Читать книгу The Business of Venture Capital - Mahendra Ramsinghani - Страница 40

Foundation Capital, a Silicon Valley venture firm with two decades of investments in companies such as Netflix, Uber, Chegg, and Graphcore, was getting ready to raise its next fund — the ninth fund since it started in the late 1990s. The firm had survived and thrived across major innovation and economic cycles such as the emergence of the World Wide Web and the dot-com bubble, Web 2.0 and the mobile revolution, the rise of Big Data, software's ascension to the cloud, and the birth of blockchain. As the technology waves evolved, the three senior partners at the firm were eager to recruit the next generation of the investment team. Fund IX focused on enterprise software, finance, and consumer and marketplace opportunities. One of the candidates it homed in on was a rising star in cybersecurity investments, Sid Trivedi. For Foundation Capital, cybersecurity had been a lucrative arena. As the firm continued to build on its successes, it needed some fresh blood. With his investment experience of three years, Sid brought a healthy blend of insights, self-confidence, and more importantly, a growing network of over a hundred executives in the cybersecurity universe. During his interview, one of the senior partners at Foundation Capital asked him that dreaded curveball question: “Give me the names of five people you know well in three categories — prospective founders, current founders, and investors. Tell me why you picked them and how you got to know them.”

A quintessential networker, Sid walked up to the whiteboard and put down names in each of the three categories. The senior partner then picked five names from this list of 15 and asked for an introduction. In the meantime, the rest of the team at Foundation Capital engaged with Sid for over 25 hours, conducted over a dozen reference calls (several of them were blind checks), and could see the potential edge Sid brought to the team. Soon after, Sid had an offer from Foundation Capital. “Besides having developed a point-of-view in cybersecurity, I can help our portfolio companies secure their first dozen customers quickly. For any founder, that can be an advantage,” says Sid.

Soon after joining the firm, Sid hosted a dinner with security founders, buyers, and professionals. The guest speaker, a chief technology officer of a publicly traded company with over a hundred-billion-dollar market cap, sat down to have a fireside chat with Sid. For the founders who attended, the value of the investor and the firm was evident — access to a potential customer and seasoned security investors who had invested across multiple cycles and their views on market trends and challenges. Within six months of joining the firm, Sid was able to close on his first investment — a security team had spun out from a multibillion-dollar networking company to develop the next-generation AI-driven security platform. “In our business, feedback cycles are long, as it takes 10 years to realize returns. In the meantime, I have developed the muscle of seeking constant feedback from my partners, founders, and peers in the business. Gotta get better every day to stay ahead in this game.”