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Josh. Kopelman is a partner and co-founder at first round Capital. He's been an active entrepreneur and investor in the internet industry since its commercialization Co founded his first company info not
Next while still an undergrad at Penn and later co-founded half.com which became one of the largest sellers of used books movies and music in the world and eventually acquired by eBay in July of 2000 Josh co-founded first round capital in 2004 to reinvent seed stage investing and that's exactly what he's done over the last 15 years.
Josh thank you so much for doing this. I really appreciate it think I just recently discovered that you are listener that made me feel great. And and so now really excited to have you as a guest. I think a good place to start would just be tell us a little bit about your background where you grew up and what led you to entrepreneurship.
Sure. So thanks for having me on I grew up in a suburb of New York on Long Island. I had a pretty privileged background. My father was a professor at City University of New York. My mother was a residential real estate real estate agent and my maternal grandfather. My mom's dad was an entrepreneur he put himself through college on the GI bill, you know served in World War II came.
Back got an engineering degree and started some semiconductor companies and sort of he was a mentor and role model for me in so many ways. He you know all through high school. I interned carrying his bag, but even before that like I just always was entrepreneurial whether it was you know, I got one of the first those clunky VHS camcorders and I instantly was like bit set up a videotaping business right videotape birthday parties weddings.
Bar mitzvahs when I was eight, I built my own little Lucy's peanut stand for to sell, you know juice at the juice and soda the tennis courts that at the park near my house. So I just was always trying to find Opportunities to create value. What brought you to Pennsylvania College. Yeah. So I went to I went to Penn toward an undergrad and it was an entrepreneurial management major and never left. So even even going into
Ecology. Were you were sure that you wanted to start the I was pretty sure it was like it was a different time right? I started college in 1989 the web browser wasn't invented. I left College in 1993 right after NCSA Mosaic and Netscape were out. So it was if I couldn't have been more Lucky in so many ways both in terms of sort of who my parents were in the privilege that came with that as well as sort of the time that I got into college right sort of I was one of the first
Undergrads to have an email address and and sort of that just position me really in a really I think fortunate spot. There's all this talk now about how you know college or even grad school is probably not the best place to prepare someone for entrepreneurship. Did you feel like even in did you feel like you learned things at pan or in college that prepared you in a better way? Yes, I'd say that entrepreneurship curriculum in 1990 is very different than the
The on social entrepreneurship curriculum in 2020, but I was fortunate in that I co-founded my first company in Fanatics while I was after my sophomore year. And so what ended up happening is during my Junior and senior years. I had the benefit of sort of learning stuff in the classroom and immediately applying it in a start-up. And in fact, I took numerous independent study classes where I was fortunate enough to have professors who were I would get Class Credit instead of
In a hypothetical marketing research project in the marketing department. I was able to do it conjoint analysis based, you know research report for my startup. So I had the benefit of sort of combining both the resources of word and with the Hands-On approach. I was thinking of starting my company. That's great. Did you start it with other folks? Could you tell us a little bit about empanadas? Sure. I had a summer internship after my sophomore year. It was at a company called. Tella base you remember keep in mind. There was no internet at
This time. Yeah, so like the way companies got information was they would sort of dial into the LexisNexis service or dial into the Dow Jones service and and sort of tell a base was a an information broker that sort of played in that space. And while I was there my boss was a man named Marvin Weinberger and Marvin was the co-founder of tell a base. We had this idea for a service called Homework Helper, which is wouldn't it be neat if these resources that are available for businesses could also be
Available for students. So we ended up leaving in Fanatics together. And Marvin was the CEO and I was sort of the number two, so we have to leave until abase together and started it Fanatics. And and he obviously I imagine he was older he was not at Penn he yeah, that's right. He told her he had kids, you know, then the beginning raising money for a start-up back in 1991. Especially seed stage that there wasn't the robust ecosystem that there is today.
I mean Marvin, you know, I couldn't mortgage my dorm room but Marvin mortgaged his house, is that right? So he he funded it as well in the early days. Yeah. Yeah. How did it evolve you built it the first couple years in college and then post-college stayed stayed with and kept building it, correct? Yeah, I graduated in 93 and in Fanatics will public in 96. So but again right time right place, you know, we originally our business model we had deals with Prodigy which was
The first online style of services and CompuServe and America online and then as the web browser and internet access grew and dominated we quickly were able to capitalize on that ultimately rather than a consumer facing service where consumers would pay a monthly subscription price the real value for it for nautic seemed to come from selling to school libraries. So School libraries had recently sort had been collecting DVDs of CD-ROMs of information and this just allowed them to get
More Dynamic updated information. But but candidly, you know, the search engines the fact that like okay the fact that we had gone out and licensed a couple thousand books and a couple hundred magazines and newspapers and had them real time because none of them had websites, right? You know that that model kind of was blown up by the fact that all of them created websites. Yeah. Yeah. So did you and did you run it as a public company? So I wasn't the CEO I was never CEO, but but
You know, I was terrified for many years as a public company for night, you know 1996 and I left in 90 99. Could you just I'm just so curious like you were very 2526 senior executive at a public company. What was going through your head? What did that feel like and what were some of the maybe Lessons Learned so it was a pretty surreal experience, but I'd say look going public in the early 90s was very different.
Aunt than today right going public in the early 90s was like a bee or a serum today, right? Like, you know, we are company raised 40 million dollars in the IPO, right, you know and had less than 5 million a trailing 12 months Revenue, right? So this is all before sarbanes-oxley and the market had changed. So I would argue that it's an experience that isn't match today. You know, we went public in the company struggled. I learned a lot from those struggles. I remember you used to get art. The company name was in Fanatics and used to get your
Quotes from the newspaper and my grandmother would always look at the Wall Street Journal and the anodic stock price would be down and right above us was infoseek, which was crushing it. That was one of the first search engines somebody's grandmother because I don't know what you're doing wrong, but those infoseek guys seem to have it. What were the what were the kind of the key one or two lessons? You think you learned that that you brought with you to half your next company, I'd say the first thing I learned was the importance of flexibility. We build our business model. We'd licensed content, right?
So we have gone on and license the Los Angeles Times and New York Newsday and all of them, you know, encyclopedias and all of this stuff for students, but we licensed it with the presumption of a very specific business model like that. We would sell it at this price or and that just didn't give us the flexibility that we needed as the world evolved. So, I think I think that what we learned is you really need to sort of build flexibility and a lack of dependencies The Gatekeepers and a lack of meeting to get permission into all of you can talk into the way you approach things.
How about from a management perspective? I'm not sure. I'm a good manager. I don't think I learned a lot. Yeah, you know, I thought by being moving to VC. I'd be like running away from my weakness, which is like about a great manager. Let I'd end up having to sort of build a fervid realize. Oh crap. I gotta manage. Right right. So then you went and built half. I'm curious what the just the kind of Original Seed of an idea.
Yeah, there was and how that came to be. Yeah, so I was a big user of eBay and I was an early user of Amazon. And what was amazing to me was the power of both the models right Amazon was building warehouses and eBay was leveraging stuff in people's houses. But the auction model really makes sense if something is scarce or hard to find right? So that's why you go to Sotheby's or Christie's. That's why you bid on something but like no one walks into board.
As in starts bidding on the book with the person next to them. They just bared its you know for commodity items option is the wrong format. So we kind of said wow like it seems crate yet Amazon had the right buying format for books, which was you could go on you could see the cover you could read the reviews for audio. You can listen to a 30 second sample. So eBay didn't have any of that yet. They people are trying to sell books music and movies. Like they're used books on eBay and Amazon did in the lab have Marketplace. All right. So so we said, you know, it really makes sense.
To allow not option fixed-price person-to-person peer-to-peer Commerce of these commodity items books music movies video games cell phones. And and so that was the basic idea for half.com. Originally we were going to actually call it we own the domain name Eva's on because it was the best of eBay in the best of Amazon, but our lawyers told us that there's very few, you know, even though he made an Amazon a ruthless competitors that they really hate each other. The one thing they both agree on is suing us.
Who did you start that company with so I was the CEO my co-founder. There was Sonny Belichick Polly Rao who was an early technical employee at my prior company in phenomics. And so he was the CTO and I was the CEO and so tell us just a little bit about that kind of experience. I know you ended up selling it to eBay. So I'm curious. It was a crazy. It was like again, yeah luck, you know starting a company.
In 99 in this space. We launched in January of 2000 and how much money did you need to start the company? I assumed it was quite a bit more than today. No. Yeah, we had well, we had raised five million to just get to launch and right with him and in February a month after lunch. We raised close to 15 million. Okay, you know because keep in mind at that time like the only way to create exposure for your.com company off the the amount of money you're spending on TV.
I was crazy or pets.com had their sock puppet right heating up the air waves, you know, so we launched and very quickly got attention. We did some stunts to drive awareness and within 60 days of launch got a call from eBay and ended up selling to eBay about six months later. I was with eBay still private or they'd already gone public eBay had gone public. Okay, and I assumed they were basically acquiring like specifically your categories. They were acquiring
In the categories, but also just sort of the under they hadn't really thought about fixed price Commerce. So for example, right after they acquired us, you know, we help them drive by it now, which is you know, a pretty important feature on eBay. It's their fixed price feature and the auction category and now that drives over fifty percent of their total. Gmv. So, yes, you know, I ended up running their books music and movies category, but the learnings both in terms of buy it now, but also,
So in terms of building a payment mechanism like so we had our own, you know, when you bought something on half.com you gave us a credit card just like you would buy it on on Amazon because we launched before PayPal and so I think we had the experience of integrated payments which helped them both with their in-house solution built point, but also ultimately push them to by PayPal we helped with buy it now and then we helped drive volume in there and the books music and movies chemicals. Do you ever think about not selling it? So yes, just put
Yourself? No and keep in mind that on you know that we got a phone call from them in March of 2000. If you remember what happened in March of 2000 that was the top of the.com bubble. So while we were talking to them the market was crashing. So while look the business ultimately went on to generate hundreds of millions of dollars of GMB annually and was highly profitable when I left that was a guaranteed and access to the capital markets would have been
Meaningfully constraint. So just given that we had gone out and raised money and had an opportunity to deliver. I think a 10 or 11 x to our investors within five. I think they invested in February and we sold in June July so, you know in less than yeah, their biggest problems was that it was a short term gains right take a problem to have. When did you start Angel Investing? And how did you what kind of drove the interests and how to do begin learning about
It was it after half. I think it was. Yeah, it was it was while I was at half.com. So it was like it was like around 2000 2001 is when I started making my early investment. So the market had turned right so the.com bust had started and I assume you went out to California. Oh, I was going out to California every other week. Okay, I'd half.com so I you know, that's a Cadence that that I've been doing for a while. And when I look at my friends and the peer group in the industry a large number there more
Our West coast-based but you never move there. No, I did it and I did it. Yeah. So for Angel Investing perspective it started off I think as most people do investing in people. I knew start, you know, my friends or ideas that I was just excited by and it was a form of learning for me, especially when I you know working at eBay at that point in time. This was an opportunity for me to sort of stay close to Founders. I knew friends I knew in the startup scene, so whether it was
Twice who was starting ironport which ultimately got acquired by Cisco or Joshua schachter who starting delicious or Reid Hoffman who was starting LinkedIn. They were all sort of people I knew and contemporaries and sort of was an ability to invest alongside people. I knew in the beginning was that our financial like with it financially driven or really just a what was there a component of the financial piece first just learning and investing in friends or I guess at one point.
Did you decide or think like this would be a good way to actually like Drive Financial returns Beyond The Learning If Ever I wasn't making donations, right? So I was indeed investing Capital but I also recognize that it's extremely risky. Right? So like I remember I kept my you know, I keep all my investments in quick in it and for me the way that I was able to live with the risk of writing a check is I would wire, you know, I'd write the check 25,000 50,000 whatever.
It might be to the company I entered in quick in and then on the Investments category I Dad. Okay LinkedIn and I bring the value to 0 and I carried it at zero on my quote in my head and on my quick get in my personal balance sheet. So of course, I knew I wasn't just like doing it to light money on fire. But I also needed to sort of just mentally understand the risk that I was taking. I think what ended up happening is, I sort of realized a few things during that time. I also I wasn't the CEO.
As a founding chairman of another company that got started turn tide which very quickly got acquired by Symantec and and sort of what I had seen during the career in terms of either founding or co-founding three companies are investing in you know, in a couple dozen companies before starting first round as I saw just so many trends that were playing out in the industry, right my first company it took two and a half years to raise five million dollars. You get the first product chip second company half.com we spent about two to two and a half million.
Hours of cash to get to first product ship third company turned time is about $500,000. So in my own operating career and in about the span of a decade a little over a decade there was an order of magnitude drop in terms of the cash needed to get to product Market fit and during that same time Venture funds tripled in size. So the average initial check went up from 4 Series a or average series a round one up massively so that you know, where as a series a check in 91 was one point.
Five million dollars in 2005. It was about 5 million dollars sure. And so here you see companies getting 10x more Capital efficient yet Venture funds are tripling and Venture fund checks or tripling that was like a 30X Gap in the market and they're just sit didn't seem to be anyone who was playing at the quote institutional seed. Right? Like if the people that were writing the 250 to 500 thousand dollar checks to help a company get to Market. So who were the other Angels were on that?
At time like I assumed it was, you know, folks like you and Ron Conway I assumed it was a pretty small group. Right and you were probably all investing in the same same companies. Yeah. I mean like Ron Conway had done it earlier Ron Conway had done it during the.com. Boom. He had kind of shut down SV Angel for a while and he was rebooting it back up in 2004 when we started first round around like 2005-2006 like the art my earliest sort of peers I would say where
Maples Steve Anderson, Jeff claw VA. I didn't sanket the those folks were all creating and I think they all kind of went on a very similar Journey. At least. I know I didn't and Jeff and Mike did which is started investing personal capital and then raising some small institutional Capital. Yeah. What led to the ultimate decision to start the first round and how did you go about?
Out that that was a maybe 2006 first-round started 2004 2004. Okay. Yeah. I was Angel Investing For The from 2000 to 2004 and then first started the end of before I think what happened is I just saw, you know, the opportunity we talked about that Venture funds were moving later and larger they were ignoring this asset class and I believe that you can make money as a seed stage investor at that point in time. You're making your money to is you're making your money by the pick right by picking a good founder and a good idea, but you're
So making your money by structural Arbitrage, which is that Venture firms were ignoring this stage. So you didn't have competition you are looking at a space where others were not obviously that's changed now that yeah, if anything the Arbitrage works against you and today you have to work even harder to make your money on. Yeah. Yeah. How did you go about raising that first fondant, you know, you'd raise capital for companies before part of my learnings over the last number of years.
Starting notation has been that raising for funds is in many ways very different some ways may be similar. So I'm curious how you started that first Bond. Yeah. So originally I wasn't sure I wanted to make I wasn't sure that this was my forever job, right? I've been I've been a Founder. I founded or co-founded three companies and the seem like an interesting opportunity, but I wasn't sure this is my full-time job. So in fact, I raised money say, you know with my slide deck saying this is not my full-time job and
So one of the things that we did is we raised a series of had a co-founder at first round. His name is Howard Morgan and we raised a series of vintage funds. So what we basically said is the normal fun does a three for your investment window and is active for 10 years. We're just going to raise a fund that will deploy in 2005 will raise a fund for 2006 and we'll Reserve half the fun for follow-on. And so to some degree I felt like with each vintage fund. I was making a one-year commitment because we were funding
A basket of companies during the year and afterwards all I would have to do is follow on in those companies that wasn't necessarily that that wouldn't be a 10-year type tailed commitment and you raise Capital primarily from kind of your network of people non-institutional. Imagine High net. Yeah, we did that for three years. So we raised our 2005 Honda 2004 and that was all family offices friends high-net-worth. I was the largest individual limited partner in that fun. Did they get a no 6 did it again? And no.
When we had our First Institutional Investor join us Chris Dubose, he was at Tiff at the time. Yep, you know, what's our first sort of legit Institutional Investor and then in 2007, we went out to raise our First Institutional fun. We've had Chris on the show and he's always a great guest. I think we've ever had them twice now. Could you tell me how that came to be because I imagine imagine
And he expected there to be some changes as you kind of went from managing your own capital or some friends and family every year to what is may be expected in like a more institutional environment. Yeah, I think you know, we got introduced I got introduced to Chris by a mutual friend and I remember our breakfast we had breakfast at the Marriott hotel and Conshohocken Pennsylvania, and we were finishing each other's sentences talking about the structural Gap.
The industry talking about how Venture funds were moving later and they were just abandoning the playing field at the early stage and there wasn't a sufficient enough Angel ecosystem to fund these companies and sort of the rise of the micro VCS was the bet that both of us were making the rise of early stage investing. It just became one of those things that we were in violent agreement and and so it I think it you know,
We were a non-traditional investment for him. But just in that we didn't look like any of the other Venture funds that he or Tiff it back but I think we both had a shared perspective, right? My understanding is that the first round platform and it would be great to just get your quick overview on exactly how you think about that what that is, but then my understanding that it was basically built into the firm from the very beginning and so I'm curious when you kind of
Conceived of that and how you thought about that as part of the firm then and maybe now so I'd say it kind of grew organically. So okay, it started off saying that you know, I was an operator and I realized that some of the best feedback I got wasn't from my investors but was from fellow Founders. So one of the first things we did is we set up a Yahoo groups for CEOs like it was just a it was just a Yahoo group mailing list and it
it quickly became pretty active and I remember I think that like where this really tipped for me. There are two things that tipped. The first was TechCrunch had disrupt which was their early conference. It's now called TechCrunch 50 or whatever but the TechCrunch conference, but it was disruptive first year of disrupt. We had funded accompaniment. And Aaron patzer was the CEO and they want on stage. It was in October or November and they had a goal of trying to get 20. They were launching it disrupt and they wanted to get 25,000 signups.
The end of the year, so in the fourth quarter, they launched on disrupt they ended up winning the best of show and I think they had 22,000 signups within 12 hours and their site crashed their site crashed. So Aaron called my partner Rob Hayes, who is the point partner on mint and said, hey, do you know how to scale my SQL and runs like, you know, and I think it's like a Friday night and then it you know, Rob called me because you know, I like and so Rob and I were dialing our networks to say do we know anyone at the same time?
Aaron posted in our CEO group help like, you know our sites crashing and you know, ultimately he ended up getting connected, you know, multiple people connected him to experts someone who had done some early work. I think at Facebook back when they had my SQL another person connected him to Martinique has and it turns out he just needed to like flush some cash in the site would be back up. And so the next sort of showed that like all value should not be delivered by the partners, you know, you could get massive amount of value if you could unlock this.
Community. So that was just like a thread that helped us sort of pull to the point where you know, it's really core to what we do. I mean Venture by itself. We like to fund Network effect driven businesses right companies that are scalable with network effects that are that are software not services. But if you look at the types of firms that most Venture Venture capitalists have built they are anti Network effect, right you sort of, you know to the typical model is if I'm a VC and I point on five companies I
And I could help each company one day a week. If you add five more nodes to the network. If now point 10, I can help them every other one day every other week, right? So the value decreases with everyone you had yet a few if you tried to approach Venture as a network effect based business and what that enables you to do is with each company you add you're actually adding resource to the network, right? So when I read half.com when I'm when I talk to an e-commerce company today about customer acquisition, they're talking about social mobile or paid search often as their top three sources of customer.
Position the only thing all three of these have in common is that none of them existed when I read half.com there was no social there was no bubble. There was no paid search. So, you know my ability to help a Founder today often is driven by what I've heard from other Founders or seen for other companies do so, why should I be in the loop, you know, if you're building a mobile app, and you want to figure out how do I get featured in the App Store as the Apple app of the day? Maybe you could call me and maybe I know the person at Apple, but wouldn't you want to speak to the mobile marketing?
Age or Square Uber hotel tonight who would already done that themselves and isn't that a far more effective way to unlock the knowledge. So it's grown from Yahoo group of CEOs to an online Network where we have, you know, full-time software Engineers working for us. And our goal is, you know, we connect to the slacks of all of our companies and thousands of employees at first round are connected on this first round Network we feel yeah. It's been a it's been amazing to watch what were some of the
The learnings or changes as you went from managing you and your kind of friends Capital to more institutional Capital like I imagine there were some new learnings around portfolio construction and thinking about you know, multi-year funds rather than single year funds. I'm curious one. If you now view yourself as like a institutional VC rather than Angel and you
No, maybe what were some of the big learnings along the way? Yeah, so I mean, I think that you know, again, we grew pretty organically I never said I want to be a money manager and what's the best asset class sort of this Grew From A. Hey, this is I think the first 18 to 24 months of a startups life for a magical time so much gets baked the product the hunt for Market fit the culture the team pricing distribution go-to-market all of that so selfishly. I think we built a firm that just sort of allowed us to
You know, yeah in the sandbox. We wanted to play it in terms of institutionalizing. Yes. We have 30 people we have three offices. We brought on lots of other partners and you know, we have a mature and stable institutional group of limited partners. And so, you know, do we spend time doing models as to what works and what doesn't work sure but I think it's really important to also understand that you know, a model is a guideline. We're not afraid to break our model or not afraid to invest in new areas.
We're not afraid to do things differently than we had done them before and sort of experimentation and reinvention. We've tried to sort of build that into the cultural DNA of the firm. So as the market has evolved a lot more competitive today, maybe when you started there was one seat firm and now there's many hundreds. Maybe there was one VC platform now, there's maybe dozens or more. How do you kind of think about competing in today's environment?
Fireman as it's gotten much more competitive and what parts of the firm, you know, have you may be evolved or what parts of the firm Are You may be thinking about evolving in the future? Yeah. I think it's obviously a lot harder. I mean, you know, I think holistically if you previously if you'd wanted to index seed investment, you know, I would have bought a in general sort of just like the asset class as an asset class bet I would have bought a call from 2005.
Five to 2015 and as an asset class bet today from 2015 on I'd probably buy a put just in terms of the number of players the valuation uptick the competitive nature. So I think the only reason I'm still here is that I'm arrogant enough to believe that I'd outperformed the market. Maybe that's true. Maybe that's not you know, I think that there are few things that come to mind the first is that the more players come in the the more
Monetized Capital gets ironically the more important brand is brand that has to stand for something right. So to some degree the incumbency benefit of having been privileged to be able to work with so many amazing Founders just sort of really helps and especially if you're playing the network effect base game the community game the strength of a community is really a draw. I think that because we've been doing this long enough. We've also been able to build a differentiated product whether that's through the community.
At work or services that we offer whether it's our pitch assist service or whether the way that we choose to invest right sort of because we're a large fund and we've been doing this for a while. We are able to invest I believe we spend more on platform community service than almost any other seed stage fund makes a total fees and that's just because we have the advantages. So we've chosen to invest heavily our fees into building a platform and building a team.
That we believe can help our companies win that most smaller funds can't afford to deploy. Yeah. The other thing we've been able to do is think through sort of what's important to Founders. Okay. It's important to Founders that they have a venture firm that follows on if their seatbelt their seat burn follows up. So, you know, we came out with a guarantee if we lead your seed round. We will take a hundred percent of our parata and your next outside LED route, you know, and we think that's a differentiated product right if you have a choice of a venture fund
And who's willing to now commit to invest price unknown lead unknown, you know that they believe in you enough that they'll you know blind commit the second check. We think that's differentiated. How have you kind of grown the partnership over time, you know early on we added Chris fralick. He Chris was my first executive hired half.com and then shortly very quickly afterwards Rob Haze. That was the core partnership for several years, you know over and over the years we've been added in Barns as an investing partner.
Bill trenchard who had hired his web development company when he was in college when he was at Cornell. Wow, and so I don't bill for most of his life and then most recently Haley and Todd joined us as Venture Partners. We've we've kind of had taken the approach that our preference is to bring in Partners through a venture partner role which truly is a partner world. They're investing their writing checks. They're taking board seats. It's just kind of a venture but it's a partner role with a two-year sort of mutual audition, right?
The goal would be hey, you know Haley you ran out. You're a founder of Birchbox you like operating maybe you'll like these see maybe you won't U shouldn't have to make a 10 plus your commitment out and we shouldn't die there and it was an opportunity for us to sort of mutually sort of see is this a fit but we don't differentiate like our Venture partners are the partner meetings. They're writing checks their leading yells. So, you know Todd joined us in January has already led to investment. I think Chris recently retired or is thinking about
New things from first round and I think the same is true for Rob potentially is that right? Neither is retired. They've shifted from investing partner to board partner. So what they're doing is they're actively managing their existing portfolio of dozens of companies. Yeah, and just not taking point on new Investments. So, you know if there are new opportunities that come their way, you know, perhaps one of our newer Partners might take Point got it. I'm curious what you think is in store for you in the years to come having done.
First ground now for let me do the math 17 years. All right, 15 16 16 years. Do you think of this as the forever job? I mean you mentioned those words. Yes. This is it is. Okay. I've built a firm and I've been fortunate to work with people, you know to attract teammates and partners who I just have genuine respect and affection for it and sort of had the ability to sort of create my own job. And I love what I do, you know, and I'm able to scratch the operator H because I still do first round as a start-up we
You to experiment and event whether it's trying to create first round review and you know, all of a sudden now, we're a publisher or other things, you know, we're playing around with different models all the time, you know, we you know, whether it's our dorm room fund or our Angel track program to help people become better Angel Investors. We feel like we have the ability to sort of invent as well as execute and we get we're privileged. We just get to work with so many amazing Founders any advice for younger VC's earlier in their career in journalism.
Me, I'm curious what maybe the advice you give for new partners a person? Yeah, you know, I think that it's important to recognize how the role that luck plays and it's also the important to recognize the number of at-bats. You need you need in this business, right? I learned so much from the 40 Angel Investments. I made out of my personal investing that drove a lot of the that saved a lot of LP money one time. I started first round. So, you know, I think it's important to sort of think through like
If you're going to become a VC think through the Cadence that you get to operate at the number of Investments, you make the ability to get learning from those and it's important to recognize there's a difference between like a model and a rule and while it's important to build Frameworks and models and lenses for thinking of things often times. The best outliers come when you're willing to break this I assume you'll be in Pennsylvania forever. That's also a forever that's also up for every decision. You know. I've an apartment in San Francisco, and I'm
Out there what I okay back when the world was open. I was out there, you know once a month and I look forward to resuming that suit. Thank you so much Josh. I really appreciate it. And I think folks that listen to Origins ball two. Thanks for having me. Take care.
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