The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
00:16:24 · Nick Shalek
[00:16:24] S1: A 100%. I think that's the biggest challenge for us. The fundraising environment, the valuation environment, I should say, is one thing. I think that's just a reality that you have to adapt to. How to build meaningful relationships and partnerships, which we see as kind of a cornerstone of how to be a great investor, that's harder to do. We always think when we're underwriting a deal, and this I learned as an LP too, the first decision is important, but it's you should do the work to make the second decision because you often will have to and especially in this environment, you have to make that decision before you have a chance to collect all that much more data. But even more importantly, if something goes wrong, which is you know, almost is inevitably the case in FinTech companies, there's some, you know, regulatory issue or a balance sheet issue, you want to have to get back to that word, you want to have the conviction to be great partners at that time. And I think a lot of the worst behavior we see from investors is where they came into something quickly, and they didn't really understand it. And we really work hard not to be those investors, but it's hard to do on a three day timeline on Zoom. So we're working on it, adjusting and trying to do a lot of things to figure out how to be on the front foot rather than the back foot.
00:17:24 · Harry Stebbings
[00:17:24] S0: I mean, I'm so glad that I'm not alone in that one. I do want to ask that, you know, in terms of like, you mentioned the reinvestment decision making process there. When you think about ownership, often a lot of funds, you know, certainly of your size have very specific ownership requirements. How do you think about ownership requirements on entry? And then how possible do you think it is to build ownership over time? Often I find with the best companies, they get taken away by the best and you never see them again. How do you think about those two?
00:17:49 · Nick Shalek
[00:17:49] S1: Ownership definitely matters. To me, that's like almost a immutable law. But I think this is one of the tricky dichotomies of the business, and there are a bunch that you can never quite reconcile. There's this F Scott Fitzgerald quote that I remember maybe from college that like, the test of a true first rate intelligence is the ability to hold two ideas in your head at the same time and still retain the ability to function. And that's what I think about on this topic all the time. So here's my two opposing ideas that, you know, seem hard to reconcile. Like first, ownership really matters, mostly because we're all limited by the time we can allocate. And at Ribbit, we really believe in making concentrated focus investments and putting our money where our mouth is. But second, at the same time, I think investing in the best companies should be the tail that wags the dog. You know, you certainly shouldn't back a weaker company because you think you can own a few more percent of it. So the thought experiment for me goes like this. Like, if the best founders only want to sell you x percent of their company and x is lower than your ideal, you kind of have choices. One, don't back the founders. Two, you just shut down your business. Or three, you try to find ways to align your desire to own more with their objective to make the business successful. So we start with who we want to back, and then we get to working on number three. And our arguments are usually based around trying to show them in lots of ways the value of being partners with us. And if we can give them more money over time, and we still think the return is asymmetric and meets our absolute bar, it's the highest return on time thing we can do. This is how we think about it. I don't envy stage focused generalists, because I think it's an even harder challenge these days.
00:19:11 · Harry Stebbings, Nick Shalek
[00:19:11] S0: I do want to ask on the reinvestment decision making side, how do you process that? What does that structure look like? I mean, I know a lot of funds have the automatic pro rata that they kind of guarantee. How do you feel about that? And then also, how do you structure your reinvestment decision making process? [00:19:25] S1: I think if I were to criticize it, know, arguably, we spend too much time on it. But our principle from the beginning is we re underwrite every deal, including follow on decisions. In follow on decisions, we certainly take into account the importance of the relationship and the fact that we've been that it's our default posture to be supportive of companies. And then going back to what I was sort of alluding to before, Harry, I think if a follow on decision happens within a short period of time, and you're struggling with it, a lot of times, it's because you haven't done the right work up front. So I always think like, try to do the right work up front so that we can be supportive of the company over time. And then you take everything on a case by case basis. So what we do is we assign, you know, a few people on the team, and we do the same sort of underwriting, maybe it takes us a little bit less time that we would have done in in any other scenario. And we try to let that guide us in terms of what to do. [00:20:15] S0: Can I ask, is it consensus decision making? Or is it like partner led, one person can do it?
00:20:15 · Harry Stebbings, Nick Shalek
[00:20:15] S0: Can I ask, is it consensus decision making? Or is it like partner led, one person can do it? [00:20:20] S1: Neither consensus nor partner led, I would say we have a process that's intentionally conviction driven, meaning somebody on the team needs to pound the table. But we try not to attach that investment decision to a person because I think that often leads to people thinking about investments in the wrong way, rather than just being, you know, very straightforward about analyzing the investment or the opportunity. They get hung up in, you know, the kind of politics of the internal process, anathema to the way we're trying to manage the firm. [00:20:46] S0: Well, I do want to touch on that because attribution is so cool to a lot of how LPs think, and obviously, LPs love it. Most venture firms do actually have pretty clear and granular attribution. Given that you don't, by going a little bit deeper, why do you not? And what are the benefits of not having attribution?
00:21:01 · Nick Shalek
[00:21:01] S1: Yeah. It's just always seemed right to us for Ribbit not to have attribution. Like, deals almost always have advocates. This is what I'm saying. Like, in fact, we sort of have this loose rule that if someone's not pounding the table, there's no point in considering an opportunity. A little different than the the follow ons where we we have to consider it or, you know, we have to think about it. But we never label something Nick's deal or Nikolai's deal or Ray's deal. The biggest reason is we we just think it's more fun to live and die as a team. And once we've decided to do a deal, there's no credit claiming or finger pointing in it. It does get rid of a lot of the pathologies of venture. It's it just becomes a Ribbit deal. You know, from an investment perspective, we try to depersonalize it like it can be easier. And This is what I was alluding to before. It can be easier to bring the wrong biases when it's a deal attached to a person. We need brutal honesty as a firm a no holds barred debates. But you might think about supporting the person behind the deal, which is a nice sentiment, but it's not very productive. When something's going in the portfolio, like our promise to founders, the way we structure is that everyone on the team is available to them. This all rings a lot truer internally and externally, like if everyone feels like they're contributing to a joint body of work. But I don't want to be pollyannish. There's a cost to looking at the world this way. Like deal attribution makes the whole venture industry go around. Like when Forbes puts together the Midas list, they want to know what investments you've made. So attribution clearly motivates people. I think what we're asking of ourselves as a team is to be motivated by something else, like the desire for Ribbit to win and the joy in feeling like we did it together. And at the end of the day, that's not only a choice about what makes the firm perform best, but about what makes it worth doing.