Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
· Patrick O'Shaughnessy, Mitchell Green
[00:00:00] S0: My guest today is Mitchell Green, the founder of Lead Edge Capital. When I think about Lead Edge, I sort of think about this giant money machine that Mitchell and his two partners have designed over the last 15+ years to make remarkably consistent investment returns for their clients. They have all sorts of unique aspects to the machine that they've built, whether that's their collection of LPs, their 8-point criteria for how they select companies, the way they do cold calls, the way they construct their portfolio. This is just a totally different way of approaching markets. They're trying to hit singles and doubles and deliver very consistent returns. Mitchell says it's really important in life to be memorable. That's just a great simple thing that you can do. I think you'll find listening to Mitchell today and him talk about his entire machine and the firm that he's built, that he himself is extremely memorable. I hope you enjoy learning about his business. So the first time that I heard about Lead Edge Capital was the very famous list of what companies report, starting with cash profits. And then if they don't have cash profits and you go down this very funny list. [00:00:00] S1: Hierarchy of bullshit. [00:00:00] S0: And the bottom one is the place that's voted the best place to work in New York City or something. [00:00:00] S1: Absolutely. [00:00:00] S0: Where did that list come from? Why did you put that together?
· Patrick O'Shaughnessy, Mitchell Green
[00:00:00] S0: Where did that list come from? Why did you put that together? [00:00:00] S1: We've always found that the best way to communicate with our audiences, which is entrepreneurs – and also our LPs, our clients effectively – is to write a quarterly letter about a different topic. And I started my career cold calling companies and that's the way we source deals. But when you start your career talking to – I think Brian and I probably spoke to like 10,000 companies. And if you wanna know what’s a good company, just call 10,000 of 'em. You'll figure out really quick. It's pretty good pattern recognition. Until our head of PR comms came in a few years ago, we had actually never posted any of these things online. We joked that we sent this letter to some people in the VC community, one of which is like our buddy at Andreessen Horowitz, and they posted it online for us. We just thought, I think it's like a very simple way – in a world where people spout off total bullshit all the time and like you see everything in decks, this is just a good way to distill it. [00:00:00] S0: Talk to me about the 10,000 calls. What did you learn calling that many companies?
· Patrick O'Shaughnessy, Mitchell Green
[00:00:00] S0: Talk to me about the 10,000 calls. What did you learn calling that many companies? [00:00:00] S1: You learn to be very disciplined actually, and you learn that most things are actually just noise. And to figure out what makes a Lead Edge company, and then try to ignore everything else. You learn a lot about responsiveness of people, and more responsive CEOs tend to be better CEOs. I think another thing you learn that's really important for young people – if you tell an entrepreneur that you're gonna actually do something, then actually do it. I think that's actually true in life. There are so many people that say they'll do things that just never do 'em. And so if you're known as a firm and a person that actually does what you say you're gonna do, it goes a long way. So if you tell an entrepreneur, "Hey, I know somebody at Adobe, do you want an intro? Because it looks like it'll be helpful for your business." And then he or she says "I'd love to." Well then guess what? Follow up with that. Do what you say you're going to do. [00:00:00] S0: Can you describe what seems to me like I would call it a machine that is Lead Edge? Much more than most investment firms where a lot of great investors will tell you there's a lot of art, everything's different. Lead Edge feels to me unbelievably well constructed as a machine to produce returns. Before we go into all the component aspects of the machine, describe the machine itself at a high level before I get off on a tangent.
· Mitchell Green
[00:00:00] S1: We run this place like it's a software company. My background was at Bessemer. I worked for somebody that was extremely disciplined, that was building the cold calling program. My partner Brian worked at Bessemer. We were the first two cold callers. And my other partner Nimay, worked at Insight. And I think Insight – Jeff Horing was on recently – is one of the best software investment or technology investment machines on the planet. So we've modeled ourselves on that. To build a good investment firm that stands the test of time – if you want to go build the next TA Associates or General Atlantic or Bessemer or Sequoia – you just have to be extremely rigorous. And so our number one KPI that we run this place by is, what is our gross dollar retention for LPs. We want 95% gross dollar retention, because the only way you can get that is one, have good investment returns, and great client services. So how do you, through long periods of time across people that will come and go, generate world-class returns? You need to have a process. And the process for us starts with 18 22 to 24-year-olds that talk to about 9,000 companies a year. You get those 9,000 companies, how do you figure out which ones to work on? So then you need this framework to guide these 18 people to like, well, what’s going to be an interesting company? Because in the investment business we have one asset – it's time, and it's precious. And so how do you guide people to say no quick? And so we built this framework,that we really took from coming out of Bessemer. And so they helped build the Bessemer Five. We took the Bessemer Five, turned it into the Lead Edge Eight, and it drives everything we do. Now when we find the company, we're then super creative. We'll buy 10%, 80%, LPs out of a 20-year-old fund, buy employee secondary, fund somebody's CV. We don't care. We'll do anything.
· Patrick O'Shaughnessy
[00:00:00] S0: If I think about the two sides being the LPs and the companies that you invest in – I'll come back to the 8 criteria – the LP story that you have is also quite distinct and different. Can you describe that in a lot of detail?
· Mitchell Green
[00:00:00] S1: Our LP base is all world-class execs and entrepreneurs. I know we do have some big institutions, but 95% of our capital is all these world-class execs and entrepreneurs. And we use these LPs throughout the entire investment lifecycle. It literally starts with sourcing. If a company won't call us back, we'll email our LPs. Let's say it's like an automotive software company. We'll have Rick Wagoner, the former CEO of GM, who's a longtime investor. We will send them, the CEO, a note. If you're like an automotive software CEO and the former CEO of General Motors calls, they're way more likely to take an email than my knucklehead emailing them, or a 22-year-old emailing them. Then for diligence, we'll say, hey, you're a healthcare software company, you're $25 million of revenue. Maybe you sell like biotech or pharmaceutical software. It's like, oh, I see Pfizer's a customer. How big is it? $2 million. Could it be bigger? Oh, it could be $10 million. I'll meet the former CEO. and then I'll call up Ian Read and be like, hey Ian, can you like talk to this company? They'd love to talk to you, but can you tell us what you think? And then if it's super interesting, could you call Pfizer and backchannel it? And then you might say to the entrepreneur, hey, I don't see Biogen as a customer. Would you want to meet the former CEO? So then you call up George and you're like, hey George, I found this company. It meets 7 of our 8 criteria. Then post-investment, we literally send emails to our LPs. Be like, hey, Toast is looking for intros to these restaurants. Do you know anybody? And it turns out all these people invest in funds and never get asked for help. That's how we do it and how we leverage them, but it's not actually why we did it. It would be a lot easier to go have 20 giant institutions write you $50 to $300 million checks versus me spending a huge amount of my time running around the world all the time, spending time with these people. Because if you want 95% retention, that's what you need to do. Because they're your clients. The reason we did it is because I knew that the returns in this sector, in the tech investment sector, flow to the top 10% of funds. They just do. It probably is the same in real estate. It probably is the same in industrial buyouts. But like I knew in the venture world that it definitely flowed to that.