
This is software (AWS) generated transcription and it is not perfect.
I would say, I failed a lot to get to where I am and still failing, thankfully. So I don't know how much time you have to talk about all the failures, but a high level started five startups, a bunch of them failed but some of them were successful, started investing off some of the early successes and then basically parlayed that into a venture fund with some friends from college, and now we'll be flipping over to fund five, which is next year and we've done probably 200 investments through the fund and personally, and the interesting thing about investing and startups are, the majority of them fail, in every fund, we're investing in, say, 35 companies and only five are fund returners, if that, I mean typically 3 to 5 companies in each of those funds out of 35 companies are the ones that are the home runs, the vast majority are zeros or singles and doubles. So I think it's about embracing failure. I think I was very lucky to have failed spectacularly in my very first startup, I had to file for bankruptcy in 2001, in my early twenties, but facing failure in the face in the flesh and recovering from that, picking yourself up, dusting yourself off makes you feel invincible because if that's the worst thing that can happen in business and you've gotten through it, it's only upside from there.
So we lead seed rounds, so a seed round means there's a formed founding team, there's some product prototype. It's usually pre-revenue and certainly pre-product market fit. So our job is to come in at seed, ideally lead those rounds, take a board seat, help the company get through a product-market fit. So doing whatever it takes. Custom Discovery, Bis Dev, recruiting, PR, sales, product, distribution, and get it through product-market fit and then raise the Series A. At Series A, we're handing the baton off to the next cohort of the investor, Excel, Sequoia, Bessemer, whoever it might be, but we're really laser-focused on that stage in terms of what type of categories or industries we invest in, we're generalists but being engineers, myself and my partners, we like technical Moz, so we're attracted to technical problems and at the technical team, and ideally, there's some proprietary tech on the team, that's creating that moat to enable the company to solve that problem, we do have an archetype for founders that we now have the pattern matched and look for all every company is, we judge it and diligence it on its own merit, but the pattern matching so far that has been successful is founders that have done it together before, and so the serial founders and ideally, they failed before so going back to my concept of failure, they've had their hands around each other's necks, but they still want to do it again together, right? And that's really important for us because we remember some of our early failures as an investor were because of founder chemistry. The founders did not get along and I think if you can de-risk that my experience and if they have experienced these peaks and valleys together and they still want to work together, that means the world, right? And so we really look for those serial founding teams, founders that have done it before together.
Yeah I mean, it's all about the team, at this stage. So, I think every deck should start with the team, talk about why is this team uniquely positioned to win? This company versus anybody else in the world, right? What is the founder's market fit for this team, that is so special? That is, by far the most important thing, the next most important thing is let's talk about the product in the market, the market needs to be massive. We say, if you shoot for the stars, you'll probably fail and land on the moon but you've got to be thinking about a big market, this is not a $100 million market, $200 million market, this is billions, dozens of billions, hundreds of billions of total TAM, right, and if you have a product prototype, I'd love to see that instead of a deck. Talk about your team, show me the product.