Investing Billions - E159:How a 24-Year-Old VC Landed Cendana Capital as a Limited Partner w/Paige Doherty

Episode Date: April 29, 2025

Paige Finn Doherty, Founding Partner of Behind Genius Ventures, joins the How I Invest podcast to share how she built one of the most distinctive brands in early-stage venture capital — all before turning 25. Paige talks about the power of content and community, how her engineering background shaped her investing style, and why being deliberate about media strategy can transform access to top founders and LPs. She also breaks down her investment thesis around AI in overlooked industries, the importance of institutional-grade operations from day one, and what it really takes to build a lasting venture firm.

You have one of the top LPs on the planet, Sendona Capital, on your cap table as a 25-year-old VC. How did you accomplish this? Three things that really differentiate behind Genius and myself as a GP. So the first is that we have a strong branding capability. I came into venture having a deep passion for educating the next generation of venture investors. I wrote a children's book about venture capital, started one of the most shared venture podcasts, Seed to Harvest, and I've continued to execute on our brand, especially focusing on video for storytelling. The second is exceptional grit for our first fund, which is a $5 million fund,

probably touch base with 1700 investors before closing on 120 LPs. And the third is discipline execution. So I'm an engineer by training. And the way I think about investing is very much from the first principles approach. You're extremely passionate about venture capital specifically, not about investing, but VC specifically. What makes you so passionate about venture capital? Today I'm excited to welcome Paige Doherty, founding partner of Behind Genius, a top pre-seed

and seed venture firm. Paige, a Gen Z investor and author, shares how she raised her very first fund at the ripe young age of 22 and her second fund at 25 with prolific LPs including Sandana Capital and David Sachs. We'll explore her unique investment thesis focused on backing technical storytellers and applying AI to overlooked industries. Paige, welcome to the How I Invest Podcast. Thank you so much for having me, David. It's a pleasure to be here. Paige, you have one of the top LPs on the planet, Sandana Capital, on your cap table

as a 25-year-old VC. How did you accomplish this? Great question. Why does one of the top LPs in the world invest in a 24-year-old VC, which is how old I was when they invested? I think there's three things that really differentiate behind Genius and myself as a GP. So the first is that we have a strong branding capability. I came into venture having a deep passion for educating the next generation of venture

investors. So I've concentrated a lot on building a compelling brand. I wrote a children's book about venture capital, started one of the most shared venture podcasts Seed to Harvest, and I've continued to execute on our brand, especially focusing on video for storytelling. The second is exceptional grit. For our first fund, which was a $5 million fund, probably touch base with 1700 investors before closing on 120 LPs. And the third is disciplined execution. So I'm an engineer by training and the way I think about investing is very much from a first principles approach. I think about a container risk. Like when we're investing in early stage companies, there's obviously a lot of risk at the earliest stages. So how

do you construct and execute on a portfolio construction that allows you to take that risk? And so for us, we worked with Eric Wu, who used to be the head of Institutional Capital Angelus and has seen hundreds, if not thousands of funds play out over the years. And he helped us construct a portfolio construction of between 25 to 30 bets that are all similarly sized. So when we make an investment, we're just focusing on the binary conviction in the company versus wiggling around on check sizing and then being disciplined on ownership. So we strive to invest early with high conviction.

Insurance in general is like it's a very network driven industry. And so, Sandona actually passed on her first fund when I was 22. And I ended up having five Sandona backed general partners invest in Heart Fund One and had them give strong references for the three things that I mentioned. And then Sandona ended up anchoring our second fund. Yeah, that is how one of the top LPs came to back a 24-year-old VC. Nearly every venture firm would love to have Sandana on their cap table. What do you think got Sandana Capital to ultimately make the decision to invest? Remember I would meet someone and I would see they were connected with Michael Kim on LinkedIn.

I'd be like, hey, tell Michael I said hello, tell Kelly I said hello. And so by doing that, I feel like I created not an echo chamber, but a lot of narrative gravity where they were hearing my name from people in their circles that they respected or had invested in. There's one element of it is creating urgency in that decision making. There's substance. In engineering, you have like the first principles, the substance, the execution, and then around it the marketing and vibes. Then when we were in the final process of getting to know each other, I hosted a 40 person event on three days notice in one of their

advisors apartments in San Francisco and I invited a bunch of our portfolio founders, creatives in our community so they could really get a taste for our community because those are the two pillars I think about most in building a enduring venture firm brand is content and community because then we're not the only ones telling our story. It's interesting that you mentioned the substance and then vibes. I look at it as table stakes and what actually gets an LP to say yes. GPs, they're acting under the impression that they'll get an equal chance as every other GP, add an LP, add an IC.

The problem on the LP side is that they have scarce resources. They could only take a look at so many deals. So yes, you need to have fun construction. You need to have a fun admin, all these things in order to qualify. But just because you have those doesn't mean you're going to get one of these five spots at the next IC meeting. So I think it's really important to have this X factor, this gravitas. Yours was media.

There's other strategies. Tell me about how specifically media gets you access to both LPs and GPs. In terms of how media gets us access to the best deals, one of the things I think about is putting yourself out there online is scary, especially on video and especially sharing things that you're learning or mistakes that you made. How I thought about it is like building in public and sharing the sawdust of our process. So I might share how we helped a portfolio founder or different creative inspiration. And so before I even get on a call with a founder, they have an opportunity to get to know us and Behind Genius before getting on a call. So it's almost like a pre-sell.

In terms of LPs, it's the same thing. They can see how we work, what our portfolio construction looks like, really get to know our thought process before they even get on a call. When I was 20, I was interning at a growth equity fund in San Diego called TBC Capital. I was cold calling entrepreneurs who had been building businesses for 15 years and getting shut down a lot. So I think I definitely built some resilience in that manner, but that was like a very strenuous outbound process. And what I realized is that by leveraging media, you can scale your own presence as a GP and ultimately increase the quantity

and quality of the opportunities that are coming inbound. And I think what's unique is most of our content is actually geared towards emerging managers or other GPs because I've identified that persona as A, like the ones I'm most excited to share my journey of building a venture firm with, and B, they have been incredible at connecting us with LPs, with portfolio founders, and ultimately building that community. So that is the approach that I've taken to content. And then in Fun2, we focus really heavily on what is the founder archetype that we look to back and what can we learn from the exits of the past.

So two recent pieces that we've written that are much more data-driven would be the technical storyteller, which is the founder archetype we look to back at Behind Genius and also what it takes. Our analyst Chimba, who joined in July, did a deep dive on the last $100 billion plus exits to see what patterns we could start to understand from the exits that have actually happened of companies that have sold for a billion dollars and returned DPI to the venture funds that invested in them. What were some takeaways from that report? I don't want to steal a tune with this vendor. But one of the things that we've learned from the

study is that the markets or just like market sizing and how we think about it in general has shifted. So I think what we've learned from this study is the majority of companies might only have like a thousand customers, but those customers are paying 500k, a million, two million a year. And so it's really about finding a pain point as a founder that companies are willing to pay a lot of money to solve. That is very challenging if you don't have yet technical depth or deep domain expertise that's given you any unique insights. That has been one of the biggest learnings. Then one other interesting stat is that 70% of the founders were the sole representative of the college that they attended to have built a company that has gotten to a billion dollar plus exit.

So it proves that founders can really come from anywhere. So I thought that was quite interesting. Those were two takeaways. But it's on our blog if you would like to read the full research. There's one investing category that's outperformed major US and world stock markets over the past three years. Private infrastructure. Private infrastructure is expected to double over the next 10 years with the continued development of AI, increased demand for power generation, and the modernization of supply chains. This asset had previously only been available to large institutional investors,

but now you can invest in it exclusively through Republic's partnership with Hamilton Lane, who's co-CEO Eric Hirsch I previously had on the podcast. Visit republic.com slash hlpif. Again, that's www.republic.com slash hlpif to invest today. One of the reasons I think a lot of venture funds are reluctant to do media is the same reason that keeps them from being great, which is taking a stand on certain issues or certain stages, certain investment styles. It doesn't have to be politics. Obviously politics is a thing that a lot of people don't want to touch, but there's also things like these are the type of founders that we back.

These are the type of paradigms that we back. We want things that are hard. We want things that are hard. We want things that are out of favor. When it comes to building great venture brands or great GPs in general, it's not about what part of the market likes you or not. It's which part of the market really likes you. One of the things that you've done really well in terms of curating your life and your fund in a way that it only aligns with a certain amount of people that are willing to back you very heavily.

Thank you so much for saying that. I mean, I think a lot of elements of venture are quite binary. Like when I was doing research for the children's book I wrote about venture, one of the things I came to understand is raising a venture fund is binary. Like you either do or you don't. There is no in between. What you have to do to raise a venture fund is be able to have a thesis that you have deep enough conviction in that you can align LPs around that thesis and how you're going to support founders. Then the second part is in my Narsar stars like top decile DPI, like how do we actually back companies that will 3X, 5X this fund? Like I would say, I want to be

one of the investment greats when we look back on the decades of venture to come. And so there's like another third fun thing, which is building the firm and all the fun back office stuff that comes with that too. Thank you for listening. To join our community and to make sure you do not miss any future episodes, please click the follow button above to subscribe. You're extremely passionate about venture capital specifically, not about investing, but VC specifically.

What makes you so passionate about venture capital? There are two really compelling elements of venture for me. So one is the ability to take a long-term vision. I think that is unique in venture as an asset class because if you look at public markets, you can take a long-term vision. I think Berkshire Hathaway has done an incredible job at this. There's other firms that think that way. But on the whole, there can be such volatility in the day-to-day of the market that it makes it challenging to zoom out and really take

a long-term view on what could be the most compelling technologies of the next 30 years and how they impact it. And then if you go down the stack to growth or private equity, those companies are already doing maybe like hundreds of millions. They're more outclassed as like obvious assets. I think the joy and venture for me is spotting a founder who's building something unique early on and then seeing their vision come to life. That is like one of the most rewarding things to me. You mentioned the lack of women and diverse figures in the venture ecosystem. What is your advice to females that would want to be in a GP spot that would want to raise a

significant fund? Those are two different things because I think like going up the GP route in an established firm, like I think one of the reasons why it takes venture so long to shift is that if you look at a venture fund, usually they're changing positions or giving promotions upon new fund cycles. It usually takes two to three years to go into a new fund cycle. So you might be waiting, if you get into the industry, you might be waiting two years from analyst to associate, two years from associate to senior associate, and then principal, and then depending on the hierarchy. So I think it just takes a while to get to GP unless you come in from an operator route

where you've had a similar amount of experience. I think what I'm most excited about is the proliferation of micro-funds and solo GP funds because I think that's truly the fastest way to get more diverse seats at the table. It's also why I've been so passionate about sharing my journey on getting into venture because yeah, I think that'll ultimately be how a lot of change happens and is already happening. ultimately be how a lot of change happens and is already happening. My second piece of tangible advice for folks looking to get into venture is cold email. I just got a Twitter DM from a woman who had cold emailed Mark Pinkus and got a reply like same day. And she was like, thank you so much for writing this cold email outreach.

And yeah, I feel like people really respond to cold emails. So that's like one of the other things that I would recommend. And I have a blog post on my personal blog called a cold outreach workshop, if anyone's curious that I wrote. I know your network. You have a very strong network in the venture community. You decided to go be a solo GP as a 22-year-old instead of go to a top fund. What made you want to go the solo GP route versus being mentored and learning at a top fund? I actually had a business partner in Fund One, Josh Slisserman. I did have a moment

between Funds One and Two. That was really tough for anyone who's gone through a co-founder split, even those amicable. It was just really tough to be like, oh, I got to do this by myself. And there was a moment where I was getting recruited by a T-Row and Fun. The pay would have been great. I would have had like check rating ability for much larger checks. And as I got further into the interview process, I started to feel my body just get like so tense. And I was like, this is not what I want to do. Like I want to build my own firm from a first principles standpoint,

be able to do the branding work because I think we can build a really compelling next generation brand. And if I had gone to another firm, I would have been adding to theirs versus being able to build my own. And then I just thought about what I really enjoyed is being able to have conviction within the first five minutes of a call and be like, this is it. And there's no red tape or bureaucracy. I just do the due diligence of obviously doing our reference calls and things like that. But the ability to take action when you have conviction is unmatched when you have your own firm.

There's a meme in the venture capital community. It was also satirized on Silicon Valley, this idea of venture capital value add and these venture capitalists that have never built businesses giving advice to operators. You mentioned your brief startup experience, but really you don't have much startup experience. How are you able to actually deliver value add to your portfolio companies? When I was in college, I spent three years in Northrop Grumman. I was 17 with a security clearance and then I worked as a chief staff at an e-comm startup and then I built Python bots for Instagram growth and then built a brand and wrote a book and started this firm. So even though I am not a founder of a startup,

I very much view Behind Genius as my own startup. And so I think founders sense that empathy. And I think one of the best parts of being a younger investor and not having had that operator experience is I really know when to be like, you know what, the question that you're asking is out of my depth. I think some people can like overstep the amount of advice that they give. So knowing when to stop giving advice and just like, this is not where I'm spikiest.

But in terms of actual value add, I think about it is like one, we built an incredible community of co-investors and LPs who love to angel invest in our company. So we've almost doubled the capital we've invested through direct introductions for this company, Statusphere. When we invested, I broke my emails. I literally couldn't send emails because I had sent so many intro requests. And then that ended up landing her an additional 500k in that current round with this company Break Sports, which is recreational booking platform.

I ended up connecting them with our lead investor of their seed who wrote a $1.6 million check. So I'd say like capital is one element of it. And then the second is creativity. I would say like my references are quite diverse. I love the art of storytelling in all forms, fashion, film, music, media, and I study it. Whenever founders come to me with branding or storytelling questions, especially narrative-driven, talking to investors, I love doing that work. So I helped one of our portfolio founders put together this like Google, Google Doc one-pager. It was like, here's

where we're at when you invested, here are our goals when you invested, and then here's how far we've come and what we would like to do. And just that one-pager helped him raise two million dollars from insider investors. And then we host our annual summit every year. But I really love bringing our portfolio founders together so that they can help each other because the portfolio is quite diverse. You're very bullish about companies that are using AI that may be in antiquated spaces. Tell me about your thesis around this.

One of the pieces that we wrote last year, September of 2024, was clipboard companies. Integrated industries that were skipped over by automation and software are getting reevaluated in the acceleration age of AI. I see this in three specific ways. The first is foundation models driving costs down and performance up. The second is in AI agents and the third is in embodied AI or AI in the physical world. And so we've made investments across those different elements. I would say one of the first investments that we made in the vertical AI space is a company called Hum.ai. I remember meeting them. I think when I first met them on Zoom, it was like five days before Christmas. They were in the HF Zero

house in SF. And I was like, okay, I'm in and I want to fly to SF. I'll meet you guys tomorrow. I hung out at this massive mansion that HF Zero has. And I was just like twiddling my thumbs waiting to talk to these founders. And they're absolutely incredible. So Kelly Zhang and Thomas Storick, University of Waterloo, PhD candidate on Applied Machine Learning on satellite imagery. They're building a foundation model for the natural world with use in climate, defense, and agriculture. You can think of it as basically like a chat GPT for any earth observability data. Based on how the crops grew 20 years ago, how are we looking for the next 10 years, questions that we would have once really struggled to answer without a massive team of data scientists.

In AI agents, we have a company called Maneva, and they're building video to action AI agents in high volume manufacturing. Ray has an incredible story. He grew up in Canada, single mom, immigrated from South Korea, and he started working as a mechanic at the age of 12. And so he became one of the youngest researchers at Google's DeepMind, and then started Maneva to automate manufacturing.

So we've been spending more time researching on that space because right now, most of the AI models have been text-based or video-based. And I think the AI that becomes embodied is going to be really, really interesting. So I'm excited for the resurgence of hardware. Like I started out in mechanical engineering. So that's been really exciting to see how those two worlds come together in the next 10 years. You've been now a VC for over five years and your sourcing strategy has really evolved. Tell me about how your sourcing has changed from fund one to fund two. I'll tell you about the first deal I sourced for the fund.

It's 2021. I was scrolling on TikTok. I was watching some of my favorite creators. And then when I would go to their pages, I kept seeing the same like Lincoln bio thing. I was like beacons.ai, beacons.ai. And I was like, what? Like, what is this?

And I was like, I bet the founder is on Twitter. Let me see if I can find him. He was on Twitter. He probably had like 500 followers. I was like, ooh, this is good because there was no one who I knew following him. And I had like 500 followers. I was like, oh, this is good because there was no one who I knew following him. And I followed a lot of other VCs. And usually if they're talking to a founder, you'll see followed by, I don't know, name your tier

one VCs. And then you're like, this is going to be tough. I was like, okay, we got to this early. We're very early here. I got on a call with Neil, the CEO of Beacons, and this was prior to them raising their seed round. I think they might have just finished or in the process of going through YC. I was like, hey, this Beacons AI is super interesting. They'd gone super viral on TikTok. They had a million users. And I hadn't really seen, that was the first time I'd seen a software product go viral on TikTok. And I was like TikTok, my view of TikTok in 2020 was I was like, this would be the best platform to go viral and generate top of funnel. Like I think YouTube is the

best platform to build like long standing relationships with your audience, but TikTok is number one fast growth engine. We ended up investing, we committed right before Andreessen led that round. And then they've just seen incredible success since then, which has been really exciting to see that company grow. So that I would say is like how my sourcing started is finding something on TikTok and DMing the founder on Twitter. And then yeah, just getting on a call and being really excited about it. So many of my early opportunities were more outbound sourcing. And then as I started to grow a bigger network in venture, I started spending more time and kind of like parsing through who were the A, like collaborative pre-seed funds that I wanted to work with. We usually write 150

to 250K checks at pre-seed. So we love co-investing with more institutional pre-seed leads, just spending more time with them, understanding their investment mandates and sharing hours. And so now I think it's evolved to a lot of our opportunities come from really great co-investors who we built deep relationships with. And then I still love like doing outbound sourcing, trying to find interesting companies, especially through Twitter.

I feel like the build in public movement has had another resurgence. And then also on YouTube, there's been more founders posting on YouTube. So I'm excited to continue doing Outbound in addition to our like community driven sourcing and then writing about what's interesting is always surfaced cool opportunities like like Maneva for example. Despite the proliferation of VC Twitter and seemingly everybody being on Twitter, the

majority of VCs are not on Twitter. What are some do's and don'ts for VC that's looking to build their being on Twitter, the majority of VCs are not on Twitter. What are some do's and don'ts for a VC that's looking to build their brand on Twitter? One of the things I found was interesting when I was on the outside looking in is it seems like VC Twitter is big, but there's not that many people who are actively posting. A lot of people might have teams doing it or they're not actually interacting. I think the first thing that would be really helpful if you are new on Twitter is finding a few accounts who you really enjoy their content. And then if you find a format that you like or a thread that you like trying to copy it,

if you're a writer, you copy Hemingway. If you want to get on Twitter, you go look at Paki McCormick's writing. What's worked and been done before and trying to adapt it to your voice is a really good way to get started. You don't necessarily have to post that. Then the other thing is just prepare to be humbled. You'll post it and not get more than a like or two, and then you'll post something and it'll go super viral. But everyone who I've trained on building a Twitter audience, when they have had their first tweet go viral and they see that dopamine hamster wheel of a thousand likes coming in

and people DMing them and getting job offers, it's really incredible what happens if you just put yourself out there. and people DMing them and getting job offers. It's really incredible what happens if you just put yourself out there, but just know that you're not going to have that result every time. I think MrBeast is on record. His 10th YouTube went viral. And then he had another 100 that didn't go viral, but he's on record as saying that he probably wouldn't be a YouTuber if he hadn't got that early dopamine hit from the virality. Tell me about your portfolio of tweets. Are there extreme power laws?

Are you pretty much getting consistent returns on your tweets? And how should one think about the mindset of being a great user on Twitter, now X? A great tweeter. Such a great question. Yeah, I was actually laughing when I was talking about it earlier. I was like, oh, this actually sounds a lot like venture. You just continue to invest with a long-term perspective and then occasionally one of those companies really goes well and you kind of tweets. My first one that went super viral, I think was a term sheets thread. And I did it to apply to a company for a analyst position.

And then they rejected me and they didn't even say anything. I had prepared this whole PowerPoint on term sheets and how to explain them to founders. And I was like, freak this. Like I'm posting this on Twitter. They don't like my work. Like I'll see how it does on there. And then it ended up going like mega viral. Like, I think it got like 2 million views. And then I kind of like launched

my Twitter career. One of my ones that went super viral during COVID was like Masterclass has the ad budget of Shen Yun, all in lowercase. And what I realized was like that format works really well on Twitter, where it's just like comparing two things that it's like the niche crossover and everyone's like, I thought I was the only one to have that original thought. And then the second type of tweet would be more deep dives on like things, really bring value to the community. But when I look across the creators who I look up to, they also have an element of humor. I think you kind of have to have substance and vibes, but I really

like funny people. And I think Twitter definitely optimizes for that. So I would recommend watching standup comedy. I think just consuming more funny content brings a brevity that I think is missing from a lot of venture. This goes a little bit to me and your personality. Last time we were catching up, we were talking about institutional service providers providing good experience for LPs. We were geeking out about that. Tell me about that.

What are the best practices and what can you share on that? Hilarious segue from writing ship posts to institutional service providers. So one of the things that I realized in venture is there are times to be scrappy and there are times to invest. And one of the places as a fund manager, I think it's really important to invest is in your back office, in your tax team, in your legal team.

We work with Carta on our fund admin team. We've been working with them since the beginning. We work with RSM on our taxes and now audit, and then we work with Wilson-Sinzini. These are some of the top like tax audit back office firms. When we started at like a $5 million fund, I'd say it was like definitely an investment. I think it is important because we were orienting towards, you know, we're going to be in this for 10 years minimum. The average company right now is taking like 12.9 years to exit. So, you know, call it 13 with a continuation of the fund. And one of the things that can build up if you're not careful about it is like the administrative

elements of the works. I want to make sure we automate this and delegate the back office and make sure everything is like very organized. And there's also a cache in working with the top tier ones because LP is here and they're like, oh, perfect checkbox. Like, they get it. One of the best ways to become an institutional fund is to start acting as an institutional fund before you actually have institutional capital. It's this chicken egg that a lot of GPs don't really do well.

I couldn't think about it any other way because I just came into venture and I was like, I will build an institutional venture firm. And I think that that also differentiates us. I'm not here to like do a fund. I'm here to build a firm. And that just gives me a very different decision-making lens when I'm thinking about our service providers, like who I want to work with for the next 10 years, how I think about like our LP structure, just like how I want to work with for the next 10 years, how I think about our LP structure, just like how I think about the growth of the firm overall and the brand as well. It's all LP relations. So you can't go in one meeting, be all buttoned up and talk about

your fund portfolio and then you get your K1s late. It all comes into effect and LPs see every part of it and they make a judgment of you as an institutional player based on every aspect of your business. One of the things that we started doing really early on this note on the LP relation side is sending a monthly newsletter. So when we're fundraising, it's very like when we're raising fund one, it would be so fun because it'd be like monthly update. We just closed like this amazing LP and this amazing LP and we added like new companies to the portfolio. And then when we're just deploying, it'll be updates on our portfolio found or like portfolio founders and then any new companies.

We started doing much more rigorous institutional level investment memos in Fund 2. So I brought on Andy Strand who spent time at a multifamily office and he's helped build out our memo practice for the companies that we back. I've been doing those for one and two, so probably 50 updates and they're pretty long. And I would say that is like a higher cadence than most GPS. And sometimes I joke, I run a very expensive newsletter, but it has helped us operate at such a high level because I'm like, Oh, newsletter is going out. I need to get our annual meeting invite out. I need to finish the memo. I need to follow up with that founder about their progress or what

they need help with. And so it's a really good forcing function. Every month, I feel like I close the month and I'm like, okay, perfect. And then I can look back and be like, here's the work that I've done over the past four years and it's all written out and like my learning. So I'm excited to have that as like a body of work in the future. What would you like our audience to know about Behind Genius? Oh, great question. I would love to get some feedback from the audience on this and for them to notice it is that we're doubling down on our visual storytelling this year, which is something

I'm really excited about. So high production YouTube, high production podcast, in-person filming, collaborating with some really incredible creatives and really doubling down in that area because I think video has quietly become the default language for modern work. And I'm really excited to be ahead of the curve on that. So keep an eye out for that from Behind Genius on all platforms. Well, Paige, it's been a pleasure to catch up and look forward to sitting down very soon. Yeah.

Thank you so much, David, for having me on. Thanks for listening to my conversation with Paige. If you enjoyed this episode, please share with a friend. This helps us grow and also provides the best feedback when we review the episode's analytics. Thank you for your support.