00:11:16 · Paige Finn Doherty, Molly O'Shea, S1
[00:11:16] S0: Okay, so I wanna switch gears a bit to talk about like the skills and figuring it out. Can you talk a little bit about the first time you heard about venture capital? [00:11:26] S2: Yeah. So I think I was in my sophomore year of college. I was at Google thirty Weeks, which was their incubator for designers. I was a project manager there. It was a very small team. There were probably like four or five of us. And, I had my own company at the time and it was called Blue and Tuck. It was a sports rock company. Cool. It used technical fabrics. People are all about space now, but I was about space back then. [00:11:53] S0: So you were using space textiles [00:11:55] S2: Yes, to make it was like a NASA derived It was silver ionic plated. It blocked RF shielding radio frequencies and stuff because the interior liner, this was at the time when like phones weren't that big. This was just like a functional, like product. I made a sports bra. You can put your [00:12:11] S1: phone in. Oh. And I
00:12:12 · Molly O'Shea
[00:12:12] S2: was like, okay, but like you don't want any potential harm, radiation, breast cancer bad. So like I went on this huge, like, you know, study and trying to understand material science. So I did that and I was like, well, at first I was talking to my dad and we're like, we have to invent a fabric. Turns out it's usually probably exists, right? So it did. Then I just found all these suppliers of it, and this was awesome. And so anyways, I got into Google thirty Weeks as a project manager because of that and like the knack for like building businesses and the creativity because it was for designers. Building a business is hard and I wanted to be exposed to as many as possible. And there was a venture capitalist on the team. And once I understood what that job was... You're kind of like, the leader Oh, starts is awesome. This is awesome. This is gonna be an easy job. Yeah. All you do. How are you gonna be? It can't be that hard. Like, not at all. For me? No. So like, I know you're laughing because you understand, but it's like a real reality. Like, you know, I saw this person, like what you do as a venture capitalist seems very simple at its base level. You find companies, you research them, you do a lot of diligence and you choose which ones you want to invest in. And then over time, like you get to see them grow. You get to see all the mistakes, challenges, like, hopefully they're like really good teams. Sometimes, you know, you have to learn hard lessons and then you make a return maybe one day, hopefully that's the goal, right? Sometimes. Yeah. And so once I saw that, I was like, oh, obviously like if I want to build a business, you know, I mean, I was probably like 18, 17, 18, 19 at the time. Right? Like young. And I didn't know what the hell I was doing. I did not have the risk appetite to actually go all in. I'm like, I don't have any money. Like I don't have any money. Like, there's no, like, am working like 10 jobs right now and I go to NYU and I have to live in an apartment in New York City as like a kid. Right? Like, this is so expensive. And I'm like eating cafeteria food, and like frozen food from Trader Joe's. And, like, there's no way I can, like, just do something for free for a while and like just bask in unemployment. Right? Like, it just doesn't make sense. And so I was like, logical sense. I need to be a VC.
00:14:47 · Molly O'Shea, Paige Finn Doherty
And so I can learn all this stuff. Yeah. Invest into these companies, make money. Obviously you don't make that much money as a VC, unless like, you know, you're like a GP somewhere, or you have major exits, but, you know, the goal would be like in my thirties, maybe I use all those learnings to start my own company and do that. [00:15:12] S0: So after graduating, you have the... You had this experience, you encountered venture capital. You're like, wanna go try this out in the real world. Can you share a bit more about your experience working in a family office and like continuing to gravitate towards venture and startups?
00:15:26 · Molly O'Shea
[00:15:26] S2: So after graduating and getting into VC, you know, it's like, it's a new world, like even learning about and everything, it's a new world. Like you'd think just because someone has a fund or like a name of a fund that the fund exists. Like, I really have no, like, I'm just learning about this. Like, I don't know much about the industry. I don't know which firms are good, which firms like have been around for a while, how it works. I didn't know you could just make them and, like, you know, what the, the process is for building them up. Obviously there are some long dated legacy funds and like solidified names, but for whatever reason, like I just thought those were like, you know, not, I would, there's, there'd be no way with an art degree, even though I like finished up my credits really early and then shifted over to like entrepreneurship and business classes and took, I took graduate, I took a graduate class in college, which was really cool And all this stuff, was like, there's no way like they would hire me and whatever. Anyway, so I get into VC. I'm working for a growth equity fund. We're doing pre IPO investments. All of the hard, you know, spreadsheet modeling, decks, research, all that good stuff. Super fun. Like it just is such a, like a wild puzzle and like satisfying puzzle to kind of unravel and uncover and figure out, like, do we wanna do this business? Like, do we wanna get into this? Does it have, like, long tail? Like, do we think there's exit? Like, all that kind of stuff. And so I got obsessed with it. I just thought it was a really satisfying intellectual journey and process. And of course, like at the time I just didn't have the capacity to like start my own company. Know what it takes. So I just like, I started on this journey and like, you know, the first couple of funds I worked for were emerging managers. I was joking, but you know, if you looked at my LinkedIn, like I probably changed funds like every year or so. And like, those were for some macro factors, like one of the funds couldn't raise another fund. I was let go, like as a first job out of college. That's wild. I was like, oh my God, harsh reality check. But like I learned really soon, like the world, like you can't depend on it.
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.