a16z Podcast - a16z Podcast: Demystifying Venture Capital

Episode Date: May 2, 2014

What do venture capitalists actually do all day? And what is the path that leads to a career investing in startups? Hummer Winblad’s Ann Winblad, Cowboy Ventures' Aileen Lee, Aspect Ventures' Theresia Gouw, Intel Capital veteran and UPWARD founder Lisa Lambert, and Andreessen Horowitz’s Margit Wennmachers discuss VC trends, the importance of technical chops, and how to build the next generation of entrepreneurs and investors. And finally, in front of an appreciative crowd attending the UPWARD event at a16z, Ann Winblad reveals the secret to truly kicking ass.

Welcome to the A16Z podcast. I'm Michael Copeland. We were lucky enough to have the founders of three venture capital firms down to A16Z recently. Anne Winblad of Hummer Winblad ventures, Aileen Lee of the new firm Cowboy Ventures, and Teresa Gow of another new firm, Aspect Ventures. They were joined by Lisa Lambert from Intel Capital and Andresen Horowitz's own Margaret Wenmockers in a conversation that examined the basics of venture capital. the tech trends that each are keen on today, as well as the path that each of these women took to get where they are in the venture capital world. Market Benmockers moderates the conversation. There's a whole set of topics,

but for those of you want to be in this chair one day, I'd be interesting to hear what your path has been into the VC job. And do you want to start? Sure. First of all, I have an undergraduate degree in mathematics, and a minor in computer science. So I started early investing in software as a track for my career.

I worked for a year as a systems program with the Federal Reserve Bank in Minneapolis and quit my job and started as a software entrepreneur, where actually did, for better or worse, write some of the code. When my company was acquired in Minneapolis, I moved out here to Silicon Valley. And my intention was to continue being an entrepreneur. But John Hummer wanted to start a software firm and stocked me for about a year and a half. He's tall, so that's scary. And he's six, ten.

He's the tallest venture capitalist, I think. I could be the shortest, I'm perhaps. And, you know, what, so I didn't actually think about being a venture capitalist or what skills or capabilities I needed. You know, I'm pretty much a product of the software industry, and I still think of myself as being in the software industry, and I just happen to be a venture capitalists. And would you say that that makes you particularly attractive to entrepreneurs just because you have been in their shoes? How big a factor is that?

You know, I think they're, you know, now I've been in their shoes such a long time ago that they think they're wearing different shoes, but that's not true. All Birkenstocks, they're flip-flops. Yeah. So in the beginning it was really helpful. And it was, and it's also good to be able to, they're, just on that topic, another 30% of our time is what I'll call general psychodrama. And, you know, our jobs, I mean, we, we hand over the money directly to the entrepreneurs and say, have at it. And, you know, we, you know, we don't know how most of these entrepreneurs scale until they either do scale or don't.

One of the big jobs of the board is to hire and fire the CEO. And I'm sure all of us have had to fire CEOs or help them exit gracefully from the building quickly, you know, sometime in our career. So, you know, having been in the shoes of hiring people, hiring a lot of people, and, you know, managing engineers, understanding how hard it is to build companies from scratch from the standpoint of a CEO is very helpful. From my standpoint, I also think if you're doing enterprise software, you really have to be able to lift up the hood. Because, you know, the business descriptions are usually coming from engineers. You know, then there's business models on top of that. And if you don't really understand what these products are intended to be or actually what the technical shifts in the market are,

it's pretty hard to be a core enterprise software investor. All right. Aileen, your path. So I did go to MIT for undergrad, but I was never a kind of working engineer. I did not know that. Yeah. And then I also went to grad school. I always love consumer businesses, so I actually work for the North Face in Edwala when I was

at business school, and then actually I worked for Busy Burt, who's in the audience here, a gap when I graduated from business school. And so I was going up like a consumer path. I thought maybe I would be like a VP of marketing or CMO or a CIO someday. And I always thought venture capital sounded really cool. I was an analyst at Morgan Stanley and like, you know, after your second year of these analysts programs, a lot of people do a third job. And like venture capital sounded amazing.

But the two types of people who were applying for jobs as like analysts in venture capital were like guys who grew up in like Danbury, Connecticut, and they're, you know what I mean? And like they went to Dartmouth or Princeton and they played squash and like their dads were super rich and then or like the gunner guys who went to Wharton and like carried a briefcase to school and like wore bow ties like I just figure I would never fit into I don't still so like not much has changed I didn't even think about it and then when I was at Gap I was kind of helping to build the online business in 99 and I just kind of got lucky and I got this job at Kleiner Perkins

and I thought I would stay for two or three years and then go into an operating role because I didn't know that much about Silicon Valley and I figured to be a good place to learn and I did learn a ton and so I went up staying for a long time and I did take two years to actually go be the founding CEO of one of our portfolio companies so I ran that and raised 20 million dollars and kind of hired the team ship product built revenue bought a couple companies and then went back to Kleiner full-time so I feel like I did my kind of like my stint very difficult stint in the trenches and that's kind of my background

so I also have an engineering undergraduate degree I other than summer internships like at General Motors and a British Petroleum were literally a thousand engineers and two women so that was my knowledge and no one so I'm first-generation Chinese immigrant my father you know dentist all of his brothers doctors my mom was a nurse that's what I was supposed to do I did Chinese women with dentist parents that's really that's the commonality that's the key spec there's a thing about that who did not want to go to medical school Right? So being an engineer was like that was the next acceptable thing. Anyway, I give that only as like, I had no idea what venture capital was or entrepreneurship or anything, right? But working in those companies, I was like, oh, you know, being like the engineer in the CAD behind the CAD machine, that's okay, but not super exciting. The product managers, they seem to have much cooler jobs. They actually at least have input into like, you know, why we're building what we're building. So given that, the eager beaver type A,

first born child that I was. I went back to school. I said, okay, well, I evidently I need to get an MBA in addition to my engineering degree, and so how do I get one of those? So I interviewed for investment banks and consulting firms, because it seemed like that would give you a good chance to get into business school. Everything was about sort of like two steps ahead. And then I went to work at Bain, and that was great experience. And I came out here to Stanford, and what I wanted to do was I wanted to be a product manager back then, I'm giving my age, at Hewlett-Packer. That was like my goal in life after graduating from business school. I was a product manager that summer at Silicon Graphics, which was actually a really great time to be there. It was like the Jurassic Park year.

It was very cool. And so from that, though, I got a little bit more of a taste of like, oh, you could actually like work at like maybe not such a big company. Like maybe, you know, that was once, it was a billion-dollar company by then, but it had been a startup by a bunch of guys who had left places like Sun and Silicon Graphics. Did your parents lose faith in you? Oh, every step of the way. Every step of the way. My parents have never once understood any career decision or job that I've ever had, but now they've finally stopped worrying about

whether, like, I'll be able to support them in their old age. So it's okay now. My parents still call me and they're like, do you need money? Are you okay? Oh, yeah. When I started my firm, my dad was like, I know you've been helping us, but like now that you're at a startup, like, don't worry about it. Sorry, my story's a bit long. So I became a venture capitalist sort of by accident. I was an entrepreneur. So after business school, a couple of people that I had gone to Stanford GSB with had started a company.

It had just raised a seed round from DFJ. I actually knew, Jennifer, we worked at Bain together before business school. Fast forward five years. We just raised our seed round. I joined. I ran, you know, product, marketing, sales, basically everything that requires. talking to people outside of the building. Customer support was fun.

And Tim Draper and Jennifer actually were our lead investors, and that was when I reconnected with her. So she was an observer on our board. And that was really how I even understood really what venture capital was by helping to raise like $15 million of venture capital and going through three rounds of funding. And at the end of that, I wanted to go do another startup again. We'd had three CEOs in 12 months, so I thought it was time for me to leave.

time for me to leave. I was young and not so smart, but I was smart enough to figure out that that probably wasn't a good sign for my startup. And, you know, it was late 98, early 99, and a couple of the other VCs who were on my board, knowing my background, said, you know, I'll introduce you to three of their portfolio companies at various stages to see whether you want to do earlier or later. I'm also going to introduce you to some other VCs who are looking for associates or analysts who, you know, your background seems like it could be interesting. You have experience in the Internet. I kid you not.

That was what they said. Anyway. Turned out to be a big deal. Turned out to be a big deal. Very big deal. Who knew? This crazy internet e-commerce thing. So, and that's how I ended up at Excel, and I joined as an associate and, you know, worked my way up

through the ranks, became a partner, and eventually a managing partner, and then started my own firm. All right. Wow. Great. Okay, so I'm from Toledo, so my story is not nearly as interesting. I grew up in Ohio. I do have a technical degree, so I was a software developer for the first three or four years of my career, worked in IT at a company in my hometown, Owens Corning.

I got my Bachelor of Science at Penn State, and absolutely had no idea what venture capital was, and it wasn't even a thought back where I was from. So I knew I wanted to do something in business, and I knew I didn't want to sit behind a desk in code for the rest of my career, so I didn't want to sit behind a desk in code for the rest my career so I decided that I was going to be a general manager. That was a way for me to get access to what looked like to be the moving and shaking in the company, right? These are guys that ran P&Ls. So I embarked on a ambitious plan to get my company to sponsor me on a business rotation. So I got out of IT and I did sales, I did product marketing, I did strategic planning.

It was kind of a mini GM prep course, if you were, if you will. I did that for about three three or four years and then realized I needed to seal the deal with an MBA. So I went to HBS and got my master's in business. And then I looked out over the horizon and I said, Silicon Valley is where I've got to be. Kind of like the Beverly Hillbillies. I had to be in Silicon Valley. You know, I knew I wanted to be in tech again. And so Intel was a great platform. I had other opportunities with other tech firms that you would know, but opted to take the Intel offer. And, you know, I've been happy with that. I mean, I started as a product marketing engineer and then product marketing manager at Intel. So I was doing technical marketing

with our PCOEMs, and it was the desktop business. So it was the cash cow. So a lot of attention there, a lot of resources. And after doing that for about three years, I thought, wow, Intel's a big company. What else can I do? Because, you know, you're not really putting the MBA together, I mean, to use, right? I'd spend $100,000 on an MBA, and I figured I'd probably should be using it instead of writing technical papers and talking to IT people and PC people. So I went looking and fortunately found what was then called corporate business development is now called Intel Capital and I've been there for 14 years. Those are four different stories, but I think they have a lot in common, right?

A lot of sort of in the trenches experience and then somehow magically you fall into it. I don't know that anybody had a plan to be a VC. No path, I think. Which is interesting. venture capital is a bit of a black box, and I think it's also, it's been part of a strategy of most firms to not really talk that much about what goes on in there. So in the spirit of demystifying it, I'm going to ask, Teresa, I'm going to just pick on you first, what do you think of venture capital? Like, what do you do all day? Like, what is it actually that happens? I know there's,

at some point there's a meeting with an entrepreneur, but like, how do you get there? So my daughter asked me that question too. And my answer to her is like meetings, lots of meetings and phone calls. We want the next level then. So what I would say is there's really, if you think about it, once you're sort of up and running as a venture capitalist, the things that you spend your time on are split between the companies that you've already invested in and that you're usually on the board of and meeting potential new companies, new entrepreneurs, and new executives that you're trying to recruit into your companies.

So in any given day, it might be that you would have a board meeting for one of your companies, or you might have an interview, you're looking for a VP of marketing for one of your companies. So, you know, every day is different, but if you look in a long, long term, I think it's maybe half of your time on existing company board work and maybe half of your work, in maybe half of your time looking at new companies. And so there's this magical we're deal flow, Aileen. So, you know, how do you find the deals? Do they all just magically walk in the door?

You know, that's a huge, you know, that's the magic that you have to have. I was going to add to Teresa's, which is like you spend half your time meeting with new companies, half your time working with portfolio companies, half your time doing email. And like, yeah, half your time running your firm. I mean, it's like a 24-7 job. I think that's one of the things that people who have maybe been entrepreneurs or operators and companies who join venture firms usually say after the first year, like, wow, this is a lot harder than I thought it was. Like, when I think about my job, my job is seeing the best ventures that are started every month or every year, making the right calls on them, which is as important as seeing them. But if you don't see them, you're not going to be able to make the right call.

Right. And then you have to actually, like, hopefully add value to help them to get to a great outcome. And then you have to think about running your firm and marketing your firm so that you're going to get to see the best deal. So that's kind of like how I spent my time. There's a thing that I think you left out that is winning the deal. Because I think the good deals are competitive. That's true. That's totally true.

And what's your, like, how do you think about winning the deal? Maybe you don't have, you have less pressure after 25 years. Well, I think everybody has to cultivate their own unique deal flow. That's sort of part of it so that you're not out there chasing deals. And that really is what separates the top venture firms from the other venture firms. Because if you have to chase deals and try to get into them, it's a lot of time and you frequently don't get the deal. So I think everybody on this panel really does a good job in cultivating unique deal flow and looking ahead to some of the trends in the industry and who might, you know, step out of companies.

And the advantage we all have after doing it over a decade or several decades is that, you know, you get to see a crop of people that you've helped recruit into these companies. And it's not always your CEOs that start the next company. It might be the VP of product management or the VP of engineering. So you can't get lazy about deal flow. Yeah, one of the challenges about deal flow is all the stuff we get over the transom. Yeah. And it's a real challenge because you don't want to throw it all away.

but you cannot meet with every entrepreneur who approaches you so you know the the signal to noise ratios is interesting in venture capital because we're we're running around with dollar signs on our head on the entrepreneur side how do you we also can't be with every potential VC and yet we need to have a feedback cycle so that we make sure that we're you know setting ourselves up for success and finding the right VCs to provide our funding so what how do we decide if you are the one to out to or other than, okay, well, we're going for A, let's say, and we're looking for, and we're in the enterprise space, how do you recommend people self-select to contact you,

and how do you decide on the other side who you reach back to? Well, those are two questions that we might have different answers to. You know, when our companies are out raising money and another 30% of our 300% time is actually helping our companies raise their follow-on rounds. There are a lot of venture firms, and many venture firms have almost telemarketing people that are calling up these companies, and I'll go to a board meeting, and our CEO will say, well, someone called me from so-and-so. And, you know, it does make sense for you to spend some time thinking about the lay of the land

of which set a venture catalyst you should approach. It also is determined a bit by who does your first round and who they're a collegial, circle is that they've worked with because you do want like-minded investors around the table so that your own investor circle and your board meetings themselves don't turn into a circus. So I would leverage your seed stage investors, your A-round investors for the follow-on ones. It gets easier then. And I'm surprised all the time that even when we give companies a term sheet, you know,

I always say, hey, you should talk to our CEOs. Or even before we give you a term sheet, talk to our CEOs, you know, find out if we're the right investor for you because, you know, once you get us, it's hard to get rid of us forever. The second question, which is how do we deal with over the transom? I would say that every partner in our firm is different. You know, I feel like I was sort of a non-pedigrate entrepreneur in my early days, so I was over the transom in every way you could describe. So, you know, I couldn't call anyone and say, well, you call someone for me.

I was just sort of, like, knocking on doors. So I have, you know, kind of a sweet spot for actually looking at the over-the-trans and stuff. And, you know, it turns out that some of them are going to get a lot of stuff now. Well, it turns out that some of our best deals ever were, you know, something caught my eye or someone else's eye. It does take a bit more time. But also, I once a week say, look, I've got to be five entrepreneurs that I've never heard it before, that I don't know, that might be in a different circular set of people. Otherwise, I'm treading the same path over and over, which is easy, but it's not going to get great returns.

The thing I'd add to the over-the-transum, because I think it is probably more often rare that an over-the-transum venture gets funded by a traditional venture firm, and then it becomes a big hit. I think your best shot if you aren't being, if you don't know the people to refer you into a target investor is to have traction. Like when I think about companies like NastyGal or Mottocloth, just like they had traction,

they were kind of like unknown, but they were able to write and be like, hey, I bootstrapped this on my own and I'm doing five or 10 million in revenue. Then you'll get someone's attention. But if you're, I've got this idea, I don't really know anybody, then you're most likely to get people's attention.

Yeah. The other thing you're to add on the first part about, you know, how do you pick the right VC partner, and I'm being very specific, not just firm, but the right partner, because as Anne says, you know, you're likely going to have this person, you know, it used to be six years. The last stuff I've seen is like 10 years. So you're going to be on board with this person for 10 years. So you're really, let's hope that, you know, you guys work well together.

It's like a bunch of marriages, so. Yeah. Longer than most celebrity ones by a long shot. So, yeah, it's your work marriage. So what I always tell entrepreneurs is that you should think about this as it's a two-way street. Just like when you're recruiting for an employee to your company or you're interviewing for a job, which is something you guys can all work. In actuality, it's a two-way street, right? So yes, absolutely. I would assume that you would have done research on Lisa or Anne or Aileen

and you know some of the investments they've made. You probably, therefore, should talk to some of their entrepreneurs. And then it won't be an over-the-transom introduction because you're just doing your homework. You want to make sure, like, what is it like to work with them? Are they interested in the space that I am in or the business model that I'm pursuing? Because it's also about, you know, what's the fit with their expertise, their network, their value add, to be on your board for that. The last thing that I would say is absolutely 150% what Ann said, and this was, I included it in my half of the time with companies. It's not board meetings, right?

It's all the other stuff. It's recruiting people. I didn't explicitly call it, but absolutely. I view, I've always viewed my job as an early stage venture investor is to help my companies get financed through to whatever is the best outcome for them, whether that's an IPO, which does tend to take 10 years, having been through that a couple of times, or an acquisition. And, you know, my job is to help you find the right partner for your series B, C, or expansion round. And Jen and I were counting it up when we launched our firm. I mean, because you know, Between the two of us, we've probably helped our companies raise over 350 rounds of follow-on venture capital. That's the kind of stuff that you should be wanting from your investment partner. And then, and lastly, understanding the difference between a private venture firm and a corporate venture firm, because we're Intel, so we're a big company, so you've got to want a lot of love, right, because you're going to get a whole lot of love from Intel. It's a beast. And so, you know, understanding what's unique about a corporate, you know,

do you want a business relationship with a company? Are you looking for go-to-market support, so we've got channels and we've got resources in other regions to get you visibility with your customers? You still are going to be subject to the partner that you choose, so you should also do the research on the individual, but you're going to have a whole lot more help than that, and hold them to it, right? I mean, corporates promise a lot of things sometimes, but make sure they deliver on the things that they promise. I'm going to ask a question. So, Aileen and Teresa, you are... Eileen, do you have a partner at the firm? I do have a team member, yeah.

Okay. Man or woman? Guy. Okay. And so you have a female firm. Is that by design, or is that just because you've known Jennifer Ever and you make good partners? It really was because we've known each other for a long time, and we knew that we had the same philosophy about both the type of firm that we wanted to start in terms of the, you know. the market opportunity that we saw, having come from bigger firms, like seeing this,

what we think of as a white space, with a big getting bigger, and, you know, multi-geography, multi-stage, which was not what either of our firms were when we joined in 96 or 99. But also, so actually we were independently thinking of doing our own thing, going out and doing seed in early stage, and the kinds of things that we loved to do. And as we were talking, truly more networking as we had been over the course of our careers around stuff life. There aren't that many women managing partners, so talking about stuff like, okay, what's your philosophy on, you know, how to hire people and when to promote people? So we knew we had a lot of commonality in terms of culturally how we wanted to run our firms. So it gave us a lot of

comfort. And we were literally like comparing notes on like stuff, which I did with Aileen as well about like, okay, who should you hire as like your rent-a-c-o and all that other stuff. And at one point she was literally just like, you know, it sounds like we wanted to do the same thing. Why should We do this together. And have you seen the number of female founders that you've been able to invest in? Has that grown at all? Do you see more women entrepreneurs these days than you saw when you first got started? And you obviously are focused on enterprise software.

Yeah, we just gave a term sheet to a woman co-founder, woman CEO firm last week. And she got a lot of attention from our partnership because we don't. really see that many women in enterprise software. It's pretty shocking, actually. Again, if you look at the stats coming along, you know, the number of computer science science majors in the U.S. is not that large. It's going down for women. It's going down. It's going down for women. It was like, you know, 20 percent, and now it's like 13 percent. Most of the women coming in, and actually most of our founding, founder, you know, CEO types, there are a good number that do have an MBA.

I mean, they want that job as a CEO that got the advanced degree. Other than Stanford and Harvard, which has a higher percentage of women as MBAs, only about the typical MBA class in other universities is 20 to 25 percent. So we're dealing with the law of small numbers here for qualified to, you know, to the enterprise software market is very large. now, very competitive, you know, the skill, the bar keeps rising for entry-level skill, other than your some, you know, wonder kind who, you know, has, thinks of something in their dorm room.

So, you know, we were really excited to give her this term sheet. She's super qualified, you know, we won't be announcing that deal for some time. And she just did a fantastic job of, you know, presenting her idea, her concept. And she was very authentic. That's another thing that my partners and I really liked about her. She was very open about, you know, what she thought the opportunity was as well as the challenges. You know, we got to know her really quickly. She really, really was herself.

She wasn't, she was very comfortable in her own skin as a woman. She wasn't, she hadn't gone to like prep classes somewhere to be prepared to present to venture capitalists and sort of was acting the role. And the VCs noticed that. And it's really not a good idea. It doesn't help you at all. You know, but the answer to your question is, you know, it's pretty much on change.

We gave our first term sheet to Heidi Roizen and Team Makers. So we started with a woman, but it hasn't changed much. It's very disappointing. How about you? What female deals do you do? So I do think there are a lot more female founders, CEOs than there were when I started in 99, especially in the consumer side.

In the consumer side, I think it's much thinner. And I think for any of you who are working in larger companies right now, and you're at, like, you know, the director, VP level, you are an awesome candidate to be a founder. I think most of the best founders have good training from existing tech companies that have high growth. And so whether it's you or it's someone you work with, you know, I think my frustration in there not being as much kind of gender balance in tech

is, you know, we have, like, I think, challenges at every stage of the pipeline from who the investors are to what the kind of supply side looks like. And if there aren't great women who are directors and VPs at tech companies, we're not going to increase the number of female CEOs. And so like if you see some superstars who don't, like you don't think they're going to stay in the workforce, like encourage them, support them to stay in because we have to keep this pipeline increasing, not decreasing, otherwise it's never going to get better.

I'll give you an example. I mean, Diane Green, of all fabulous people, was told by someone, you should do your own company. So to me, that's an incredible anecdote. It's not like she had this plan all along. So if you're wondering, if you should, you might want to really think about it. Aline said one other really key thing is that when we are

auditioning these companies, and we get attracted to one. We look at the founding team and see what movies have they seen before. Have they only been working at horror shows? So this is one thing for your own career as well. If you are in a horror show, leave. Because you want to see what a good movie is like. What's the difference as you look at it between the power and influence you had as one

person in a Kleiner or an Excel versus the kind of power influence that you have to make an impact as a founder of your own smaller funds? I mean, so I take a lot of inspiration from my entrepreneurs, and I'll use that as an analogy, right? So, and many of you are, some of you are entrepreneurs, some of you are executives at larger companies, right? So you can be an executive at a larger company, and it's not that it's a bad place or, you know, it can be a great place. But the amount of change and the speed at which you can make change because of the end number is just much slower and much different and the amount of impact you can have. And so when you're a founder, you know, it's your vision. It's, you know, you get to start from sort of the, you know, from blank sheet of paper.

So I think it's, I think that's the difference. That was kind of what kind of drove me. It was sort of, I had an entrepreneur who told me once when it was sort of like, had sort of done it like three or four times. It's sort of like, why are you doing this again, right? And it was sort of like, I just feel like I'm called to this. It's like I really see something that I want to do. And I can't, you know, where I am is a great place, but I can't do that here.

It just doesn't fit. fit. So the only way I can do that is to go out there and do it myself. And also fundamentally, like, I think a lot of great entrepreneurs are kind of impatient. For any of you know me, I'm extremely impatient. And so you can move a lot faster when you're just kind of a much smaller group. I would totally echo what Teresa said. I think, obviously, we wouldn't be doing what we're doing if we didn't think it was better. And it's like, now I'm two years into it. It's way better. And I was also inspired by some entrepreneur friends. I was having dinner with some friends, and this is probably three years ago, who are entrepreneurs, and

they were asking me about changes going on at Kleiner and things like that, and we were kind of talking a little bit about what's going on. They were like, when are you going to leave to start your own firm? And honestly, it had not, it had not crossed my mind, to be honest. Like, you know, Kleiner's super socially respectable. It's a big platform. We had great deal flow. Like, I think, in my mind, I had been thinking, like, I think I'm an intelligent person. I think I have a lot to bring this to table, but a lot of people want to talk to me because I'm a Kleiner partner maybe not necessarily because I'm me and I think I could do a good job even if I was just me and so it was that dinner that really

inspired me like I could do that why wouldn't it isn't it amazing I hear that so often that women are sort of asked to go do it and we somehow seem to be waiting for someone to tell us that we should go do it so go do it whatever it is that you want to do it what about you Marguet I mean you You were running in a top marketing firm and seemed like, you know, leading another sector. How was the transition out of one industry? I'm changing, I'm being the moderator right now. How was the transition from a totally different industry where you worked with a lot of entrepreneurial companies?

I will say when I first moved to this country, I worked at an agency that was chalk full of women. It was run by men. and that really was annoying to me because my home industry is a shock full of women and that was just weird. So it was really fun to start my own because you can put the imprint of the values that you have and the culture and what you want to make that's bigger than just what you do every day. And there's nothing more gratifying than that. And I have a child and I have the Outcast Agency and that is my other child still. And if you think that you might like that, you will love it.

That is absolutely amazing. The reason that I made this weird decision to come here, because I don't like being an employee, that part was not attractive. But I thought at the time, maybe that was naive, but I thought that the list of top five firms was very, very established, and it was almost, that was going to be very tricky to become one of those. And I didn't know that I could do that, and that was the job, at least the spec that I was asked to do. And then I liked the values of the founders and the way they had set it up, and I liked the fact that it was a partnership, but it had like normal hierarchies because some of that stuff gets dysfunctional.

But fundamentally, I did it because I knew how to run Outcast, and I didn't know that I could do this. and this kind of job doesn't come around every other day, right? So that was the reason I did it. And you've got an amazing job. I have a lot to work with. And I will also say, thank you, but we have a lot to improve because we're like not even five years old. What elements do you think the culture that you will cultivate for your firms that you really want to make different from where you came from? So Cowboy Ventures is pretty small.

It's just myself and another person. And I don't actually know if it's ever going to get very big. Like, I, like, I came from a place that started small and got very big. And I didn't really like it as much when it got really big. So, you know, Cowboy Ventures is very personal. It's, like, and we're goofy and we're silly. And, like, when, like, we have this new ritual when, like, when our portfolio companies have raised enough money to open, like, their first office,

we send them a disco ball. Like, if that's, like, we're, like, we're, like, we're, I can be myself now. you know whereas before I kind of feel like I was my sanitized self and so you know it's a very personal business it may never be more than three or four people but I think it will always be like very hands-on and personal and also very collaborative like what I think one of the things that Teresa and I are super excited about is like we've been friends basically since I started and we've never been able to co-invest because when you're a series A or series B investor you want as from our firms you want as much ownership as possible so we could talk about deals and we could never

figure out how to split them. And now we can work together all the time. Actually, we could. We just couldn't convince other people who are less collaborative. Yeah, and so, and seed, yeah, and seed is very collaborative. Like, I don't want to be the only institutional seed investor. I want to do it with Teresa and Jennifer, like, other people. So that's a great thing that I love about what I'm doing now. One more question. Yes. Hi. My name is Karen Vosudavan, and I'm a vice president at Merrill Lynch Wealth Management. I really want to commend you on your leadership and impressiveness working in a male-dominated industry. And I'd love for you, in closing, to share, if you would, your own unique way,

share with us some secrets as to how you've kicked ass in each of your space. Anne, you've kicked more ass than all of us. Thanks a lot, Lisa. You know, it's, it's, I thought it would be easier to kick ass if you're tall like you. Yeah. Size does not matter, apparently. You know, the, you know, one of the real early pioneers in the, in the tech industry is a woman named Sandy Kirtzik, and she did an interview recently, and people always asked us this question. And she said, you know, something very clearly.

She goes, look, I've always been comfortable being a woman. I've never tried to act like the guys. I grew up in a small town of Minnesota. My dad was the head basketball coach, so I can say that I was in the locker room at age three. My mother was unhappy with that, but my dad was in charge of me as the oldest. So I think you really just, the way you kick ass is just be comfortable with your own ass. I have no more to add than it. That's just really the best.

Thank you.