by going to deal.com/senra. That is deal.com/senra. So you just mentioned it, then you decide to leave after sixteen, seventeen years, and you're... You take a hard turn [00:27:15] S1: You think so? [00:27:16] S0: I sure think so. Into government. Why?
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
00:27:26 · Scott Kupor
[00:27:26] S1: wife your is way smarter than I am and her job is mostly yes to question like what the hell am I doing? So the historical reason was I had literally done policy stuff starting in literally in high school, actually, I worked for a group back in high school that used to do healthcare policy research. So we were trying to figure out like, because we were doing like breast cancer screening stuff, right? You know, like what do the economics look like? And then when I went to Stanford, I worked for a professor, this guy named Alan Garber, who's actually now the president of Harvard, doing stuff around prostate cancer, right? Which is okay, like, does it make sense to screen large populations of men for prostate cancer? And I won't go into details, it turns out there's these weird nuances of prostate cancer. The basic answer is most men die with some form of prostate cancer, very few men die of prostate cancer, and so screening broad populations can be problematic because you will catch a lot of stuff that never would have actually had health outcomes. Anyway, so I'd been doing that, and then when I went when I went to Stanford through law school, I actually worked for another guy who... His name is in the news today, guy named Jay Bhattacharya who now runs the NIH, if you follow that. Jay was a researcher at Stanford, I was his grunt, I used to do like modeling for him for this policy group that worked on. So I always had these like interests in policy and then whatever life kind of intervened and ended up obviously going in a different path and going to the private sector. But at some point in my bucket list I always thought I'd do policy stuff. The reason now was really a couple of things. One was just from a personal perspective like it was the right time in my life to do this so my kids were all out of the house at this point in time. Marc and Ben were incredibly gracious and said, hey look, if this is what you want to do, like we're happy to support it, know, you know, they were, they enabled me to kind of transition my stuff off and you know, gave me the freedom to do that. And obviously I've been very lucky just financially along the way to have the means to be able to kind of take a break from the business.