00:17:37 · Molly O'Shea, Paige Finn Doherty
Like you have to always be on your toes and like, you know, use your skills to apply to the next thing and like what you want to get out of it. And I was like fortunate enough to get another job, another VC job in a world where it's really hard to get VC jobs. Like I just kept on being able to do it because like I had this really great skillset. I could find companies. I could diligence them. Like I had this really good. I know people are like, pattern recognition in VC or pattern recognition. It's like this whole like debate, but it's like, no, like if you can find companies like, and you can understand what trends are going on, you can be ahead of the curve. You can kind of package that together for your team and help them become more knowledgeable. So you can find the gaps, whether it's like things you miss, things you want to find, like where there could be a sweet spot, something that's overlooked. Like those are really important. And like for me, I'm just like really good at finding lots of stuff. Like I can find anything. Right, Brett? Anyways, so... You have really good news in story box. Inside. Inside story. But like, you know, it's a really cool process. And like, that was when I started sorcery. [00:18:48] S0: Yeah. Okay. So you, yeah. Tell me about the origin story of sorcery.
00:18:53 · Molly O'Shea
[00:18:53] S2: So sorcery started when I was working at TMV. They're a fund in New York. They're great. The partners are Sourcery and Marina Hajapateras. Marina comes from a really cool background. Believe it or not, her family comes from the shipping industry and her name is Marina. She's really So they have like this, like an awesome strategy and, you know, they were doing a lot of consumer early stage kind of stuff, stuff that I wasn't doing yet. And like health and, future of work, this was their whole strategy. They're great. And like understand marketing and brand and all this kind of stuff. And so when I was there, small team, like I forced my way into that fund, by the way, like there's never been a fund or a job where I did not force myself, like except upfront. But like, but anyways, so like when I was there, you know, small team, I was aggregating all this information. I was making it easy for them. People always say, if you want to work for someone, find the jobs that they're doing, they don't want to do or find something that helps them and lets them see like five steps forward. And so I've always tried to make myself that person and to do that. And so I did that by starting Sourcery. It was originally just like, you know, a newsletter for our team. And so I would go through all of the deals of the week. At first it was every day. So I would go through every day, whether it was like fortune pro rata, like all these like fin smees. I don't know what it's called. You know, like, you know, like, you just... All these places just scrape what companies are being funded, what are getting acquired, what are the exits, what are the IPOs, what funds are getting created. You're doing this Like, every internally? Yeah. And I would like, you know, set aside an hour, maybe before work, whatever. Ever since I was young, I would wake up super early. So I have plenty of time during the day to like do more stuff. But, so I was doing this like every day. And then at one point it was like, this is too much. I'm gonna do this once a week. And, I had left and gone to New York Life Ventures. And once I went to New York Life, I published it publicly because it was just like an internal thing. And that just like caught you know, by organic word-of-mouth.
00:21:05 · Paige Finn Doherty, Molly O'Shea
[00:21:05] S0: Wait is that? [00:21:06] S2: I have zero clue. I don't know. Love that. Yeah. It could have been just years ago or two. I have, I don't remember, but like in my mind, I'm still 23. I have no idea. I love that. It's a great age. Yeah. So I, yeah, I just like, I started publishing it publicly and like by word-of-mouth and friends, like it was a really valuable resource because it was curated. Yeah. Like I knew which companies were good. There were signaling, right? Ones that could still be interesting and the signaling by means of like investors or amount of money or like time between rounds, like those are things you can see optically. Yeah. And I also just like started storing a bank of information in my brain, right? Of like all these companies over time. It's like you you have a better sense of which ones if you have that, like, constant exposure and top of mind. There one where [00:21:59] S0: you could kinda see, like, patterns emerging and being like, one's gonna be... This one's gonna hit? Definitely not OpenAI. Really? I don't think I [00:22:08] S2: even saw that, like Did you? Like that came out of [00:22:11] S0: nowhere. Yeah, I guess it kind
00:22:11 · Paige Finn Doherty, Molly O'Shea
[00:22:11] S0: nowhere. Yeah, I guess it kind [00:22:14] S2: of did. Yeah. But I feel like, you know, I think like Stripe was really obvious. And these are really cool. Cause like they're now companies that huge companies. Yeah. You know, I've been tracking them for seven years. That's crazy. And Coinbase, like, I mean, were like a handful of these companies that continued to grow. Like, I've been watching Flexport for like years and years and years, Figma, like, you know, a bunch of these companies I've interviewed now and it's really awesome. [00:22:45] S0: Okay. I have a tangential question on like spotting companies and tracking talent is like, at what point did you start committing more heavily to like Twitter X as a platform? Cause I feel like you've grown really dramatically on that platform. [00:23:01] S2: This is a very clear answer. Yeah. So it was when Elon took it over. [00:23:06] S0: Really? Okay. [00:23:07] S2: Yes. I just, like I had started doing some, like, I didn't, this was all organic. Like I had no reason. I wasn't trying to make like a million dollars off of a newsletter. Like I was not in the newsletter pump marketing game. Like there was, that was not a thing. [00:23:22] S0: You're like, I'm writing a newsletter for my friends who have curated companies. Yeah.
00:23:22 · Paige Finn Doherty, Molly O'Shea
[00:23:22] S0: You're like, I'm writing a newsletter for my friends who have curated companies. Yeah. [00:23:25] S2: It's a resource for work. Yeah. And so I was using it as a utility. I wasn't using it to like, you know, create, not like garbage, but like, you know, clickbait and whatever, even though, like I will make stuff that is funny because I think it is funny clickbait, but it's still valuable information. That's kind of like the irony. So anyway, so like I had started doing a little bit of like marketing and brand building, this was probably when I was at upfront and like putting it on, and I had never done this before. I was putting it on LinkedIn. Turns out if you put something on LinkedIn, people see [00:23:56] S0: it. People
00:23:57 · Molly O'Shea
[00:23:57] S2: do They subscribe. See Yes. It grows. Like most of my newsletter subscribers had come from LinkedIn. Yeah. And I'm like made it a little icon and everything, but anyways, huge fan of Elon. I've obviously been watching Elon's companies throughout the history of time and see how just purely relentless he is as a operator and as like an inventor and as like a technologist. And so, I had read like the books on him, the Walter Isaacson book, like, you know, either you just study someone for a period amount of time. It's like, distinctively places and like uses a playbook for all of his companies. It's like, I don't have any money to buy a Tesla, but I'm sure like, if I had a Tesla, like I would understand like how he built it, like vertical integration and all that stuff. Like he really like will be maniacal about creating processes and then like deleting things that are inefficient. So I was like, okay. There's definitely some game theory there. Once he took over X, I was like, game on, like, is going be a game. It's going to be some sort of like game of words or whatever. Like, you know, I hadn't studied any of the other stuff. I don't care about social media. Like I'm really not like a social media person. I'm sure like I had gotten like into it just through like Instagram and stuff, but like, it's not like I'm like addicted. I just don't have that kind of connection to it. And, once he took over X, it was like, oh, this is obviously going to be a game. And I'm like a really great writer and a creative and whatever. And I was working at a fund at the time that was an RIA. Like, couldn't post anything. Can't