Latest / Unstuck Pod / Make AI Your Advantage (Katie Weiss and Jamie Schneiderman)
Transcript
- Jamie Schneiderman: Hi everyone, welcome to the Unstuck Pod. really excited today to have Katie Weiss here from FF Venture Capital. so Katie, welcome. Thanks for coming. Katie Weiss: Thank you for having me. Jamie Schneiderman: I would love for you to share with everybody your background. you have a wide range of of experience before you got here or the second time you got here. so I'd love for you to share more of your background, what you've done, and what where you're focused right now. Katie Weiss: Of course. So just two ways to start it. I'll tell you that before before I really got started in the industry, I failed at being a founder. I started a company right out of college. The company was called Cuego. I started with two colleagues at the time. within eight months we we failed. And it was a really great lesson. A lot of the things I take I've taken into my early career were from all the failures that I had during the early career. Basic mistakes that someone out of college typically would make, but isn't isn't what's necessary to be a successful founder. So I I know a lot of people say if you can't te if you can't do you teach. I learned very early on my career that I probably wasn't made to be a founder. Maybe I'll be proven wrong. So I decided to venture. And I started in 2010 at FF Venture Capital. Was there for seven years. Started at the bottom of the totem pole. Left, not at the bottom of the totem pole, but not at the top. during my time there, I started off by helping the partners with a lot of operational support and left leading due diligence and actually being one of the first people to ever focus on post investment support, which is now called platform. and we can Get into that later if you want to talk about it. But I spent a couple years after leaving FF at other venture funds like RGA Ventures, spent a couple of years in venture capital business development roles at Salesforce, TriNet, and Single Sprout. And then in a full circle moment, about two years ago, I came back to FFVC. But today in a very different role, partially because the world has changed with everything going on with AI, and partially because I had a lot of knowledge I could bring back to the firm. So today I'm a principal at the firm and I spend a lot of my time helping our companies be as operationally efficient as they can, as well as sourcing deals and doing all the other things that we do in venture. Jamie Schneiderman: Awesome. No, I love it. okay, so I I do I want to talk more about how what does that mean? So like a l like let's let's be clear. I I I've met with many, many, many VCs who talk about helping. There's a lot of the word help comes out a lot. The practical part of help doesn't show up nearly as much. and and at least that's been my experience. I and I, you know, and I the some of the stuff I've seen. So I but I I want I'm not suggesting that's the case with you. I want to talk about What you're doing and what platform looks like. And you are obviously, like you said, early to the party in terms of driving what that looks like. so what do you see where do you see some of the challenges that companies are having? And then how do you help? Katie Weiss: Yeah, so we always joke around about this at FF, but it's true. Before you get a term sheet from FF, we actually ask you to diligence diligence us by calling any one of the founders we've ever invested in. We will give you a full list, we don't care who you call, but we ask you to reference us before we give you a term sheet because we really do help. And every single one of our founders, whether they've been successful, greatly successful or not, so successful, they will tell you that FF really has been in their corner since day one. Well, w We've always tried to be ahead of the curve at FF, which is one of the reasons why we first started looking at post investment support. So back in the early 2010 BCs invested money, we sat on boards and maybe we made a few introductions, but anything beyond that was kind of out of scope for a typical venture fund. Our team sat down and we said, Hey, we have some extra time on our hands. A single time didn't have kids, and I said, you know, how can we increase the valuation of our portfolio companies. So we started paying a bit more attention on board meetings and we started to notice patterns emerging So five founders asking the same question with the same type of support. So we started finding ways to create scalable support for these portfolio companies. So whether it was getting the better discounts at certain vendors or you know, making large-scale introductions to portfolio. Or getting six founders in a room together and say, hey, you all are worrying about sales strategy, let and you all have similar models. Let's sit down and figure this out together. So that was the beginning of platform. It was this unified effort at FF and actually about six or seven other funds in New York were exploring the same thing, which is how do we make our companies more competitive so it increases our returns so we all make more money? Because at the end of the day, a venture capital fund is an investor, institutional investor, and we care about making money. But we wanted to do it in the most founder friendly way. And the eight of us ended up getting together for coffee and dinner and breakfast. And we kept having these conversations. And actually VC Platform came out of these, which is an online group, came out of these conversations. Now I'll say platform today is not in my title because I think platform has dramatically changed. What you could do back in 2010 that was innovative is now is now, you know, the basics that every fund can do. So we at FF are always trying to find the next way to support portfolio companies. So when I rejoined the fund, I rejoined with a singular mission, noting I would do all the other venture stuff, but when a thinking about platform, we wanted to help our companies figure out AI. We knew AI had gotten to a place That was sophisticated enough that could really be instrumental to VCs. Not VCs, sorry. Our startups. VCs Jamie Schneiderman: Yeah. Yeah. Katie Weiss: as well. We use it. We actually, I can talk to you later about the AI workflows we built out for the portfolio. But we like to call them AI point solutions instead of agentic workflows, because it's much more fun to say APES. We like a good acronym. Jamie Schneiderman: Ha ha ha Katie Weiss: so we started what we call the APES program for our portfolio companies. And I came in step back into the fund to do this. So essentially what we did is we taught our founders how to reshape companies so they could take the most advantage out of what was happening in the working environment. We saw our companies reduce operational cost anywhere from ten to forty percent in a twelve month period, and honestly employee happiness and s and general just success of these companies skyrocketed. I mean this led to a few quite a few of our companies who really, really engaged with apes to become either profitable or rule of forty companies. which is, you know, our favorite metric in the industry. Yeah. Jamie Schneiderman: Sure. Yeah. Katie Weiss: So I might have got I I might end up going on a tangent. So what else c what else Jamie Schneiderman: No, no, no, no, no. This is this is a okay. So I love what you're doing. I I would like you if you can share more. Like so, so look. So here's lots of people start businesses, they get their business to a certain place, they they work, they're working as hard as they can, they raise money, they right. So this is the thing. And then They run into all sorts of challenges. What I'd like to know are what are the kinds of challenges that you're seeing? Number one. And where are the areas where apes can start to help you know, fixing some of the not everything, because it's not going to do everything, but what can it help with? You talked about cost savings. I get it. But w you know, cost savings and employee satisfaction, if you like, in terms of the kind of work. Obviously, it's taking away some other stuff. So, so I just Help me understand more of what that looks like 'cause everyone talks about AI and everyone's talking about workflows, but it's like I wanna get less I not from you, but I just I wanna get into more of the guts of what is what does that mean day to day. Katie Weiss: So I think I think a great example for this is note takers. If you Jamie Schneiderman: Mm-hmm. Katie Weiss: don't have some form of note taker you're using today, what are you doing? I mean there's AI note takers across the market that all have different benefits. And you can weigh you know, one note taker above the other and one, you know, one integrates better with a CRM and one might, you know, have slightly better AI attached to it, but everyone utilizes a note taker today. Something today, once again, that everyone uses, no one really thought about five years ago. No one technology didn't exist. And technology is moving at such a fast pace that we don't try to teach our companies exactly what tooling to use, like using clay over other tools in the market. Clay obviously is one of my favorite sales tools. but when when to use which LLM. yes, we try to stay educated on it, but what I think is much more important is helping teams understand the culture of using AI. And how to best use these AI programs so they can each be better in their individual roles and as a team, versus how to use these tools so you can spend more time at home. And how to create these benefits so they they kind of they most impact the company itself. So when whatever we sit down with a company, we sit down and say, what are the worst parts of your job? Because everyone has them. There are those redundant, irritating tasks. for me, and I'll I'll admit it, I don't like doing public market comps. We do them every quarter. you know, looking up the stock price of, you know, hundred or so companies so we can do our comps is is something that's very, very feels menial, at least the data gathering portion. So when I was first at FF, Didn't matter, still had to gather them. Today I've been able to build out an agentic workflow who now preloads all of the comps that we've put out for our companies and does it in seconds. That only not only creates efficiencies within the office, but makes my job better. So, how do we help each of our companies with these individual tasks? Now, Jamie, I'll tell you the most important thing is not thinking there's a white label solution that works for everybody, but actually taking a true sort of individual approach to each c to each company or each team to make because without that you don't get the efficiency that's kind of obtainable. Jamie Schneiderman: No, I think it's I I I mean, I think it's I think obviously working with each company and saying how can you use these things to get better is it's great. Do you f is it is that hard from a time perspective? What are the what like wha how difficult is it to kind of find the time to do that work as opposed to, you know, sit in a board meeting, like you said, you know, the way it was, sit in a board meeting, listen to stuff. go yay, nay, kinda you know, I again I'm oversimplifying, but you know where I'm going with that. So Katie Weiss: You are and you aren't. What I can do today capacity wise because of the AI workflows I built up myself Jamie Schneiderman: Yeah. Katie Weiss: is probably that of four or five people back in the day. and it's in part because I found the redundant task within my own role and I've been able to create my own workflows. So one of them might be public market comps. I still read every deck. That doesn't mean I haven't created an agent to read them for me. I still I still read them because I think that's just a responsible thing to do, but we have agentic workflows on the back of data collection from our portfolio companies. We have we use AI in writing our newsletters and our marketing material. there's lots of little things that that get done because of AI that allows me to have the time to sit down individually with my companies. Now at FF, we've always been had a very hands-on approach. John, one of our partners, sits somewhere between 12 to 15 boards at a time. I sit on some boards, Alex is on some boards. So we're very in touch with our founders. We're texting, calling them. That's who's pinging me at you in the background right now. It's one of my founders. But we stay very in touch with our founders. So a lot of the times we've already done the deep dive of what's going on with the companies and where the efficiencies can be created. So when I recame back, when I came back to the firm, the first thing I did was sit down with about a third of the portfolio. I had the conversations with them to try to understand where we can be most impactful. And then I found experts and speakers that could talk to the tooling and the kind of new thought process that was necessary within the portfolio. And I hosted a bunch of webinars and I made a bunch of introductions. And I brought the subject matter experts to the people within my portfolio to teach them the things that I couldn't. And I won't Jamie Schneiderman: Mm-hmm. Katie Weiss: pretend I'm an AI expert by any means. But I learned from all these things, so much so that we've built out two of our own external facing agents. We're about to launch one this weekend called Luna, which will actually ingest candidates' resumes and say, based on your resume, here are the companies within the portfolio you're the best fit for. It seems minor, but instead of just presenting them every job that's out there, we can now. Create a custom response to anyone who's looking for a job at an FF company. Our perk management is done by an agent now. If you're looking for a particular discount or looking to make a vendor decision, we've trained an agent on all of this, which once again takes maybe minutes out of my day. But those few, but when it comes to which CRM to use, I have an opinion. But the AI is trained on a much larger data set than my own personal opinion. Jamie Schneiderman: Got it. Well, and I think if you can balance the data from that you have with l you know, judgment, expert judgment and experience, again, you're using, like you said, a larger amount of data to help guide, even if it narrows it down and then you make the d whatever decision your choice you're making is from there. Anyway, I I think it's a great it's obviously very helpful and you have the benefit of many portfolio companies that can lean into this to move forward and gain from. Where where are the areas? Let me ask a question. So so there's a ton of places you're helping. There's a Katie Weiss: Mm-hmm. Jamie Schneiderman: ton of things that you're doing where you can help, where platform and in particular the AI AI effectiveness or or efficiencies can be built in. Where are areas that are things that you're less able to help and and why and where are some of the things that folks are struggling with, if anything, where You know, you've leaned either externally or other places or you've just let companies try to figure it out themselves. I'm just curious. Katie Weiss: So I think what's interesting is, you know, 10, 15 years ago, the startup was all around the engineering team. Obviously you wanted beater you wanted really good business leadership, but the technical team was the most important part of the team. And we'd spend a lot of time diligencing the technical portion of the team. because we got to know the business side, but the technical is really gonna make or break the company. I think that's actually flipped over the last couple of years. Because of AI and and the speed of innovation and how fast we can all build things, the business side of the the startup market has become incredibly important. And not that I said it might have moved from 6040 to 4060, you know. But I think what I've seen most companies f struggle with is how to create the right sort of marketing and sales. messaging without creating noise. And AI is helps with that but also causes problems. So we do lean on a lot of partners for that. There are some companies that I've helped build out some sales campaigns for and help them directly work on that. But I'll fully admit I can do channel sales. I have I did that at s a few of my previous roles. But individual sales campaigns is somewhere that you know I still think I still think sales are Sales has not has been hurt as much as it's been helped with AI. Jamie Schneiderman: Yep. Katie Weiss: So I think we've all gotten that million spam messages from people who are targeting, not even yourself. Like they'll target someone else who maybe once worked your organization. For example, one of my prior interns, Ethan, gets a lot of spam that Jamie Schneiderman: Okay. Katie Weiss: gets forwarded to me. And like, you know, they they they the the amount and it's just interesting how. how bad AI can be. So much nice. Jamie Schneiderman: So much noise, right? Just a ton of noise. It's yeah. I mean, what I've seen is the amount of companies have harder and harder time breaking through because of the noise that's being created, which requires them to be significantly more focused and clear. To your point about messaging and other things, like you have to be, you have to know exactly what you are and exactly who you're talking to, and exactly how you're gonna do it. Otherwise you end up just another noise another bit of noise and chaos that's in the market that's not helping. Okay. So that's Katie Weiss: And we we all know when we're targeted by bots. Doesn't mean we won't respond, but we all know when it's an AI speaking to us typically and when it's an actual human writing that message. Look out for the spelling mistakes. That's that's if if you have one or two good grammatical issues, like a missing comma, I'm gonna assume it's not an AI. Jamie Schneiderman: that's it. That's interesting, right? Pe regular people screw up, but but Katie Weiss: Humans are humans. Jamie Schneiderman: Okay. So you don't like the people who are grammatically like locked locked up, right? You're just right away they must not be real. I don't I'm not into that. Katie Weiss: Well, I may use AI to edit my emails, to be perfectly fair, to try to have more sophisticated emails. But that being said, I don't go out and use it on sales campaigns and blast people over and over again. particularly when people send me decks. And this is if you send me a deck and you've actually customized the email, you're mu I mean, I read every single deck that comes to me, but if you write something that you've actually written, you will get a response. If I'm suspicious it's an AI, for example, you tell me it's the wrong firm name or wrong person you don't address it to myself, someone else who never worked at the firm, it's less likely I'm gonna respond. I will look at your deck, but less likely I'm gonna respond. Jamie Schneiderman: Okay. Someone's just blasting stuff out as opposed to like putting some thought into it and sending it to you for a reason. So, so like along those lines. So, so I'd love to know. So you've been a founder yourself, you've worked in venture you know, in a wide range of places, and you're working with companies very actively to try to help them. What kind of advice, if any, would you give founders who are running businesses, who are looking to raise money, who are in different places, what are the things that they can do, should do? I some of the things you've shared in terms certainly fundraising, but what other things are you seeing or you believe that would be really helpful for folks as they're thinking going forward? Katie Weiss: So What I tell my founders, and I think this is a good practice for anyone, is put an hour in your calendar week, and it can be more or less, to spend to think around efficiency. If there's nothing you can think of that you can improve that week, go spend that time reading about the industry and learning about what's going on. But make this a priority. We have founders who have spent a lot of time waiting. For the right time for a l large language models and other technology to catch up where it needs to be so they can start using it. I won't say all our companies started using it the moment I joined FF. some of them said, hey, it's not there yet. But they remained very curious. And the consistent sort of effort to create efficiencies within the business have been extraordinary. I now found I know founders who now use AI when doing annual reviews, particularly when it's they want to have a second opinion and they want to figure out how to best improve their employees. Let's say you're a CEO and you're not an engineer and you have to meet with a couple engineers. It's a great tool set. I know companies have used AI to create entire Entire kind of schools to teach their new employees how to be best at their job, databases of everything they need, where they can ask questions to an AI and be able to get the answers instantly versus going to a manager who may or may not know the answer. I know companies that use AI to redline documents and say this is what's different from our typical document, reducing legal hours for their internal legal team. the use cases are kind of endless at this point. The question is how can you get creative? And I think spend putting like specifically having on your calendar that time to say, I'm gonna find a way to either to make people happier on their jobs and or save money by reducing ineffec like work that can now be done by an agent or some sort of AI tooling. Obviously with the cost spend. well managed, you don't want to run into some of the problems you're seeing at large corporates today. I think spending that time is really important. Jamie Schneiderman: And does that and so I that I think that's great advice and a question for you. So are you do you find yourself being explicit in terms of thinking through how companies are leaning into technology and leaning like AI in particular to make their initial business more effective, more efficient, as they're pitching you? Does that stand out for you? Katie Weiss: if you get to diligence with me, and I do run our diligence as well as running our platform efforts right now, Jamie Schneiderman: It was Katie Weiss: I'm gonna dig into your AI workflows. And if you've not found creative ways to solve problems within your organization and you're just using a note taker, well, that's gonna be a red flag for me. Now I'm not saying you have to have the most complex workflows out there, but you've had to give in some thought and how you can run your business most efficiently and effectively. We look for companies that are doing things ten times better or ten times cheaper. And one of the ways to do things ten times cheaper is properly utilizing AI. Jamie Schneiderman: Think that's so smart. fantastic. I love the way you just said that. 10 times better, 10 times cheaper is great. Like I love that. okay, so so how can folks find you, reach you, find you? I wanna make sure that you get it out there the way you want to. Katie Weiss: Yeah. So I am the type of person who actually responds to every person who reach out to me on LinkedIn, every person who reaches out to me on X. on any sort of if you email me, my email's easy to figure out. I do respond as long as it it is not a completely AI generated email. and you guys can have fun trying to trick me on that if you like. But I'm actually quite accessible. I do respond if you find me anyway, except for my personal email address. That's the one place I ignore people. Jamie Schneiderman: No, awesome. I love it. And I think you've given everyone a very clear like instruction guide for how to get you and and talk to you once they get you, because I think you've been and and in and fair, fair, clear an instruction guide. So that's awesome. Katie, thank you so much for the time. I really appreciate it. and this was great, great advice, great, great insight, fantastic. And to everybody who's watching. listening. I hope you got a lot out of that. and until next time, thank you. Katie Weiss: Thanks for having me.