Latest / The Inspired Stories Podcast / Is Capitalism Failing? With Seth Levine from Foundry Venture Capital

Transcript

Is Capitalism Failing? With Seth Levine from Foundry Venture Capital · The Inspired Stories Podcast

• 0:04
  Welcome to another edition of the Inspired Stories podcast
• 0:08
  where leaders share their experiences so we can learn from
• 0:11
  their successes and be inspired by how they've overcome
• 0:14
  adversity. My name is Anthony Kotaspodi and
• 0:17
  today's guest is Seth Levine. He is a partner at Foundry, a
• 0:21
  Boulder based venture capital firm that invests in early stage
• 0:24
  technology and supports founders through a strong network driven
• 0:29
  approach. Foundry is known for its give
• 0:33
  First philosophy and helps entrepreneurs build lasting
• 0:36
  businesses in a supportive community.
• 0:39
  Over the years he has advised venture funds worldwide and
• 0:42
  guided many entrepreneurs through growth and change.
• 0:45
  Seth also Co founded Goodbread, a platform that aims to expand
• 0:50
  financial access for small businesses.
• 0:53
  He Co founded Pledge 1%, a global network of companies that
• 0:57
  have pledged to give back to their local communities.
• 1:00
  And Seth has co-authored 2 books, The New Builders, which
• 1:03
  discusses the empowerment of women and people of color in the
• 1:06
  world of business. And his latest book, Capital
• 1:10
  Evolution, which explores how businesses, governments and
• 1:13
  individuals can work together to create an economy that works for
• 1:16
  everyone. Now before we get into all that
• 1:21
  good stuff, today's episode is brought to you by my company,
• 1:24
  Add Back Benefits Agency, where we offer very specific and
• 1:28
  unique employee benefits that are both great for your team and
• 1:32
  fiscally optimized for your bottom line.
• 1:34
  Imagine being able to give your employees free access to
• 1:37
  doctors, therapists, and prescription medications.
• 1:40
  And here's the fun part, the program actually puts more money
• 1:44
  into your employees pockets and the companies too.
• 1:48
  One recent client was able to increase net profits by $900 per
• 1:53
  employee per year. Results vary for each company
• 1:56
  and some organizations may not be eligible.
• 1:59
  To find out if your company qualifies, contact us today at
• 2:02
  AD back benefits.com. All right, back to our guest
• 2:05
  today, Seth Levine. Thanks for making the time to
• 2:07
  Share your story today. Anthony, it's a pleasure to be
• 2:10
  here. Thank you for having me.
• 2:12
  So Seth, where did you first get your start in the
• 2:15
  entrepreneurial world? Do you have a lemonade stand?
• 2:17
  Were you selling comic books? I had a SAS business actually
• 2:22
  back in the day. It was a shovel.
• 2:25
  The first S was shoveling, shoveling as a service.
• 2:29
  I used to, I grew up outside of Boston and to make a little
• 2:32
  money snows in Boston to make a little money, I used to go
• 2:35
  around the neighborhood I was probably was in, in Newton.
• 2:39
  So we moved there when I was in 4th grade.
• 2:41
  So probably call it 5th, 6th, 7th, 8th grade.
• 2:43
  Somewhere in, in there was kind of when I, when I was working on
• 2:46
  this, I would, you know, offer to shovel people's walks for,
• 2:51
  you know, 5 bucks or whatever driveway for 10 bucks kind of
• 2:53
  thing. This is back in the 80s and I
• 2:57
  had a lot of of sort of older clients, elderly clients and and
• 3:01
  it occurred to me that it was kind of a pain to walk around
• 3:06
  house to house and ask if they wanted it on any given snow day.
• 3:10
  And so I came up with this idea that at the beginning of the
• 3:13
  winter I would walk around and I would offer for $20.00 a month
• 3:17
  to shovel, shovel their walks or driveways as many times as it
• 3:22
  snowed. Unlimited.
• 3:23
  Unlimited exactly. And so I so a subscription
• 3:27
  business, shoveling as a service and and I ended up, I got a
• 3:31
  decent number of clients, enough that I actually had a couple
• 3:34
  friends that I would pay. Of course, I was paying them on
• 3:37
  an hourly basis, right? Not or a per walk basis, not on
• 3:40
  a, a monthly basis. And most winters I did pretty
• 3:44
  well, right. I mean, there was obviously it's
• 3:46
  just my time. So you know, winters where it
• 3:47
  snowed or months where it snowed 3 or 4 times, you know, I was
• 3:52
  sort of begrudgingly walking out the 4th time and shoveling.
• 3:54
  But but anyway, that's kind of how I got my start in in
• 3:56
  entrepreneurship. So was sales just like natural
• 3:59
  easy to you? Yeah, I mean, I like people.
• 4:02
  I'm a natural extrovert. So I, I really, and I by the
• 4:05
  way, I also felt like it was something that was kind of
• 4:08
  offering them a bit of Peace of Mind, right?
• 4:09
  I mean, one of the things, and I think maybe the idea came
• 4:12
  because I would sometimes I would end up at someone's house
• 4:16
  later in the day just because, you know, I just, I'd start
• 4:19
  walking neighbor to neighbor, right.
• 4:21
  And by the time I got to someone's house, maybe a bunch
• 4:23
  of people said yes. And I was shoveling for hours
• 4:27
  and people would say to me, Hey, I wasn't sure if you were going
• 4:29
  to come today because it would be later in the afternoon.
• 4:33
  And that's where the idea came to me was like, well, actually,
• 4:35
  why don't I give them an, an assurance that I will do it.
• 4:38
  And by doing that, I would, I would do those houses first.
• 4:42
  That was part of my pitch was like, look, I, I'm going to do
• 4:45
  the houses that sign up like this.
• 4:47
  I'm going to do first thing in the morning.
• 4:49
  And then, and then I'll keep going in the around, you know,
• 4:51
  the rest of the day and try to make more money.
• 4:53
  And obviously you're less likely to get clients later in the day
• 4:56
  because people have already figured it out.
• 4:57
  And you know, either someone else, some other kid has showed
• 4:59
  up there or more likely they've just shovel it themselves.
• 5:02
  So anyway, that was, that was kind of how it all came into
• 5:04
  driving that was. Pretty clever, especially for
• 5:06
  like, somebody in elementary school.
• 5:08
  Junior high. Yeah, Not some.
• 5:10
  Coaching on this 5th, 5th or 6th grader.
• 5:13
  You know, it's funny, I was talking to someone about this
• 5:16
  the other day I, I hadn't totally put this together, but
• 5:19
  my in particular my dad's father was incredibly entrepreneurial.
• 5:24
  He grew up in Denver, which is, you know, I live in Colorado.
• 5:28
  He, he was one of eleven children.
• 5:31
  He dropped out of school. I, I, I think it might have even
• 5:34
  been middle school during the Great Depression.
• 5:37
  And he never went back. So he never, never even
• 5:40
  graduated from high school. And he ended up having this like
• 5:44
  very kind of middle class life. He was a he was a salesman and
• 5:48
  he, he sold cars. He sold check, check, cashing
• 5:51
  check, check writing machines. He for a while had a men's
• 5:55
  clothing store that he started. It was unfortunately wasn't
• 5:57
  successful, but you know, when he kind of scraped together this
• 6:01
  really sort of very good, very nice middle class life.
• 6:04
  And, and we really, my family is sort of the epitome of the
• 6:07
  American dream, right? So, so he, my grandfather didn't
• 6:10
  graduate from, from high school, let alone college.
• 6:13
  My grandmother, by the way, actually back in the 30s did
• 6:15
  graduate from college when it was much more unusual for women
• 6:19
  to go to college. She went to Colorado Women's
• 6:20
  College and, and my dad has a PhD from Harvard, right.
• 6:24
  So like, like in one generation, my dad goes to Cal and then
• 6:28
  Harvard and, you know, and his dad, you know, hadn't graduated
• 6:32
  from high school. And and of course his mom was
• 6:34
  sort of. An I love that.
• 6:35
  That really is the classic American dream.
• 6:37
  I, you know, my dad came over to the country when he was just
• 6:40
  eight years old. His parents didn't have anything
• 6:43
  better than a grade school education.
• 6:45
  He graduated from college, graduated from dental schools,
• 6:48
  gone on to start, you know, many successful businesses, you know,
• 6:51
  kind of on the shoulders of giants like if if earlier
• 6:55
  generation. Say it.
• 6:56
  Say it again, Seth. We both come at it naturally,
• 6:58
  right? Yeah, yeah.
• 7:01
  And, you know, without the earlier generation sort of
• 7:03
  having, you know, made the sacrifices and the strides for
• 7:05
  us, you know, the, the, the path was paved.
• 7:09
  So, yeah, I've got a lot of gratitude as I hear your story
• 7:13
  and I think about, you know, similar connection to mine.
• 7:16
  And I think that you have as well the way that you're talking
• 7:18
  about. It absolutely.
• 7:19
  And I, my grandfather and I, we're very close and, and, and
• 7:24
  sort of all growing up, we, I spent all my summers in
• 7:26
  Colorado. That's why I decided to move
• 7:27
  here. And, but after I moved here, my
• 7:30
  grandfather and I, there's this wonderful Jewish deli down in
• 7:33
  Denver called Zadie's. And he and I would have
• 7:36
  breakfast together at least two days, sometimes three days a
• 7:40
  week. We would just meet there.
• 7:42
  He lived nearby. And and this is, you know, I was
• 7:44
  younger, I didn't have kids, stuff like that.
• 7:45
  But, and that was like one of the great gifts of my life was
• 7:50
  the decision to move to Colorado and being able to spend that
• 7:53
  much time with my grandfather. That's really cool.
• 7:56
  OK, so let's Fast forward a whole bunch.
• 7:59
  How did you meet your partners at Foundry?
• 8:01
  Because this has turned into something pretty incredible.
• 8:03
  Yeah. So it's a 2 step story, Anthony.
• 8:06
  The 1st is I met Brad. I was working for a datacoms
• 8:09
  company sort of through the the Internet bubble and the bubble
• 8:13
  burst and I, I eventually they decided to focus on a portion of
• 8:17
  their business and they had me run the rest of the business and
• 8:20
  sell it. It was a couple different
• 8:22
  business lines, which is an incredible experience.
• 8:24
  I was in my 20s. I, you know, I was running a $55
• 8:28
  million P&L had a couple 100 people working in my
• 8:31
  organization. I sold them up, but I, I could
• 8:33
  see that, I could see that the sales were happening at that
• 8:36
  company had asked me to stay, but I didn't, I knew I didn't
• 8:39
  want to stay. And so I, I had a summer where I
• 8:42
  had sold 2/3 of the businesses that I was supposed to sell and
• 8:45
  I had one sale pending. I didn't have a lot to do,
• 8:47
  frankly. This is the summer of 2001.
• 8:49
  So the bubbles already burst and I was taking long lunches and I
• 8:53
  had a lot of friends who were about to get let go from Cisco
• 8:56
  and a couple of other places. We'd meet and play basketball
• 8:58
  and stuff like that just waiting for this deal to get done.
• 9:01
  And I had to stay through the deal because I had some deal
• 9:03
  bonuses that were tied to that. But I kind of looked around and
• 9:06
  I was like, all right, I know I don't want to stay.
• 9:08
  What do I want to do? And I thought, you know, I had a
• 9:11
  couple of offers to do corporate development or be like AGM of
• 9:14
  something. And I was like, I have a lot of
• 9:16
  friends that have tried. I had early in my career, I was
• 9:20
  an investment banker and I had some friends from banking who
• 9:22
  had gone into either venture, private equity.
• 9:24
  I don't know that I even totally understood the difference at the
• 9:27
  time. And I was like, that sounds kind
• 9:28
  of fun. Again, I was young, youngish and
• 9:32
  I, I was single at the time and I didn't have kids.
• 9:34
  So I was like, yeah, now might be the time to do that.
• 9:37
  So I just networked into a bunch of people.
• 9:40
  Eventually someone introduced me to Brad.
• 9:42
  Brad, what's like crazy busy back then.
• 9:43
  It truly like we got this introduction and he said I'd
• 9:46
  love to sit down with you and I got a an appointment on his
• 9:49
  calendar three months later, right.
• 9:51
  So and so eventually I track up. There's sort of a fun Side Story
• 9:55
  about like, what do you wear when you're going to meet Brad
• 9:57
  Feld for something that feels like a job interview?
• 10:00
  I was like. Was was Brad Feld a person of
• 10:03
  recognition at that point? Yeah, we everyone in Colorado,
• 10:07
  It turns out they're not there are just aren't that many VCs in
• 10:09
  Colorado. And I was, I naively thought,
• 10:11
  well, I'll just meet them all and someone will offer me a job,
• 10:15
  which is a crazy thing now that I understand how it actually
• 10:17
  works. But but yeah, no, he was very
• 10:20
  well but well known, but also known for being a little
• 10:22
  eccentric, right? So I'm like, he will probably
• 10:24
  not even have socks or shoes on. But it's kind of an interview.
• 10:28
  Like I just wasn't wired to show up in jeans and a hoodie.
• 10:32
  And so I remember that they had this like crazy throne in the,
• 10:36
  they had this like incubator thing that was sort of between
• 10:38
  Denver and Boulder. They had this big throne with
• 10:41
  all these ornate decorations on it.
• 10:43
  So he sits me in the throne and he's like, so why are you up
• 10:46
  here? And we had this kind of amusing
• 10:49
  conversation. But anyway, we eventually it
• 10:51
  turns out they were trying to, they were hiring for an
• 10:53
  associate and I ended up going through that process.
• 10:56
  Interesting story about Brad. We get to the end of the
• 10:59
  process. I'm one of two finalists.
• 11:01
  Brad wants to hire the other guy and the rest of the team said,
• 11:05
  no, we want, we think Seth's the right guy.
• 11:07
  And Brad, because he's Brad said, OK, if you, you know, it's
• 11:11
  like 4 or five other people, you guys all think Seth is the right
• 11:14
  guy, we'll hire Seth. And that's how close I came to
• 11:16
  not having the life that I have right 'cause everything changed
• 11:19
  for me when I met Brad and started working for Brad and
• 11:23
  then eventually with Brad. And so that was that was how I
• 11:27
  got my start at what was SoftBank Venture Capital and
• 11:29
  eventually became Mobius Venture Capital.
• 11:32
  Got it. And So what point did you go
• 11:34
  from working for Brad to working with Brad?
• 11:37
  Yeah. So I joined, joined SoftBank on
• 11:41
  September 7th, 2001. So it went straight into
• 11:45
  September 11th, right, Four days later, which just it meant we
• 11:49
  couldn't travel. It was, it was, it was a really
• 11:52
  we already knew that the sort of venture bubble had burst, but
• 11:55
  it, it was worse than I sort of even thought it was going to be.
• 11:58
  And I saw I had, I joined the associate for two years.
• 12:02
  That turned into three years. Then I promoted me to this like
• 12:04
  super junior partner thing. And that's importantly where I
• 12:08
  met Ryan and Jason, Ryan McIntyre, Jason Mendelssohn, who
• 12:13
  became sort of the, the other half of, of the Foundry
• 12:17
  partnership. And in two, but in 2005, then it
• 12:21
  was then called they, they had been renamed it to Mobius.
• 12:24
  They tried to go raise another fund and, and I actually sat
• 12:27
  down with Brad at some point. It's probably later in that year
• 12:30
  and said, hey, Brad, I'm I'm not quitting today, but I I'm not
• 12:33
  going to stay at Mobius. I would at that point, I was
• 12:35
  married. We'd had her first kid.
• 12:37
  I was still and I was a super junior partner.
• 12:39
  Like to call me a partner was not even really a fair, a fair
• 12:43
  description of it. And I was going to get to do
• 12:45
  like one or two deals maybe in that first fund and I was like
• 12:48
  this, this just isn't working for me.
• 12:51
  And Brad said, Hey, I don't actually think we're going to be
• 12:54
  able to raise this fund. Been thinking about maybe doing
• 12:56
  something, you know, on my own. I would love to do it with you
• 13:00
  and that we started talking about I don't know if he had
• 13:02
  already talked to Jason and Ryan about it.
• 13:04
  I'm not sure that the exact, exact sequence that sort of
• 13:06
  gotten blurred in my, in the history, but, but ultimately
• 13:10
  said, hey, let's, we're going to talk to, to Jason and Ryan about
• 13:13
  this. And they ended up moving out in
• 13:15
  kind of mid 2006. And we kind of figured out what
• 13:19
  eventually became Foundry started raising the, the money
• 13:22
  in 2007 and then eventually closed the fund towards the end
• 13:26
  of that year. And it ended up being a great
• 13:27
  time to be an investor 'cause it we had a pile of capital through
• 13:30
  the GFC and and that was a really good time to start start
• 13:33
  businesses. So for somebody who's never
• 13:35
  heard of Foundry before, break it down for him.
• 13:38
  What is it? Yeah.
• 13:39
  So Foundry is a a pretty classic venture capital firm.
• 13:43
  We were a national investor, but based out of Boulder, Co We've
• 13:48
  now over the years, so we started in 2006 essentially, and
• 13:52
  we finished our first fundraise in 2007.
• 13:54
  So depending on how you count it, we're in close to 20 years
• 13:58
  in. We've raised about $4 billion.
• 14:01
  Yeah, it's a big, big pile of money.
• 14:03
  In 2016, we decided to expand our work.
• 14:07
  We had been investing personally in other venture funds, mostly
• 14:12
  funds from our friends, but but a pretty interesting group of
• 14:14
  managers and we thought that that would be interesting to
• 14:18
  institutionalized there had not LP's are kind of a different
• 14:21
  animal than GPS and we thought it would be interesting to try
• 14:26
  to be an LP that was AGP, right. So we had this experience
• 14:29
  running a fund and we'd created this fund of funds and that's
• 14:33
  really when our assets under management really ballooned.
• 14:35
  I mean all of our sorry. Explain that for me, Seth.
• 14:37
  An LP that is AGP. So the, you know, the people
• 14:42
  that are running the venture funds are very different than
• 14:45
  the people that allocate money to the venture to venture funds.
• 14:48
  So the limited partners, right, the fund of funds, the
• 14:51
  endowments, pensions, things like that.
• 14:54
  The people that operate those piles of capital and invest in
• 14:58
  venture just have a different I, I tell people, I tell GPS this
• 15:02
  all the time. They have a very different job.
• 15:03
  They're asset allocators. And that's, that is quite
• 15:07
  different in in sort of training and mentality from someone who's
• 15:11
  actually in the venture business making direct investments into
• 15:15
  portfolio companies. And we recognize we needed a
• 15:18
  little bit of understanding of both of those worlds.
• 15:20
  Obviously we were partners at a venture firm, so we knew how
• 15:23
  that world worked. But we ended up bringing in our
• 15:26
  largest limited partner, our largest investor in foundry, a
• 15:30
  guy who built the University of Texas investment management
• 15:33
  companies. So that basically the Texas
• 15:35
  College and University systems retirement plan, their private
• 15:41
  markets and specifically emerging managers market
• 15:44
  portfolio, a guy named Linda Lachman.
• 15:46
  So we brought him into foundry and in 2016 raised capital to a
• 15:51
  basic basically be a fund that we didn't call it a fund of
• 15:53
  funds, but essentially that's what we were doing.
• 15:55
  So to become a a fund of funds. So now foundry invest in other
• 16:00
  venture funds. We've got about 50 give or take
• 16:02
  venture funds that we've invested in as well as directly
• 16:05
  into companies and they kind of feed each other, right.
• 16:08
  We learn about new managers through our work as an investor,
• 16:12
  we can evaluate the better in our minds as an investor and we
• 16:17
  often Co invest with them. We typically invest in in funds
• 16:20
  that invest earlier than we do. So we get a chance to see a few
• 16:23
  thousand companies and we pick the ones that we think are most
• 16:26
  interesting to partner on. And what is it you're looking
• 16:28
  for? Is it all tech related?
• 16:30
  What are the check boxes that either the fund or the company
• 16:34
  directly has to satisfy for you? Yeah, it's all, it's all tech
• 16:38
  related all these, these days. That's a pretty broad category.
• 16:43
  I would say we invest in some in what we call themes.
• 16:45
  We write about it on the website.
• 16:46
  I won't go through through all of them here, but areas that
• 16:50
  have been very successful for us in particular are marketplace
• 16:54
  businesses. We, we have that we've invested
• 16:57
  in a number of very well known marketplaces, Seed Geek, Rover,
• 17:02
  the dog sitting platform, bunch of others.
• 17:05
  So that's been a popular area for us.
• 17:07
  We like what we call glue, which is technologies that other
• 17:12
  technologists would buy S intermediary technologies.
• 17:15
  And then we also have had a lot of success in, I'll call them
• 17:20
  hardware companies. We really think of them as bit
• 17:23
  surrounded by atoms. So usually there's a a heavy
• 17:26
  software component. Examples of that would be Fitbit
• 17:30
  that I think everyone has heard of at this point, but also
• 17:34
  something like Whoop, let's say, or even Maker Bot, which is a
• 17:37
  one of the early 3D printing companies.
• 17:38
  So those are air. They're not exclusively, I mean,
• 17:40
  I didn't describe everything we do, but those are some areas
• 17:43
  that we tend to lean in on. And when is it in the life cycle
• 17:46
  of the company that you're traditionally coming in?
• 17:48
  Typically it's Series A for us. So it that in the definition of
• 17:52
  that has changed over time. So it used to be maybe a little
• 17:54
  bit earlier. Now it's sort of post product
• 17:57
  market Fed typically company has let's say at least three or
• 18:00
  three to $5,000,000 worth of revenue.
• 18:02
  So there's there's some customers, there's some, there
• 18:05
  are numbers to to crunch and to do some due diligence.
• 18:07
  Occasionally we'll write an earlier check and occasionally
• 18:10
  we'll write a later check, right with sometimes we've done a few
• 18:13
  deals where we've written, you know, fifteen $20 million checks
• 18:17
  into companies that are a bit later stage, but for us still
• 18:20
  have venture risk. So when I say later stage, I
• 18:22
  don't mean pre IPO round where there are, you know, 10 or $20
• 18:25
  billion evaluation. I mean maybe a few $100 million
• 18:29
  evaluation up to call it $500 million evaluation.
• 18:32
  They've call it Series C, Series D again, the numbers kind of or
• 18:35
  the letters shifting around a bit, but giving try to get
• 18:37
  people a flavor. So where you guys come in in the
• 18:40
  life cycle, then what are you traditionally seeing as like a
• 18:43
  success rate, right? The earlier that you get
• 18:46
  involved, the more failures that you're going to have.
• 18:49
  The later you get involved, you know, the more successes that
• 18:52
  you're going to have. You guys are still getting in
• 18:54
  pretty early. Pretty early and I'd say the
• 18:56
  success rate is with the success rate has moved up because we've
• 18:59
  gone a little later. So if I look at the first fund,
• 19:01
  about 2/3 of that capital went to effectively 0 and that was a
• 19:06
  6X fund, right? It was a very successful fund.
• 19:09
  It was just highly, highly concentrated.
• 19:11
  Now we did more seed and Series A in that fund.
• 19:14
  And again, what meant, what Series A meant was earlier back.
• 19:17
  This is 2007 to 2010 essentially.
• 19:21
  And then as you go forward in fun life, our success rate has
• 19:24
  become has gotten higher because we've we've mixed in assets that
• 19:28
  we invested in a little bit later, but it's still probably
• 19:32
  5050. And it depends a little bit on
• 19:33
  what you define as success, right?
• 19:35
  I mean, if successive, we've done a much better job of
• 19:37
  getting our capital back or making a couple times our
• 19:39
  capital on things that weren't really working.
• 19:43
  And we try to continue to expose ourselves to these outlier
• 19:47
  companies that, you know, in the case of Fitbit was multi
• 19:50
  hundreds of X return on an investment.
• 19:53
  We've got a handful that of those that that still exist in
• 19:56
  the in the later funds as well. When we had Brad Feld on the
• 20:00
  show some months ago, we talked quite a bit about his the Give
• 20:04
  First philosophy that he believed strongly in.
• 20:07
  You guys at Foundry believe strongly in.
• 20:10
  Can you share a story, an example of when this give first
• 20:16
  approach, if it really had an impact on a founder or a fun
• 20:20
  relationship in a way that you didn't expect?
• 20:22
  Let let me make it really personal because it's had an
• 20:25
  incredible and a profound impact on me and my life.
• 20:29
  It's interesting. Anthony, I was, of course, I
• 20:32
  read Brad's book. I read an, I read an early copy
• 20:34
  and gave him some feedback and he mentioned something and then
• 20:39
  the book came out and he's been doing, you know, podcast things
• 20:41
  like that. As, as you mentioned, he was on
• 20:43
  your show and he mentioned a book that I hadn't read.
• 20:46
  It's, it's a give and take by Adam Grant.
• 20:48
  And I was reading, so I, I was, I read it.
• 20:51
  I, I didn't, I don't know why I missed it.
• 20:52
  I've, I've read most of Adam's, Adam's works.
• 20:56
  And about halfway through I sent Brad a message and I said this,
• 20:59
  this book is about you. And, and it's really made me
• 21:03
  realize just this incredible gift that you've given me, this
• 21:08
  philosophy of give first. And I asked him the question
• 21:11
  like I, I or I posed the question.
• 21:13
  I think I was maybe predisposed to this idea, but I don't know
• 21:17
  that if I had not met you and we didn't have the relationship we
• 21:21
  had that I really would have internalized it the way that I
• 21:25
  did. But I also acknowledged and this
• 21:27
  is in the actual answer to your question that Brad, Brad was
• 21:32
  this way with me, right? I learned the venture business
• 21:35
  because of Brad's willingness to to give to me.
• 21:40
  And when we started Foundry very specifically, Brad was in a
• 21:44
  position he was by far the most well known of the four of us.
• 21:48
  He had a real track record. He'd been a partner at a venture
• 21:51
  firm for more than a decade at that point.
• 21:54
  And he could have easily said, we're calling it Feld Ventures
• 21:57
  and I'm taking half the economics.
• 21:59
  And he very clearly said to us and the world, that's not the
• 22:03
  kind of firm that I want to be a part of.
• 22:05
  I want us to be equal and we set up a fund that in in which we
• 22:11
  were equal. We own foundry equally.
• 22:13
  We had slightly different carry in that first fund, but nowhere
• 22:16
  close to what Brad could have commanded.
• 22:19
  And that was incredibly impactful on me.
• 22:23
  It was incredibly impactful from a financial perspective for
• 22:25
  sure, but it was also impactful for me from a philosophical and
• 22:29
  an approach perspective. And, you know, I mean, I think
• 22:33
  that, I mean, knowing Brad has changed my life, right?
• 22:36
  I mean, it's, I think that's true of a lot of people.
• 22:37
  I mean, it's amazing how many people I bumped into who say, Oh
• 22:41
  my God, Brad gave me 3 minutes 10 years ago and it totally
• 22:44
  changed what I was thinking about and completely altered the
• 22:47
  trajectory of my life. And I've, I've consistently
• 22:49
  tried to, I'll never actually live up to that because Brad,
• 22:52
  Brad is at a different plane than I am, but I, I constantly
• 22:55
  try to emulate that. How do I provide value to people
• 22:59
  in, I mean, he's been so selfless about doing that.
• 23:02
  So it's affected me very directly.
• 23:04
  It's affected me because it modeled behavior that I, I want
• 23:08
  to emulate and, and continue to, to strive to emulate.
• 23:11
  And I'm, you know, I'm just really, I mean, Brad's one of my
• 23:13
  closest friends. So it's, it's, it's funny to
• 23:15
  talk about in this way. But, and we've had this 20 plus
• 23:18
  year partnership. I mean, he and I started working
• 23:20
  together and as as I said in 2001, so we're 25 years into our
• 23:24
  working relationship and and it's had a profound impact on my
• 23:28
  life. So when people here give first
• 23:31
  philosophy, I think they can mostly connect the dots on what
• 23:34
  that means. But let me see if I can
• 23:36
  encapsulate it in a way that accurately reflects the
• 23:39
  intention of it. It is as it sounds.
• 23:42
  Give first in a relationship. How can I help you, Seth?
• 23:46
  Right. How can I help you, Brad?
• 23:48
  And there isn't the immediate expectation for some kind of
• 23:52
  quid pro quo. I'm not expecting Seth or Brad
• 23:55
  to turn around and, you know, give me a share in their company
• 23:59
  or whatever it is. There is an expectation that at
• 24:03
  some point, somewhere in the universe that that karma is
• 24:08
  going to come back to me, right? And my fault, my ability to
• 24:13
  give, give, give. You know, I might not get
• 24:15
  something back directly from Seth today, but maybe Seth makes
• 24:18
  an introduction to somebody that, you know, then is able to
• 24:21
  help me in a different way. Am I thinking about this
• 24:23
  correctly? Yes.
• 24:24
  And that last piece is so important, Anthony, I'm glad
• 24:27
  that you have have sort of grabbed that and have
• 24:31
  acknowledged it here, because I think that's a piece to give
• 24:33
  first that I think some people tend to skip over or not
• 24:37
  understand. And because of that, I think
• 24:40
  that there, there can be a tendency to, for people to feel
• 24:43
  like, oh, give first isn't, is this extractive thing, right?
• 24:47
  You give, give, give, give, give and, and you're taking right
• 24:50
  from the from, from a, an individual in favor of a
• 24:53
  community. And there are people who sort of
• 24:57
  get sucked into that and feel like I'm never gonna get
• 25:00
  anything back or there's this expectation that I never get
• 25:02
  anything back. And that's not what give first
• 25:04
  mean it means. And I think that that last
• 25:06
  piece, as you accurately described it is really
• 25:08
  important. It's not that I don't expect
• 25:10
  stuff to come back. It's just that I don't expect it
• 25:12
  to be a one to one relationship. And I don't know the form in
• 25:16
  which it's gonna come back. But I think it's in particularly
• 25:18
  important to say that because I think there are in particular
• 25:21
  very specific communities of people who historically give a
• 25:26
  lot and don't get anything back and where it's expected that
• 25:29
  they just simply give of themselves, right?
• 25:32
  I think we've, we've in our society in particular, have
• 25:34
  treated women with this lens. And I've had a couple women
• 25:38
  specifically say to me, Hey, I, I feel like this could be
• 25:42
  exploitative of me and my time. And it's really important to say
• 25:46
  no, no, no, no. If, if you feel like that's
• 25:49
  happening it it's then you're sort of giving too much and
• 25:53
  you're not sort of requesting something back from, from the
• 25:57
  community. So I think it's a really
• 25:58
  important point I've, I've become, I was not sensitive to
• 26:01
  this. And so a friend of mine, she
• 26:03
  called me out on it and said, Hey, this is what it sounds like
• 26:06
  to me. And that's when I started
• 26:08
  personally using different language.
• 26:09
  I, I don't know Brad. I've noticed Brad using this
• 26:12
  language as well. I know he used it when he talked
• 26:14
  to you. And so I, I assume someone has
• 26:17
  talked to him a little bit about that as well.
• 26:18
  And it's kind of changed the way he's, I think he's always
• 26:21
  thought about it this way and we've already always thought
• 26:23
  about give first this way. But I think this has changed how
• 26:26
  he's talked about it. So how does someone guard
• 26:28
  against giving too much and not receiving anything in return?
• 26:34
  Yeah, is that even the right question to ask?
• 26:36
  I think so I think it's fair to say I, I don't, I don't advise
• 26:39
  people to keep a leisure and say, OK, well, I've given, you
• 26:43
  know, 10 dockets and I've gotten 6 dockets back.
• 26:46
  And, and by the way, different people I have, I am totally fine
• 26:49
  having an imbalance, right? I don't, I'm not expecting to
• 26:51
  get the same things back from community.
• 26:54
  And I don't really know how and in what form things come back to
• 26:57
  me, right. And I think for me, a lot of
• 26:59
  stuff sort of happens in the background and I don't know, I'm
• 27:01
  in the middle of a book much. I'm seeing a lot of give back
• 27:03
  now, right? I had AI, I've had a ton of
• 27:05
  people with a book book actually launched yesterday was available
• 27:08
  yesterday. And I had a ton of people
• 27:09
  posting on social and, you know, telling people about it and
• 27:12
  buying books and showing up to the launch event, things like
• 27:15
  that. And, and for me, that was
• 27:16
  getting back from community and it felt very, I felt that very
• 27:19
  warmly. But the way that I think you
• 27:21
  guard against it is that you at the end, each person person
• 27:25
  needs to decide this individually.
• 27:27
  But you, you need to be thoughtful about how and when
• 27:30
  and, and when, what time you're giving.
• 27:32
  And I'll tell a story later about sort of just a breakdown
• 27:35
  in my life around just too much to do.
• 27:39
  And part of that breakdown was I was not putting appropriate
• 27:43
  boundaries in that case on my schedule.
• 27:45
  Anyone who wanted to get on my schedule was getting on.
• 27:47
  And I felt like that was part of give first.
• 27:50
  And I realized that there were other ways for me to provide
• 27:54
  back information in an e-mail, pointing people, writing about
• 27:58
  certain topics and pointing people to my blog more, writing
• 28:01
  the books that I've been writing, for example, things
• 28:02
  like that that were a way for me to avoid these one-on-one
• 28:08
  meetings. And I needed to realize it was
• 28:10
  OK to say to people, hey, I don't have time to meet with you
• 28:14
  face to face, right? I, but I'm happy to answer some
• 28:18
  questions over e-mail or here's what I think might be helpful to
• 28:22
  you. And it took me a little bit to
• 28:24
  understand that. So that's just one example from
• 28:26
  me personally where I needed to put some limits on what I was
• 28:29
  giving because it just got to be too much.
• 28:32
  You made a comment before Seth about certain communities of
• 28:35
  people I don't know being at greater risk for having, you
• 28:39
  know, give, give, give and not receive back.
• 28:41
  And you specifically pointed out women.
• 28:44
  I wonder if this ties into any of the motivation for Co
• 28:48
  authoring your first book, The New Builders.
• 28:51
  Can you talk about that? Yeah, thanks for asking about
• 28:54
  that. I really, you know, I love the
• 28:57
  venture books that are about people's experiences and, and,
• 29:02
  you know, company stories and things like that.
• 29:04
  And and that's the what I'm gonna say is not to take away
• 29:06
  from those, but the, the, the two books that I've written are,
• 29:10
  are pretty different, right? There was a lot of research that
• 29:12
  went into them. It's not really sort of stories
• 29:15
  of my life as a venture capitalist.
• 29:17
  Instead, they are stories about topics that I, you know, care
• 29:22
  deeply about. Originally, I decided to write
• 29:26
  what became the new builders because I, my co-author and I,
• 29:30
  she's a a business journalist. I'd, I'd known her for a few
• 29:32
  years before this. We love trading stories about
• 29:36
  entrepreneurs doing interesting things kind of out of the Main
• 29:39
  Street lens. It started with some
• 29:40
  international entrepreneurs because we met over
• 29:43
  entrepreneurs that were working in in actually in Palestine and
• 29:46
  in the West Bank specifically. And so we were trading these
• 29:49
  stories and we thought, well, wouldn't it be fun to write a
• 29:51
  book, kind of a light hearted book actually about people that,
• 29:55
  you know, maybe are overlooked by mainstream media and and we
• 29:58
  didn't know the stories of them. And so that's how it started.
• 30:00
  As we researched it, we realized actually two things.
• 30:03
  One is that the people starting businesses today, we're much
• 30:08
  more likely to be women and people of color and immigrants
• 30:10
  as they always have been. And that they were not, we were
• 30:15
  not doing a good job of connecting capital to these
• 30:17
  businesses. Capital writ large, right, Not
• 30:19
  just venture. Venture is like 1% of companies.
• 30:21
  So it's, it's important, but it's not, it's a tiny number of
• 30:24
  businesses relative to what we're talking about.
• 30:27
  And that became a much more urgent in our mind story to
• 30:30
  tell. And so we, we decided it was
• 30:33
  going to be a more serious book than we'd originally thought.
• 30:35
  And we started writing, writing it up or researching it.
• 30:39
  And then as we started writing, COVID hit.
• 30:41
  And of course, businesses that were owned by in particular
• 30:45
  women and people of color were disproportionately affected by
• 30:48
  COVID, in large part because they had lower cash reserves.
• 30:51
  So we really felt an urgency to get it out.
• 30:54
  And so the book is sort of a combination of of of research
• 30:58
  studies and statistics, but but but really punctuated by
• 31:02
  vignettes. We tell the stories of a bunch
• 31:03
  of entrepreneurs. Each chapter is about a trend
• 31:06
  and we tell the story of an entrepreneur that exemplifies
• 31:09
  that trend. And then we talk about the
• 31:11
  broader trend and it really became a sort of a, a passion
• 31:14
  project, right? Something that we just were, we
• 31:17
  felt so strongly about. I'm really proud of, I'm proud
• 31:20
  of both books. I'm, I'm very proud of the way
• 31:21
  that, that that book came out and frankly, the impact that it
• 31:24
  had. We in particular, it got passed
• 31:27
  around on Capitol Hill quite a bit and.
• 31:29
  Oh, is that right? Yeah, yeah.
• 31:31
  I didn't. We know specifically 'cause we
• 31:33
  heard from some staffers that it actually shaped some of the
• 31:36
  pandemic relief monies and and bills because it they it forced
• 31:41
  them to think differently about the types of businesses that
• 31:43
  were actually impacted by COVID. Can you say more specifically
• 31:48
  about how it influenced it? I, I think specifically there
• 31:53
  was some of the initial COVID relief funds kind of skipped
• 31:56
  over small businesses, right? And they were really targeted
• 32:00
  towards kind of venture backed companies.
• 32:02
  And, and again, there was, I mean, look, we at foundry, our
• 32:05
  companies took advantage of those things that saved a bunch
• 32:07
  of businesses. I've, I have no problem with
• 32:09
  what the government did to try to bolster the innovation
• 32:12
  economy, but they were doing it by, at the expense of or, or by
• 32:16
  ignoring businesses that were more Main Street businesses.
• 32:20
  And and so the second COVID Relief Act tried to fix that by
• 32:24
  channelling more money very directly to smaller businesses.
• 32:28
  That's fascinating, yeah. Any idea how it first got seated
• 32:31
  there in Capitol Hill? I, I know that it was a staffer
• 32:34
  from Tim, Tim Kaine's office. I don't know how they found it,
• 32:37
  Anthony, it's really interesting.
• 32:38
  And I, I mean, look, my hope for the new book is that something
• 32:41
  similar happens. It's at the new books, sort of
• 32:43
  it's about a broader topic. So I think has sort of more
• 32:45
  broad applicability. But, but I, we're doing an event
• 32:49
  in DC in, in a month or so and, and I know that some staffers
• 32:53
  have already been kind of passing it around.
• 32:54
  So I I hope that that has the same effect.
• 32:58
  That's cool. Let's talk about the new book,
• 33:00
  Perfect Segue Capital Evolution. What was the inspiration to Co
• 33:03
  authoring this one? Well, I had a very, I, I'm
• 33:06
  interested to, to describe the story because I think it'll
• 33:09
  resonate with your listeners. I the, the impetus for this book
• 33:13
  came from a dinner that I had with a portfolio company of mine
• 33:17
  in, in New York. It was a board meeting style
• 33:20
  dinner. There were a bunch of the
• 33:21
  management team, the CEO, I was the only out of town investor.
• 33:24
  So it got a little late and all the other investors left.
• 33:27
  It was just me, the CEO and the rest of the management team.
• 33:29
  We started talking about sort of the role of a company in society
• 33:34
  these days. And, and it was shortly after
• 33:35
  Dobbs the, the abortion decision came down for the Supreme Court
• 33:40
  and one of our other CE OS had written something on LinkedIn
• 33:42
  about it and, and had but gotten feedback both from people who
• 33:46
  felt like he didn't go far enough and people who felt like
• 33:48
  he went too far. But both of both of whom worked
• 33:52
  for him, right? They're not both people, both
• 33:54
  classes of people who worked for him.
• 33:56
  He had a pretty big company and the CEO was asking me basically
• 34:01
  like, would you accept a lower return for us living our values?
• 34:07
  And we ended up having this whole discussion.
• 34:08
  Of course I gave him AVC style answer, which was like, no, I
• 34:11
  don't think you have to make that choice, which actually I
• 34:13
  believe in, but, but we ended up talking about it quite a bit.
• 34:16
  And he was, he was saying, Hey, I, we, we run a business.
• 34:20
  We have a lot of fortune 100 company customers and they may
• 34:23
  have different sets of values than we do.
• 34:24
  And I've, I've started to think a little bit more about, well,
• 34:26
  what do I, what am I supposed to talk about?
• 34:29
  Right? My employees want me to come out
• 34:31
  and, and, and address the issues of the day.
• 34:33
  We it was just past pride month and they had changed their logo
• 34:37
  to the sort of multi colored flag, a version of their logo on
• 34:40
  their website without really thinking about it.
• 34:42
  And he was like, was that a is that appropriate?
• 34:44
  Like is that what company should be doing?
• 34:46
  Was a really interesting, interesting question.
• 34:49
  And so as I am want to do, I called up Elizabeth, who's my
• 34:52
  co-author on the first book, and she and I have become very close
• 34:55
  friends and and when I have interesting questions like this,
• 34:58
  like she's the first person I think about.
• 35:00
  So I called her and said, this is super interesting.
• 35:02
  And as we typically do, we sort of batted around and decided,
• 35:07
  well, let's ask some other people their opinion on this.
• 35:09
  So we started doing some research, not with the idea that
• 35:11
  we're going to write a book on it, but just because we wanted
• 35:13
  to understand how we're people thinking about it.
• 35:15
  And that's when we realized there's an interesting story to
• 35:18
  be told here about the rise of business and society relative to
• 35:22
  government and media. And what are we asking
• 35:25
  businesses to do? And so that became what what
• 35:28
  ended up being the sort of the basis for the book.
• 35:30
  The book is about a broader set of topics, which is really the
• 35:33
  future of capitalism. Turns out it's a bit of a
• 35:35
  defense of capitalism, which three years ago when we started
• 35:39
  researching it maybe felt like it was less urgent to defend.
• 35:42
  But I think he's sitting here today probably is very urgent to
• 35:45
  defend and and at least urgent to have a conversation about.
• 35:48
  But we also talk about the ways in which neoliberal capitalism,
• 35:51
  which is the capitalism we've been living under for the last
• 35:54
  50 years or so, is maybe not working so well.
• 35:57
  And we outlined an idea for how to change it.
• 36:00
  What is that idea? Let's take a step back.
• 36:04
  Define the liberal capitalism that you say we've been living
• 36:07
  under for the last 50 years and why you think it's not working.
• 36:10
  That's kind of move into what maybe the fix.
• 36:12
  Is yeah, thank you. I I think it's actually
• 36:13
  important to do that. Anthony So Milton Friedman, who
• 36:17
  many people listening have have likely heard of, he was a
• 36:20
  economist most closely associated with the University
• 36:22
  of Chicago. He came out with a, a bunch of
• 36:25
  ideas about how the economy should be organized.
• 36:28
  He wrote a big book about it in the late 60s and then he wrote
• 36:31
  an article in the New York Times in 1970.
• 36:33
  It was a bit more digestible, so it became more popular.
• 36:37
  And in it he described that the only responsibility of a
• 36:40
  business is to shareholders. That was, I'm paraphrasing
• 36:43
  slightly, but only slightly. That was the title of the
• 36:44
  article and a bunch of people it, it didn't get adopted right
• 36:49
  away, but it but over the sort of course of the 70s and in
• 36:51
  particular in the 80s specifically with Ronald Reagan
• 36:55
  and with Margaret Thatcher. So in the US and the UK, but but
• 36:58
  then globally, these ideas really became embraced.
• 37:02
  And the idea was that the only thing the corporate managers and
• 37:05
  boards need to worry about was making money for shareholders.
• 37:08
  And it, and it, it, it did a couple things.
• 37:10
  One, is it, it, it sort of demonized government.
• 37:12
  Reagan famously said government's not the solution,
• 37:14
  it's the problem. And it forced sort of this very
• 37:19
  short term thinking upon companies, right where they were
• 37:22
  managers were incented. Shortly after this, there was
• 37:25
  another paper by a couple of Harvard economist that really
• 37:28
  sort of became the basis upon which the stock based
• 37:31
  compensation movement ended up especially for executives, ended
• 37:36
  up sort of taking off, some may argue to sort of like a crazy
• 37:41
  extent. And, and really that's what
• 37:44
  we've been operating under for the last 50 years, right, 1970
• 37:49
  through today, which is this idea that corporate managers
• 37:52
  only need to care about their shareholders.
• 37:54
  And we think that that's short sighted and and a bit naive.
• 37:58
  And the result of that has been our economy has grown slower
• 38:03
  than it had been, right? So if you look at the economy
• 38:05
  from post World War 2 through 1970, and there's a bunch of
• 38:09
  reasons why it grew potentially faster, right?
• 38:11
  We had a bunch of people returning from the war.
• 38:13
  We had very generous education programs, the GI Bill,
• 38:16
  specifically women were entering the workforce.
• 38:19
  That was a huge unlock for the GDP growth in the United States.
• 38:23
  But the economy was growing faster and it was growing much
• 38:26
  more equally. And then after the 1970's the
• 38:30
  economy and our economic growth slowed and became much more
• 38:34
  unequal. And so the during that time
• 38:36
  period just has 11 statistic to make it real.
• 38:39
  See the, the compensation for senior executives grew by about
• 38:42
  900%. The compensation for workers
• 38:45
  grew 12% total right through that.
• 38:48
  So it's just, it's everyone knows the stats, right?
• 38:50
  I mean, the concentration of wealth is, is, is gotten pretty
• 38:53
  alarming. And you see it in our divided
• 38:56
  politics and in the rise of populism, right, both on the
• 38:58
  left and the right. It's the reason why double digit
• 39:01
  percentage of Mandami voters voted for Trump.
• 39:03
  They, they care about the same things, right?
• 39:06
  In terms of inequalities, they say they care about the same
• 39:08
  things. Their prescriptions are very,
• 39:10
  very different. But you know, everyone, I think
• 39:12
  when Mandami went to to the White House, everyone's expected
• 39:15
  fireworks. And it turns out they just
• 39:17
  agreed on a lot of stuff because, you know, the typical
• 39:20
  Trump sort of MAGA base, if you will, had the same underlying
• 39:25
  challenges, opportunity, lack of opportunity specifically, that
• 39:29
  the Mandani voters have. Which is what?
• 39:33
  Which is the dynamism in the United States economy is largely
• 39:37
  gone away. We think about the American
• 39:38
  dream, the idea of being able to lift yourself up through your
• 39:43
  own sort of ingenuity and hard work and the ability to out
• 39:50
  essentially out earn your parents.
• 39:51
  And both of those things have largely gone away.
• 39:54
  I mean, just by as one example, just to make it really clear, 50
• 39:57
  years ago, if you were born in the bottom 25th percentile of
• 40:01
  wealth, you had a 25% chance of dying in the top 25th percentile
• 40:05
  of wealth today. And that is the American dream,
• 40:08
  right? It's the ability to make, make
• 40:10
  yourself make and improve your station life.
• 40:12
  Today you have a 5% chance. Of rising from the bottom 25th
• 40:16
  percentile to the top 25th percentile so that this
• 40:19
  opportunity economy has largely gone away.
• 40:22
  And a lot of what we argue for in the book is for ways that we
• 40:25
  can return to that. And I, you know, I felt like we
• 40:28
  felt like this book was necessary because a book like
• 40:32
  this actually hadn't really been written.
• 40:33
  There are plenty of people that have have written something
• 40:35
  about evolving capitalism or changing capitalism, and they've
• 40:40
  tended to fall into two camps. 1 is academics who write these
• 40:43
  sort of largely unrealistic policy treatises and that are
• 40:48
  relatively dense and not super readable and, and sort of, they
• 40:51
  lack a lot of business experience.
• 40:53
  And so it's written from that perspective, or let's say the
• 40:56
  CEO who writes about their own personal journey and they've had
• 40:59
  this incredibly successful business and they did it this
• 41:01
  way. And shouldn't more people do it
• 41:03
  this way? And those, I mean, the both of
• 41:04
  those books are interesting and we read a lot of them, but we
• 41:07
  wanted to write a book for the masses that was written from the
• 41:10
  perspective of people that have actually been in business for
• 41:12
  decades. And, and draws from
• 41:14
  conversations that we had with really, I, I mean, almost 100
• 41:18
  people who were, some of whom were academics, many of whom
• 41:21
  were CE OS, some of whom are CE OS that you've heard of, right?
• 41:23
  Jamie Dimon from JP Morgan Chase sat down with us.
• 41:26
  Dan Schulman is now the CEO of Verizon, was the CEO of PayPal.
• 41:29
  A bunch of people like that, but also companies that maybe you've
• 41:32
  never heard of and workers sort of across the spectrum of of
• 41:37
  seniority to just try to get a lot of perspectives and then
• 41:40
  distill it into a what I hope is a very readable and accessible
• 41:43
  work. So help me wrap my head around
• 41:46
  exactly what the problem of the last 50 years have been.
• 41:49
  Liberal capitalism. Did it work for the period of
• 41:53
  time that it was working, or was it always flawed back then and
• 41:57
  now we're just finally starting to see the cracks?
• 41:59
  I think it was. So I think my answer is nuanced.
• 42:02
  I and, and we try to treat it in a nuanced sense.
• 42:04
  We actually have a chapter called The Beauty and Fallacy of
• 42:07
  Milton Friedman. I really, I really tried.
• 42:10
  I, I wrote the first draft of that chapter personally and I, I
• 42:13
  really tried to get behind the time in which Milton Friedman
• 42:17
  grew up, right? Came of age post World War 2.
• 42:20
  Was one of the guys who actually, you know, met at, you
• 42:23
  know, Mount Bretton and tried to come up with the new economy,
• 42:26
  right. With the, for the entire world
• 42:28
  That, that, that, that was amongst this sort of group of,
• 42:31
  of very now famous economists, Shumptor and Hayek and others
• 42:35
  who were there. And so I tried to understand
• 42:38
  that in context, I think it worked better earlier on because
• 42:43
  it was, we've now had this like Frankenstein version of
• 42:45
  Friedmanism and neoliberal capitalism.
• 42:47
  And, and, and it, it started out of maybe a little less harsh,
• 42:51
  even Friedman talked about investing in employees and
• 42:53
  things like that. But what happened over time is
• 42:55
  that we treated everything below the revenue line is something
• 42:58
  that needed to be extracted from and, and essentially minimized,
• 43:02
  right? And needed to be optimized.
• 43:04
  And the result was very short term thinking and very
• 43:09
  extractive thinking, both around in particular labor, but also
• 43:12
  around the environment. And our view is those things
• 43:15
  aren't sustainable. And you only need to look at,
• 43:17
  well, you can look at the environment and sort of what's
• 43:19
  happened there to, to see that extracting from the environment
• 43:21
  is not, not going to be able to be continued.
• 43:24
  And I think we've kind of gotten our heads around that mostly,
• 43:27
  but also sort of look at our, our current politics to see that
• 43:30
  we've extracted too much from labor.
• 43:33
  And by the way, the same or middle class, let's say.
• 43:36
  And at the same time, I mean, our economy really grows on the
• 43:39
  backs of, of the middle class, right?
• 43:40
  I mean, the, the truth is that the consumer economy is roughly
• 43:43
  2/3 of the US economy. And the way that we've done that
• 43:46
  is we sort of traded off not increasing wages for the promise
• 43:52
  of cheap stuff, right? You can buy $200 television and
• 43:55
  that should make everyone happy. And we combined it with 0 or
• 43:59
  close to 0 interest debt for so many years.
• 44:03
  And, and really we're sort of at the limit of the middle class's
• 44:06
  ability to take on more debt and therefore continue to consume.
• 44:09
  And so part of the argument we make, Anthony, and this is
• 44:12
  really important is that we believe that we can grow the
• 44:15
  overall pie faster by making some changes in the economy.
• 44:19
  We'll talk about it in a minute, but it's not an art, It's not a
• 44:22
  redistributive argument, right? It's not a, and it's not a sort
• 44:26
  of a, there should be no billionaires kind of argument
• 44:28
  that I, I just think that falls short.
• 44:30
  I really prefer to think of the world as like strong floor, no
• 44:34
  ceiling. I'm borrowing from my friend
• 44:35
  Oliver Libby, who wrote a book in with that title.
• 44:38
  But I I do believe that there should be no cap on opportunity,
• 44:42
  but we should provide the ability for more people to
• 44:46
  participate in that opportunity economy.
• 44:49
  Got you. So in the past, the problem has
• 44:51
  been just trying to squeeze everything that we can from
• 44:55
  lower and middle class people and in terms of income and not
• 45:01
  allowing them to sort of participate at the full level,
• 45:04
  not giving them as many opportunities to rise up from
• 45:08
  the lower quartile to the upper quartile.
• 45:10
  And so the plan in the book, some of the ideas that you
• 45:14
  outlined there are how can we make this better?
• 45:17
  How can we make this more inclusive again?
• 45:20
  Yes, exactly. And I, I, I, let me describe one
• 45:22
  more thing. But I, I want to say that it's
• 45:24
  important for listeners to understand this is what we're
• 45:27
  proposing is not some radical redefinition of capitalism,
• 45:32
  right? It's, it's a shift in
• 45:34
  capitalism, but it's a little bit of AII don't want to call it
• 45:37
  a subtle shift 'cause it's a real shift, but it recognizes in
• 45:41
  particular, and I'll describe sort of the four key pillars of
• 45:44
  what we call dynamic capitalism, which is what we believe we're
• 45:47
  sort of move. We think we've actually moved
• 45:48
  away from neoliberalism. That in 2019, the Business
• 45:51
  Roundtable, which is a group of about 200 of the biggest CE OS
• 45:55
  of the biggest companies in the United States, came out with a,
• 45:57
  their own statement of a purpose of corporation of a corporation.
• 46:00
  And, and in it they very clearly described that there are other
• 46:04
  stake stakeholders other than shareholders, specifically
• 46:07
  employees, the community environment and and suppliers.
• 46:10
  Jamie Dimon happened to be the CEO of the Business Roundtable
• 46:13
  at the time. And so we, when we spent some
• 46:15
  time talking with him about this and we got the story behind
• 46:17
  that, we tell it in the book. But so we've kind of moved into
• 46:21
  this, what we described as like a messy, messy middle.
• 46:23
  So we're it's not clear. Maybe we'll pull back to
• 46:26
  neoliberalism. Maybe we'll move on to something
• 46:28
  else. Trump is this sort of weird
• 46:29
  figure that's like a kind of a stick, you know, a person or a
• 46:34
  personality of the neoliberal age.
• 46:35
  But he talks a lot more like a dynamic capitalist and he sort
• 46:39
  of governs sometimes as a dynamic capitalist, sometimes
• 46:41
  not. Isn't it more as elite
• 46:42
  neoliberal? It's sort of a interesting
• 46:44
  figure, which I think is more just evidence that we're in this
• 46:46
  transition and we haven't quite figured out what comes next.
• 46:50
  But you know, really there there's historically in the
• 46:53
  United States been this this division that we have created
• 46:56
  between capital and labor. And the division was maybe
• 47:00
  slightly less important when the percentage of top line for most
• 47:05
  businesses that ended up going to labor was significantly
• 47:08
  higher. And but what's happened over the
• 47:10
  last 50 years, we actually have a chart of that on this in the
• 47:13
  book, is that that percentage of revenue that goes to labor has
• 47:17
  gotten smaller and smaller. We, we have minimized that
• 47:19
  because neoliberalism says you need to extract from that.
• 47:22
  Now, there's no argument in the book that companies should
• 47:25
  somehow be less efficient. So that's not at all what we're
• 47:27
  saying. But we are saying that we need
• 47:30
  more pathways to ownership. And maybe to state it in a way
• 47:33
  that I hope people will will sort of appreciate and, and
• 47:36
  maybe maybe want to adopt is how do we create more capitalist,
• 47:40
  right? If you believe in a capitalist
• 47:42
  economy, then we should want more capitalists.
• 47:45
  And I think if you look at what people said about why they voted
• 47:48
  for socialist in the financial capital of the world in New
• 47:51
  York, the reason that they said that was because they did that
• 47:56
  is because they felt like they didn't have any purchase on the
• 48:00
  economic ladder of the United States.
• 48:02
  They were so swimming in debt of some kind.
• 48:06
  They felt like there was no opportunity to create wealth.
• 48:10
  They could not afford a house. The average age of a first time
• 48:13
  home buyer is increased to 41 now, up from like the late 20s,
• 48:17
  fifteen years ago, right? So it, it people don't feel like
• 48:21
  they've got a stake in the market economy, how do we give?
• 48:25
  I mean, the solution is how do we give more people a stake in
• 48:27
  the market economy? So what's the solution?
• 48:29
  What are the four pillars? Yeah, So let me thank you.
• 48:32
  I I can easily go off forever. I should not forget to actually
• 48:35
  say what they are. So there's four things.
• 48:37
  And again, these are not radical things. 1 is a shift from short
• 48:41
  term to longer term thinking. And we've already seen this in
• 48:44
  some companies. I mean, when Google went public
• 48:47
  that, you know, they wrote a long sort of share dear
• 48:50
  shareholder letter that described that they were going
• 48:52
  to, you know, they were going to think about the long term, not
• 48:54
  the short term. And by the way, companies under
• 48:57
  neoliberalism aren't particularly good at
• 48:59
  perpetuating themselves. The average half life of a
• 49:01
  Fortune 500 company is 20 years. So it's not like neoliberalism
• 49:06
  and this focus on the short term was creating these sort of long
• 49:08
  term benefits to even to companies and their and their
• 49:12
  executives. So short term thinking, no long
• 49:16
  term thinking, yes, that's thing.
• 49:17
  One thing two I've already addressed, which is an
• 49:20
  empowerment of the ownership economy.
• 49:22
  We have a bunch of ideas for how to do that very specifically in
• 49:24
  the book. The 3rd is a role for
• 49:29
  government, but a limited role for government.
• 49:31
  We have a lot. We have a entire chapter that
• 49:33
  kind of goes through this and this theme sort of weaves its
• 49:36
  way in and out of the book. But I think there's a propensity
• 49:38
  on the on one side, certainly in the neoliberal side, but also I
• 49:42
  think in general on the right side of the political spectrum
• 49:45
  to say everything government does is terrible.
• 49:47
  Government should be involved in anything.
• 49:48
  And I think there's also a propensity on the far left side
• 49:52
  to say government's the solution to everything.
• 49:54
  Government should be way more involved in people's lives.
• 49:56
  And I we wanted to very clearly outline that we feel like
• 50:00
  neither of those two ideas is correct.
• 50:03
  The, the right idea is probably closer to less government
• 50:06
  intervention in our economy, lower regulations, things like
• 50:11
  that. So we taught, we go through that
• 50:12
  in the book, but it's important to say.
• 50:15
  And then the last thing, which is a little bit, it's kind of
• 50:19
  funny that we have to talk about it right now, but it's true in
• 50:21
  this day and age, which is the, the respect of the rule of law,
• 50:24
  respect for the rule of law and market economies can't function.
• 50:30
  And the law, by the way, equally applied to everyone in our
• 50:33
  economy and our society, markets can't function without
• 50:37
  guardrails and rules. And we are at a bit of a
• 50:41
  dangerous time in the United States where respect for the
• 50:44
  rule of law is maybe being challenged, right?
• 50:47
  And, and the law is not necessarily being applied
• 50:51
  equally across people. And, and so that's important to
• 50:54
  say. And so we, as we were talking
• 50:55
  about, you know, sort of early on writing the book that the
• 50:57
  first 3 three ideas came out very clearly.
• 51:00
  And then at, you know, at towards the end of of our
• 51:04
  writing, we realized that fourth pillar is something that we
• 51:06
  really need to add. Who is your book going to make
• 51:10
  angry? Wow, I hope a lot of people
• 51:14
  actually, right. I mean, I think it's going to
• 51:15
  make people angry, like sort of classic neoliberals, right?
• 51:19
  And there's a lot of people who still have a stake in that that
• 51:22
  style of economy. And I think the book will
• 51:25
  frustrate them because they they believe the system is working
• 51:29
  for them. And they don't believe, and this
• 51:31
  is important, that an economy that works for more people
• 51:35
  ultimately will also be better for them.
• 51:37
  And that's the argument we're trying to make.
• 51:38
  But I think there's a lot of people and they're not just on
• 51:41
  the right side of the political spectrum, but I think in in this
• 51:43
  sort of category, they're more likely to be.
• 51:45
  I think they won't like this at all.
• 51:47
  They don't like this idea. They think it's too messy.
• 51:49
  Shareholders only as simple what you're talking about is too
• 51:52
  through through, you know, impact and same people that that
• 51:55
  are sort of going after DEI and impact investing and things like
• 51:59
  that. And we have a very nuanced
• 52:00
  discussion about what those things are and how, how, what's
• 52:03
  the government role in, in those, those sorts of ideas.
• 52:06
  And, and maybe we've gone a little bit too far in many of
• 52:08
  them. And then I think also it'll
• 52:10
  anger plenty of people on the left side of the political
• 52:12
  spectrum who are like, look, capitalism is irredeemable.
• 52:15
  I don't even want to hear about it.
• 52:17
  We actually addressed this early on in the book.
• 52:18
  We, we have a have a chapter about whether capitalism can be
• 52:22
  saved. And I just think there's a lot
• 52:24
  of people, and I've, I've talked to many of them who are just
• 52:29
  say, no, there's there's no role for capitalism.
• 52:31
  We need something else. And I guess they're read of
• 52:34
  history, even though there is not an example of a socialist
• 52:38
  system, certainly at scale that has been successful, but they're
• 52:42
  read of history somehow is that I don't know, everyone else has
• 52:44
  done it wrong and now we're going to do it right now or
• 52:46
  whatever. I mean, I don't mean to, I mean,
• 52:47
  I'm dismissive in the sense that I don't agree.
• 52:49
  I don't mean to sound so dismissive that I'm not not
• 52:52
  willing to listen to them, but I think that it'll, it'll, it'll
• 52:55
  anger those people as well. And we have a very nuanced view,
• 52:58
  for example, around the energy economy, right?
• 53:00
  The energy economy, we won the 20th century, the United States
• 53:05
  won the 20th century. We had the largest economy,
• 53:07
  fastest growing sort of by every metric.
• 53:11
  Most people, you know, not in poverty, things like that.
• 53:14
  We won that economy because we won the energy economy.
• 53:18
  And whoever wins the 21st century will also have won the
• 53:22
  energy economy, right? We need more electrons in the
• 53:25
  world. And so we have a pretty nuanced
• 53:27
  view of that. And those people that are like,
• 53:29
  hey, we need to have a moratorium on fossil fuels in
• 53:31
  whatever 2030 I like. That just doesn't make any
• 53:33
  sense. And by the way, we don't believe
• 53:35
  we need to do that and, and be able to still have a planet we
• 53:38
  can live on. And so I think there's plenty of
• 53:40
  people who will read those sorts of things and either dismiss it
• 53:43
  or dismiss me. I'm a capitalist by job title,
• 53:45
  right? It's pretty easy to, you know,
• 53:47
  sort of wave your hand and say, no, I, I think these ideas are
• 53:50
  dumb. And, and what I've been been
• 53:51
  encouraging people and I've, I've, I've gotten to a few of
• 53:54
  these discussions on Twitter recently is like, read the book,
• 53:58
  right? Like, don't, don't give me your
• 54:00
  feedback, feedback based on the, you know, 200 character version
• 54:03
  of what we wrote. Like actually read it and then
• 54:05
  tell me what you agree and disagree with.
• 54:08
  Short answer, Seth, what's the single biggest lever that we
• 54:11
  could pull to achieve the goals that you have in mind?
• 54:14
  Create more owners love it 100%. We've done that.
• 54:19
  By the way, we've done a pretty good job of that in call it tech
• 54:22
  entrepreneurship. But and I think a lot of people
• 54:25
  that are inside of tech entrepreneurship because it's
• 54:27
  very common to have most employees have some form of
• 54:30
  stock option or something don't realize how little that idea has
• 54:37
  actually pervaded the rest of the economy.
• 54:39
  And so we talked about in particular, we talked about a
• 54:42
  couple of couple of guys who are working on this one and one
• 54:46
  especially at KKR, P Stabros, who is bringing some of these
• 54:51
  employee ownership ideas to much more sort of mainline
• 54:54
  manufacturing businesses in his case.
• 54:56
  But more broadly, and by the way, stock options are only one
• 54:59
  form of how you think about an ownership economy as we go
• 55:02
  through a couple of other ideas. But EO PS, which are employee
• 55:05
  ownership, there's like a couple dozen EO PS in the entire United
• 55:08
  States, 33 million businesses in the United States and there's a
• 55:11
  couple of dozen EO PS, right. So as one example, but there's
• 55:15
  some other pathways to ownership that we describe and but if
• 55:18
  there's one thing that I think we could do, it is to create
• 55:20
  more owners. I want to, I want to get rid of
• 55:23
  this distinction between capital, the capital class and
• 55:26
  the labor class, and I want to create far more capitalist than
• 55:29
  we have today. Love that.
• 55:32
  Let's shift gears, Seth. I would love because people look
• 55:35
  at you from the outside and are like, oh wow, you know, Seth,
• 55:38
  bright guy, very successful. Things just come easy, right?
• 55:41
  Get to invest in all these really cool companies.
• 55:45
  What's a really hard thing that you've had to overcome in your
• 55:47
  life, whether it's something personal or professional and and
• 55:50
  what did you learn going through that?
• 55:52
  I mean, one of the stories that I like to tell 'cause I, I think
• 55:54
  people, I think people do sort of look at me or Foundry and
• 55:58
  sort of say like, that was easy, right?
• 56:00
  You were always gonna be successful And, and for
• 56:02
  starters. And no, it wasn't, right?
• 56:05
  Foundry has been hard on many levels at many times.
• 56:08
  And it's very imperfect when we first started Foundry.
• 56:13
  So it's 2006 and we, all the four of us came together and
• 56:16
  started sort of working on the, you know, things you needed to
• 56:19
  do and, and capital raising back then was a little bit different.
• 56:23
  We had to, we had to create an offering memorandum, we hired
• 56:27
  lawyers, all the things to do that.
• 56:29
  And I'd made a little bit of money, but not a lot of money.
• 56:33
  And I put my entire savings into foundry, right?
• 56:37
  It was, and again it was 6 figures, but barely.
• 56:41
  And there was, so that was, we started fundraising in January
• 56:45
  of 2007 and by May it was really clear it wasn't going to come
• 56:49
  together right. We, we, we had, there were no
• 56:51
  emerging managers back then. The conventional wisdom was you
• 56:54
  needed to be in one of probably 8 venture firms or it wasn't
• 56:58
  worth being in that, in that asset class.
• 57:00
  There were a couple of what we would now think about is
• 57:03
  emerging managers that had raised their funds, but they
• 57:05
  weren't well known yet and they had not been successful.
• 57:08
  So Union Square existed and these are all firms we were
• 57:11
  close to, but Union Square exist.
• 57:12
  First round existed, True existed and Spark existed, but
• 57:18
  no one knew who they were and there was no thesis around it.
• 57:21
  And I actually very much remember coming home in May of
• 57:26
  that year. So this is 2020 or 2007 and
• 57:29
  saying to my wife, this isn't going to work.
• 57:32
  And by the way, I lost our life savings, right?
• 57:34
  I mean, we were gonna like lose our house, let's say, but I was
• 57:37
  gonna have to go like find another job where we'd had a kid
• 57:39
  and my wife was at at the time staying.
• 57:41
  She, she does a lot of, she's done a lot of different jobs.
• 57:43
  She's a real estate developer right now, owns a bookstore in
• 57:45
  our town, all sorts of things. At the time she was, she was
• 57:48
  working part time and, and, and, and home with our, our, our kids
• 57:53
  and, and I was like, I, it's not gonna work.
• 57:56
  We're, we're, I'm gonna have to go figure something out.
• 57:57
  And I like totally lost her life savings.
• 58:00
  Her response wasn't, you know, holy, holy crap, what are we
• 58:04
  gonna do? Her response was, I believe in
• 58:07
  you guys. I think this is gonna come
• 58:08
  together, give it a bit more time.
• 58:10
  And ultimately that is what happened, right?
• 58:12
  And and then the big thing for us was, you know, my now
• 58:14
  partner, Linda Lechmann at Utemco said yes.
• 58:18
  And as many entrepreneurs who are listening know, like once
• 58:20
  you get a couple of yeses, all of a sudden it steamrolls.
• 58:23
  And we went from thinking that the fund wasn't going to come
• 58:26
  together in May to, you know, by July, you know, so realizing it
• 58:30
  was going to come together and it was going to likely be
• 58:31
  oversubscribed, we actually were trying to at the time raise
• 58:33
  175,000,000. We ended up deciding to put a
• 58:36
  cap on it at 225, though. All of our early stage funds
• 58:39
  ended up being $225,000,000. And, and that was kind of the
• 58:44
  history there. And obviously, you know, I mean,
• 58:46
  my wife and I've been together for 25 years now, but like that
• 58:48
  was a really important moment in our relationship, right?
• 58:50
  Because it was a, it wasn't just a like, hey, honey, I believe in
• 58:53
  you. It was like, hey, no, we have a
• 58:54
  real stake in what's going on right now.
• 58:56
  And, and I know that this is going to work out.
• 58:59
  And I think you just need to like give it a little bit more
• 59:01
  time. And so I think that's an
• 59:02
  important story because it really was both Foundry was an
• 59:05
  all in thing for me and and obviously ultimately worked out
• 59:10
  really well. But but there was that moment in
• 59:12
  time when I was I was certain it was not working.
• 59:16
  What was the inflection point? What allowed that to switch?
• 59:22
  You know, I well, I mean, the one thing was Lindell saying,
• 59:25
  I'm, I'm there, I'm going to do this right.
• 59:27
  And thank, thank goodness that he had a thesis around emerging
• 59:31
  managers. He had invested in both true and
• 59:33
  USV and and I think eventually spark as well.
• 59:37
  And so he was like, Hey, I, I actually think that there are,
• 59:40
  there will be this class of entrepreneurs.
• 59:43
  Interestingly, most of those funds were not in the Bay Area.
• 59:47
  True was, but USV Spark and foundry were not.
• 59:51
  And, and he had a real thesis around that and that was the
• 59:54
  catalyst. But, but ultimately it was, and
• 59:57
  this is true for a lot of entrepreneurs like you have to
• 59:59
  stick with it. And we really.
• 1:00:03
  It was a good reminder that like a, a, a lot of things that seem
• 1:00:06
  easy in sort of hindsight, we're not easy.
• 1:00:10
  And the truth is raising foundries first fund was not
• 1:00:12
  easy and we needed to persevere. And, and maybe there's some, you
• 1:00:16
  know, parallel universes where it didn't, it didn't come
• 1:00:19
  together and, and Lyndall didn't say yes, right.
• 1:00:21
  And, and we, we weren't able to manage it.
• 1:00:23
  And I, I don't know what I would be doing in that universe, but
• 1:00:26
  but it'd be very different than this one.
• 1:00:28
  Interesting. So without Lyndall saying yes,
• 1:00:31
  the your future could have looked a lot different.
• 1:00:33
  There was somebody who believed in you that bought in, you know,
• 1:00:35
  and you raise a really interesting point, Seth, about
• 1:00:38
  entrepreneurs just need to keep going, right?
• 1:00:40
  Persevere because what we often hear, you know, the overnight
• 1:00:44
  success and I'm using air quotes for those people who are just
• 1:00:46
  listening. Excuse me, it's no, almost never
• 1:00:50
  is there an actual overnight success, right?
• 1:00:54
  It's something that you didn't hear anything about that people
• 1:00:57
  were toiling away in the background for years to bring to
• 1:01:00
  fruition. And then, you know, when it
• 1:01:02
  finally pops up out of the ground is this beautiful flower.
• 1:01:05
  You know, that's when you get to pay attention to it and see it.
• 1:01:08
  But you know, there's so many people grinding, working on
• 1:01:11
  something really hard. How do you think about, because
• 1:01:15
  there's sometimes where things just don't work right.
• 1:01:17
  Even in the venture space, you've seen a lot of companies
• 1:01:19
  that they put their best effort in and there wasn't a product
• 1:01:22
  market that whatever, you know, if something happens, it just
• 1:01:24
  doesn't work out. So how do you think about that?
• 1:01:27
  Like, you know, sort of like when do you know when you need
• 1:01:30
  to keep putting nose to grindstone versus, hey, it's
• 1:01:34
  just time to hang it up? Yeah.
• 1:01:35
  And, and I'm sorry to give an answer that's messy because you
• 1:01:39
  often times you don't really know, right Or you know, in
• 1:01:42
  hindsight. And I say that because so many
• 1:01:45
  times in my career, in the history of Foundry, we have put
• 1:01:48
  more money into something thinking it was just about to
• 1:01:51
  turn the corner and it didn't, right.
• 1:01:53
  And, and, and, you know, often times that's what it takes is
• 1:01:56
  like we're going to try one more time, sometimes one more time
• 1:02:01
  after the one more time before we finally get it in our thick
• 1:02:04
  skulls. This is not working, right?
• 1:02:06
  And, and you know, look, one of the things I think distinguishes
• 1:02:08
  the United States from other entrepreneurial economies is our
• 1:02:12
  acceptance of and even embrace a failure.
• 1:02:15
  And so I think that, and so I think that's positive, right?
• 1:02:17
  So when you get to the end of the line and say, look, it just
• 1:02:19
  didn't work. It didn't work, but it's very
• 1:02:22
  hard. And I think this is one of the
• 1:02:24
  reasons that we have an effective partnership, for
• 1:02:26
  example, is that the person who is closest, which is the CEO,
• 1:02:31
  the founding team and often times the board, the the partner
• 1:02:35
  that is, is on the deal, they have the least perspective,
• 1:02:39
  right? And I think one of the things
• 1:02:40
  that an effective partnership does is they push each other,
• 1:02:45
  right, in an effective Advisory Board or an effective CEO group
• 1:02:48
  or EO group, something like that.
• 1:02:51
  They push each other to say, hey, Anthony, I know that you
• 1:02:56
  really don't want to give this up.
• 1:02:58
  Let me show you and share with you what I'm seeing.
• 1:03:01
  And I don't think it's there. And I think that that role for a
• 1:03:06
  partnership is really it can be challenging, but I think it's
• 1:03:09
  really, really important, right? And this is the sort of
• 1:03:11
  proverbial, you know, every new investment, it should be viewed
• 1:03:14
  as a brand new investment. Forget the sun cost really hard
• 1:03:17
  for humans to do. We don't naturally do that.
• 1:03:20
  And, you know, sort of the, the proverbial, you know, bad money
• 1:03:25
  after good. I, I also think there's a
• 1:03:27
  tendency. There's a book by Annie Potts,
• 1:03:30
  which I really enjoyed. I'd highly recommend.
• 1:03:32
  It's called Thinking in Bets. And I think there can be a
• 1:03:34
  tendency in venture to always look at the decision from a few
• 1:03:40
  years ago based on what you know today, right, few years, few
• 1:03:44
  years later and what the outcome was.
• 1:03:46
  And what Annie says in her book is you, you have to judge
• 1:03:49
  decisions by the information you had at the time.
• 1:03:52
  And and the the judge of a good decision was whether you should
• 1:03:56
  have made that decision based on what you knew at the time,
• 1:03:59
  right? And that's so that doesn't mean
• 1:04:00
  in she's a poker player. She's describes things in terms
• 1:04:03
  of poker, but you know, you have a 27, right?
• 1:04:06
  It doesn't mean and it eventually runs, you know, turns
• 1:04:09
  in your direction. That doesn't mean that you
• 1:04:12
  should have played that hand, right?
• 1:04:13
  The outcome was the unexpected outcome, not the expected
• 1:04:16
  outcome. And so she talks about that
• 1:04:19
  relative to startups and you know, we've at different times
• 1:04:22
  tried different ways of evaluating decisions and
• 1:04:24
  decision making frameworks through the sort of POTS lens,
• 1:04:28
  if you will. But I'm, I really, I think it's
• 1:04:31
  important because a lot of people like to do post
• 1:04:33
  postmortem. So we shouldn't put more money
• 1:04:35
  in whatever, whatever you, you can't judge that based on what
• 1:04:38
  the company didn't work. So therefore we shouldn't have
• 1:04:40
  put money in like that. That may not at, at all be the
• 1:04:42
  case, right? The case might be, hey, based on
• 1:04:44
  what we knew, we should have put money back in, in this company
• 1:04:48
  back in the day. And, and, and the opposite is
• 1:04:50
  true, right? Sometimes you put more money in
• 1:04:52
  and it works out. But you should be thoughtful
• 1:04:54
  about do we get lucky and it worked out or was this a really
• 1:04:57
  good decision and it worked out? And and that distinction is
• 1:05:00
  really, I think challenging for firms to actually sort of
• 1:05:04
  understand. So we're recording this on
• 1:05:07
  December 10th, 2025. You just had your book launch
• 1:05:11
  party yesterday at your wife's bookstore.
• 1:05:13
  What's the name of the bookstore?
• 1:05:14
  It's a composition shop in Longmont, Co.
• 1:05:17
  It's absolutely gorgeous. Yeah, so fun times.
• 1:05:21
  The book is now out. It's available.
• 1:05:23
  What's the preferred method for people to buy it?
• 1:05:25
  Is it Amazon? Is it your website?
• 1:05:27
  I would say whatever is easiest for people.
• 1:05:29
  So if you go onto our website, which is the capital
• 1:05:32
  evolution.com, there's an order button and it'll take you to a
• 1:05:36
  page where there's a bunch of different options for buying it,
• 1:05:39
  whether that's through Amazon, through composition Shop, of
• 1:05:41
  course, through Barnes and Noble books-a-million, etcetera.
• 1:05:45
  But but also you, you should be able to find it at your local
• 1:05:48
  bookstore. It's really it, it should be
• 1:05:50
  pretty widely available. And So what I would say whatever
• 1:05:52
  is easiest for people. And by the way, it's available
• 1:05:55
  on Audible as well. It came out, the Audible version
• 1:05:57
  came out, that came out yesterday, the same day the book
• 1:06:00
  was available. All of the entrepreneurs with
• 1:06:02
  ADHD they're listening right now are like, oh, thank goodness.
• 1:06:05
  Thank goodness. Yeah, you and me both.
• 1:06:07
  I listen to most of my most of my books rather than read them.
• 1:06:10
  Yeah. So you've, you've been working
• 1:06:12
  on this book for a while now. It's out and you're doing some
• 1:06:15
  book promotions and and that's going to last for a period of
• 1:06:17
  time. And then what?
• 1:06:20
  What's next? Yeah, it's it.
• 1:06:21
  So this is actually a more nuanced question than maybe
• 1:06:25
  listeners recognize. Foundry made the decision.
• 1:06:28
  We raised our last fund in 2022 and in 2023, we announced to the
• 1:06:33
  world we weren't going to raise any more funds.
• 1:06:35
  We, we wanted to get ahead of that.
• 1:06:36
  We didn't frankly, just to be super blunt, we didn't want to
• 1:06:39
  make it look like we couldn't raise another fund and therefore
• 1:06:41
  we decided not to. So we announced it relatively
• 1:06:44
  early in that fund cycle and that was kind of always the plan
• 1:06:47
  for Foundry. It was so associated with the
• 1:06:50
  four original partners. One of my partners has already
• 1:06:52
  retired. And yeah, we just got to the
• 1:06:55
  point where we felt like it was enough.
• 1:06:57
  Brad just turned 60 and and sort of the rest of us were like,
• 1:07:01
  hey, we've done this for as long as we wanted to do it.
• 1:07:04
  So I 2025 for me, if I can just sort of share personally was a
• 1:07:09
  year where I thought a lot about, do I want to do something
• 1:07:13
  structured? Is there a next thing for me?
• 1:07:17
  And, and the conclusion I came to was yes, right.
• 1:07:20
  I'm in my early 50s. I, I feel like I've still have a
• 1:07:22
  lot to give back all the things I want to do.
• 1:07:26
  I still have a high degree. I have my own version of ADHD
• 1:07:29
  and I, I'd like to tell people my mind is a very cluttered
• 1:07:33
  place and, and I find work is what actually allows me to kind
• 1:07:37
  of quiet it down a little bit. So I definitely want to do
• 1:07:40
  something next. So that was 20252026 is when I'm
• 1:07:44
  going to start really thinking about what that is and I hope to
• 1:07:47
  find what the that is. So I'm, I'm working on a few
• 1:07:49
  different ideas, some of which look more like foolish time
• 1:07:53
  work, some of which are a bit more kind of part time in
• 1:07:55
  nature, but but I'm really excited about that.
• 1:07:59
  I suspect it will involve writing more because I really do
• 1:08:02
  enjoy the process of writing. Again, to the crowded mind idea.
• 1:08:06
  I find when I'm sitting down writing, my mind quiets quite a
• 1:08:10
  bit. And I think that's part of why I
• 1:08:11
  love the process of writing a book so much is that it it does
• 1:08:15
  sort of allow me to focus in a way that a lot of other things
• 1:08:17
  don't. And so it's sort of a long
• 1:08:21
  rambling answer to to basically say, I don't, I don't know, but
• 1:08:24
  it'll be it. I hope it'll be something
• 1:08:26
  interesting. Hoping to get some clarity in
• 1:08:28
  2026 as things maybe slow down for you.
• 1:08:30
  You get a little headspace to think about.
• 1:08:32
  That yeah. And give myself the grace of
• 1:08:33
  time, right? I, I felt, I, I felt a little
• 1:08:35
  pressure because people immediately after we announced
• 1:08:38
  in 23 that we're going to do another fun, everyone called me
• 1:08:41
  and said, hey, what are you doing next?
• 1:08:42
  And I was feeling some pressure around that in 23 and 24 to
• 1:08:45
  define what it was. And I just, I was busy enough
• 1:08:48
  with the book and other things. I was like, look, I'm just not
• 1:08:50
  going to do that. And, and you know, I really had
• 1:08:52
  this epiphany over the summer in particular this year, so 2025
• 1:08:56
  that I definitely want to do more and something that has some
• 1:09:00
  structure to it. So we'll see what happens.
• 1:09:03
  Seth, I've just got one more question for you today.
• 1:09:05
  But before I ask it, I want to do 3 quick things.
• 1:09:07
  First of all, tell people the best way to find you.
• 1:09:09
  Get in touch with you, connect with you if you want that.
• 1:09:12
  Yeah, two ways to get in touch with me.
• 1:09:14
  I have a blog I've been writing for the book, so not as much on
• 1:09:17
  the blog, but it's Seth Levine, levine.com.
• 1:09:21
  You can also find in my address is my e-mail address is all over
• 1:09:24
  that. You can also find me at Foundry
• 1:09:27
  dot VC. That's our our corporate
• 1:09:28
  website. Again, my e-mail address is all
• 1:09:31
  over that. So I, I would encourage people
• 1:09:32
  to reach out. I would, I would ask, don't
• 1:09:35
  reach out on LinkedIn. I, I do sometimes scan my
• 1:09:38
  LinkedIn in mail, but it, it, it's not a reliable rate way to
• 1:09:41
  reach me. So that that's really the best
• 1:09:43
  way is to go find my actual e-mail address and send me a
• 1:09:45
  note. Great.
• 1:09:46
  We'll include that in the show Nuts for folks.
• 1:09:48
  Also, as a reminder to people, if you want to get more
• 1:09:51
  employees access to benefits that aren't going to hurt them
• 1:09:54
  financially and carries a financial upside for the
• 1:09:56
  company, reach out to us at AD back benefits.com.
• 1:10:00
  And finally, if you'll take just a quick moment, leave us a
• 1:10:03
  comment or review on your favorite podcast app.
• 1:10:06
  They'll hold a special place in my heart forever.
• 1:10:07
  Thank you. So last question for you, Seth,
• 1:10:10
  a year from now, you and I reconnect and you are
• 1:10:13
  celebrating something big. What's that big thing one year
• 1:10:16
  from today? Well, I have two seniors in
• 1:10:19
  college right now, so I, I hope it'll involve them being in a
• 1:10:23
  really like they were launching into the world, into life.
• 1:10:26
  I, I actually, I hope it'll be something really positive for
• 1:10:30
  them. And, and, and you know, I've
• 1:10:32
  been, I think a lot about my wife's work right now.
• 1:10:34
  She's, she's a real estate developer.
• 1:10:37
  She's redeveloped a bunch of buildings in our downtown
• 1:10:39
  quarter, which again is the, the sort of, the sort of the, the
• 1:10:44
  town next to Boulder, it's called Longmont.
• 1:10:46
  And she's really kind of helped transform the downtown of, of
• 1:10:51
  our city. And so I, you know, I think also
• 1:10:53
  a lot about sort of her and her success.
• 1:10:55
  So I, it, it may not be the answer you were looking for, but
• 1:10:58
  I really, I'm thinking about, about them.
• 1:10:59
  I have a son as well, who's sort of at the end of high school
• 1:11:02
  here. So I, I mean, I hope, I hope
• 1:11:04
  everyone's in a really interesting place and, and I
• 1:11:06
  think that's what I would most like to celebrate.
• 1:11:08
  I love that your one year goals are for everybody in your
• 1:11:12
  family. Fantastic.
• 1:11:14
  Very selfless. Seth Levine, I want to be the
• 1:11:17
  first to thank you for sharing both your time and your story
• 1:11:20
  with us today. I really appreciate it.
• 1:11:22
  Anthony, this is a really wonderful conversation.
• 1:11:23
  I appreciate you. Folks, that's a wrap on another
• 1:11:27
  episode of the Inspired Stories podcast.
• 1:11:29
  Thanks for learning with us today.