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How Product is the Untold Storyteller: A Conversation with Tanner Potter, a Kickstart Investor
10 Plays2 years ago
We're welcoming a new voice to the show! This Kickstart investor started his career at powerhouses like Vivint and Nike. Today, he's a product-market fit expert investing in tech-obsessed founders across the Mountain West. Join us in our conversation with investors Tanner Potter and Kat Kennedy of Kickstart (a VC firm for startups in Utah, Colorado, and the Mountain West) for a special episode of Perfect Pitch. In this episode, we'll talk about:
How product has impacted Tanner and Kat's careers—and how that experience manifests in their investing habits
Advice to founders on creating their pitch decks and the importance of storytelling
Why Kickstart didn't hire Tanner the first time he applied (awkward)
How product and sales have shaped the Mountain West ecosystem
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction to New Voices
00:00:00
Speaker
We're welcoming a new voice to the show.
00:00:02
Speaker
This Kickstart investor started his career at powerhouses like Vivint and Nike.
00:00:06
Speaker
Today, he's a product market fit expert investing in tech-obsessed founders across the Mountain West.
00:00:12
Speaker
Join us in today's conversation with investors Tanner Potter and Kat Kennedy for a special episode of Perfect Pitch.
00:00:29
Speaker
Perfect Pitch is a podcast from Kickstart that reveals the minds of both investors and entrepreneurs throughout a startup's journey.
00:00:39
Speaker
I'm your host, Karen Zelnick.
00:00:40
Speaker
Tanner and Kat, thank you so much for being here today.
00:00:44
Speaker
Thanks for having us.
00:00:45
Speaker
You're well.
00:00:46
Speaker
Yeah, you're welcome.
Career Journeys of Tanner and Kat
00:00:47
Speaker
And before we get into the conversation, I'm going to introduce Tanner and I want to cover the highlights of your career, which will show our listeners why you're the perfect addition to the show and why you're such a great investor in the ecosystem.
00:00:58
Speaker
So you earned your bachelor's in business management strategy from BYU with honors, I might add.
00:01:04
Speaker
And you have your MBA from Harvard.
00:01:05
Speaker
And in your earlier years of your career, you worked at Vivint as an operations manager and a product manager before transitioning to Nike with a focus on digital product.
00:01:15
Speaker
And today, you're a kickstart principal with an eye on fintech, AI, e-commerce, and the future of work tech.
00:01:20
Speaker
You're an avid reader, world traveler, and loyal fan of the Utah Jazz.
00:01:25
Speaker
What else would you like us to know about you?
00:01:27
Speaker
Oh, man, that feels like anything else I say is just going to bring me down from there.
00:01:31
Speaker
It's going to be low lights.
00:01:32
Speaker
But I'm also a big fan of the US men's national team.
00:01:36
Speaker
I played soccer in high school and love just chanting USA.
00:01:41
Speaker
That's great.
00:01:42
Speaker
And Kat, it's always great to have you back on the show.
00:01:44
Speaker
We'll have a link to your bio in our show notes.
00:01:47
Speaker
And what is something else the audience doesn't yet know about you?
00:01:51
Speaker
You know, I'm in my dance mom era.
00:01:53
Speaker
I do the work of an investor.
00:01:55
Speaker
By night, I sit in my car and watch my daughters and dance.
00:01:58
Speaker
And every weekend is spent at dance comps and really gotten to know that whole... I mean, it's a culture.
00:02:05
Speaker
That's amazing.
00:02:06
Speaker
What's been the most surprising thing about the dance culture?
00:02:12
Speaker
Oh, the most challenging thing I've ever done in my life is put false lashes on a six-year-old child.
00:02:20
Speaker
If I'd known that was a requirement, I never would have done it.
00:02:24
Speaker
That is, it's like wrestling a cat.
00:02:28
Speaker
But yeah, the toddlers and tiaras thing, it's got nothing on dance moms.
00:02:34
Speaker
I like that.
00:02:35
Speaker
I should maybe reveal this too.
00:02:36
Speaker
This might need to be struck
Transition into Product Management
00:02:38
Speaker
in from the record.
00:02:38
Speaker
How do you say that?
00:02:40
Speaker
Striked, stricken.
00:02:41
Speaker
Striked, stricken.
00:02:43
Speaker
When I was about eight years old, I watched my older sister dancing in ballet and decided I wanted to get involved.
00:02:51
Speaker
And so I do have a year of me as a green tree and tight, light green spandex with all females, except me dancing with them because I thought it'd be a good idea.
00:03:02
Speaker
So I feel like, you know, I had to hang up the tights, but you know, maybe with Kat's guidance, I can get back into it.
00:03:09
Speaker
That photo needs to go in the show notes for sure.
00:03:12
Speaker
Harvard grad and ballerina.
00:03:15
Speaker
Yes.
00:03:16
Speaker
So fun fact, my mom told me, cause I wanted to be in ballet like my sisters.
00:03:20
Speaker
And she said, I wasn't quite graceful enough for it.
00:03:23
Speaker
So I was in tap.
00:03:25
Speaker
Talk about things you end up talking about with your therapist.
00:03:27
Speaker
She regrets it, but she was like, I was just trying to help.
00:03:31
Speaker
The tap kids always get high scores.
00:03:35
Speaker
Oh, because tap is hard.
00:03:38
Speaker
Tap is like one of the hardest styles of dance.
00:03:41
Speaker
This is going to end up being a dance podcast.
00:03:43
Speaker
If I, we should, we should probably move on, but yeah, you'd be proud of your tap skills.
00:03:49
Speaker
I will.
00:03:50
Speaker
I'll put that picture in the show notes to my cute little tap outfit.
00:03:53
Speaker
But speaking of other careers you could have been in that you did go into Tanner, you started your career at Vivint and how did your role change while you were there?
00:04:03
Speaker
Yeah, I started out at Vivint in an internal consulting analytics role.
00:04:07
Speaker
We were working in operations and we worked with different teams on projects, everything from like, how do we bring down call center costs to how do we decrease the number of complaints?
00:04:15
Speaker
And from there, I went on to manage the quality team.
00:04:17
Speaker
And I think...
00:04:18
Speaker
As I was going around and I would talk with different leaders at Vivint, I was like the messenger bringing the bad news saying, hey, here's where our complaints are failing.
00:04:27
Speaker
Here's where our costs are rising.
00:04:28
Speaker
Here's what we should do to do it differently.
00:04:30
Speaker
And I realized at the time that what I really wanted to be doing was creating the problems.
00:04:35
Speaker
like they do in product.
00:04:37
Speaker
And so I decided that I wanted to try to become a product manager there.
00:04:41
Speaker
And so luckily, despite not having an engineering background, I was able to transition there after having worked with a number of people in product and moved over to become a product manager over the Doorbell Camera product line, for time the Outdoor Camera product line and other networking hardware software pieces.
00:04:59
Speaker
I was just getting so interested in what you were saying that I was like, what's my next question?
00:05:04
Speaker
So that's really interesting.
00:05:04
Speaker
Very interesting.
00:05:06
Speaker
Yeah, you are.
00:05:07
Speaker
You're very interesting.
00:05:07
Speaker
Not quite as interesting as a ballerina tree, but I'm just kidding.
00:05:10
Speaker
That was your first product focused position.
00:05:13
Speaker
And then after Vivint, you were hired at Nike where you started out focusing on digital product.
00:05:17
Speaker
So tell us about your evolution of your career from there and then how the two roles were different and learnings you had from your early career.
00:05:25
Speaker
Yeah.
00:05:25
Speaker
If I rewind a little bit in undergrad, I spent some time at Goldman Sachs.
00:05:29
Speaker
And as I spent time working there, it was just a summer internship.
00:05:33
Speaker
I found myself really bored and wondering why I was there.
00:05:37
Speaker
And so coming out of undergrad, I really wanted to do something that I wanted to have an impact.
00:05:42
Speaker
And so I looked at consulting, looked at Amazon, Google, and I ultimately decided to go to Vivint because I felt like I could really make a difference there.
00:05:50
Speaker
It was really exciting.
00:05:51
Speaker
They're focused on consumer tech innovation.
00:05:55
Speaker
Went there, started as an ops, as we just mentioned, went to product.
00:05:58
Speaker
And there it was really fun because we actually built and shipped physical things.
00:06:03
Speaker
There's a lot of satisfaction from actually seeing your product in the wild.
00:06:07
Speaker
I walk down the street in my neighborhood and I see the doorbell camera that I built.
00:06:11
Speaker
Or Kat shared in one of our Slack channels here,
00:06:14
Speaker
a beautiful video of somebody in her family singing on the doorbell camera.
00:06:18
Speaker
And so that made my heart happy for multiple reasons.
00:06:21
Speaker
So at Vivint, it was really fun to work from the zero to one hardware process.
00:06:25
Speaker
At Nike, I was focused on membership and their membership program.
00:06:29
Speaker
And so that was much more like business impact focus.
00:06:32
Speaker
Talking about digital experiences, how we want to create those, how we wanted to link those to the retail and Nike flagship stores in LA or Chicago and what we could do to bring in digital experiences
Approaches to Product Management
00:06:43
Speaker
to that.
00:06:43
Speaker
So very different in terms of focus and outlook, but ultimately focus on how do we make magical experiences for people.
00:06:52
Speaker
Kat, how was your product experience different or similar to Tanner's?
00:06:57
Speaker
I started my career as a software engineer.
00:07:00
Speaker
I actually didn't know what product was until I was at degree.
00:07:05
Speaker
And David Blake, the CEO, was like, you're great at engineering, but you kind of shift into product.
00:07:11
Speaker
You got a product mind.
00:07:12
Speaker
And I was like, what?
00:07:14
Speaker
Because all of my prior experience had been heavy-duty scrum.
00:07:18
Speaker
We had a scrum master.
00:07:21
Speaker
It wasn't the fun parts of product.
00:07:23
Speaker
And so I fell into product...
00:07:25
Speaker
But what I quickly learned was product is really just a focus on ensuring that whatever you're building is something that people need and that they could be benefited in their life if it existed.
00:07:39
Speaker
So Tanner has incredible experience, both on the tangible hardware products, something that is...
00:07:47
Speaker
So difficult to do well and how that needs to blend in with the software side as well.
00:07:52
Speaker
The consumer side of products where it's not someone telling you, you have to use this product because you work in this organization.
00:07:59
Speaker
No, you're choosing to go out and buy it because that experience is so meaningful.
00:08:03
Speaker
That's not my experience on product.
00:08:06
Speaker
My experience on product is we are solving for needs in organizations.
00:08:12
Speaker
And we're creating software that blends into the rest of their employee experience stack to accomplish that.
00:08:18
Speaker
So while the center of product is always make something people want, make something people will use, the ways in which that can manifest in our lives today is so varied.
00:08:31
Speaker
There's software, there's hardware.
00:08:33
Speaker
I mean, you go to a jazz game.
00:08:35
Speaker
the experience of a jazz game as product.
00:08:38
Speaker
And so really, as you think about the different ways it can manifest, there's so many different career paths that people can walk.
00:08:45
Speaker
And that's one of the things I love about what we do here at Kickstart is the experiences that
00:08:51
Speaker
of Tanner and I, while product is inside of both of them, vastly different experiences.
00:08:57
Speaker
And it gives us a very cool opportunity as founders come in and pitch us because we can see the opportunities no matter the mechanism that their business is going to come to fruition through.
00:09:09
Speaker
Yeah, super cool.
00:09:10
Speaker
Tanner, do you have any response to that?
00:09:12
Speaker
Or should we dive right into your Kickstart story?
00:09:15
Speaker
Yeah, I think that's the fun thing about product is that it touches everybody.
00:09:18
Speaker
And you're always thinking about the consumer and the consumer needs.
00:09:22
Speaker
And the unit of account on the consumer changes when you're in a B2C company.
00:09:26
Speaker
That's an individual when you're selling B2B, like Kat's saying, that's often a team or an entire department or an entire organization.
Interest in Venture Capital
00:09:35
Speaker
And so who you're developing for and who you're trying to impact changes.
00:09:40
Speaker
And that really makes a big impact in the type of role that you have.
00:09:43
Speaker
I'm just going to throw in this story from Nike because...
00:09:47
Speaker
It's something that I learned.
00:09:48
Speaker
But one of the most interesting piece of feedback I got at Nike is I gave a presentation on product there, a product that I was pitching.
00:09:57
Speaker
And my manager came and she sat down with me and I thought she was going to say, Hey, this slide doesn't make sense.
00:10:03
Speaker
You need to fix that.
00:10:04
Speaker
And she came in and told me that the fonts on my slides were wrong.
00:10:08
Speaker
She said that I needed to align them better.
00:10:10
Speaker
I needed better pictures.
00:10:11
Speaker
And the 12 slides of data that I had needed to all be cut out.
00:10:16
Speaker
And at first, I was like, kind of angry.
00:10:18
Speaker
I was like, is this really what matters?
00:10:21
Speaker
She had me pitch it to like 10 different people.
00:10:23
Speaker
And I got the transition so down.
00:10:26
Speaker
It made me realize a few things.
00:10:27
Speaker
One product and the reason Nike built such a great product is because they care so much about the details, the narration, they focus on really what the customer wants.
00:10:36
Speaker
And then it made me think a lot about as an investor or an entrepreneur, when you're pitching, getting down the slides and the details and the transitions matters a lot.
00:10:46
Speaker
What else would you tell founders about pitching with their slides?
00:10:49
Speaker
I think there's probably some nugget there that we should share.
00:10:52
Speaker
Yeah.
00:10:52
Speaker
One of my favorite quotes, I actually worked with a bunch of Nike people at Vivint was edit to amplify.
00:10:59
Speaker
So often to better tell the story, you need to edit it down and simplify it.
00:11:03
Speaker
And like I was doing on my deck, I think I had like 10 pages of data and charts.
00:11:09
Speaker
And they're like, no, you need to take all that and put it into one slide and make it simple.
00:11:13
Speaker
You know, there's that quote by Oliver Wendell Holmes.
00:11:16
Speaker
It says like, you need to find the simplicity on the other side of complexity.
00:11:19
Speaker
And that's often what happens once you've gone through the messiness of creating a slide deck and then simplifying it down.
00:11:25
Speaker
And so I think my advice there is try to get to that simple elevator pitch, what it is that you're doing, and try to limit that to 8 to 10 slides and really get down the transitions because the transitions
00:11:38
Speaker
from one side to the next, really how you're telling your story.
00:11:41
Speaker
It's this, then that, because of this, because of that.
00:11:43
Speaker
And so I think that's one of the things that it taught me was how to better tell a story, which is what you're doing when you're pitching a startup, what you're doing when you're pitching to your manager.
00:11:52
Speaker
Anytime that you're working, you're telling a story.
00:11:54
Speaker
Yeah.
00:11:55
Speaker
And any response to that, Kat?
00:11:57
Speaker
I love the experience of Nike.
00:11:59
Speaker
Is there a better known brand?
00:12:02
Speaker
I think the Nike swoosh is the number one tattoo.
00:12:08
Speaker
What that says to me is that people feel a personal affinity to the story of Nike.
00:12:15
Speaker
They don't have a swoosh because they love...
00:12:19
Speaker
the stores, they have the swoosh because they have an affinity.
00:12:22
Speaker
There's a story.
00:12:23
Speaker
There's something in their life that mattered that gave them this tie to Nike.
00:12:29
Speaker
And so storytelling really just highlights this
00:12:34
Speaker
core human need that we have to have a tie to something to understand something.
00:12:41
Speaker
And throughout humanity, we've done that with storytelling.
00:12:46
Speaker
And so the best brands in the world, they tell a story, they help you feel a part of that story, they help you understand why their product, their experience is going to amplify your experience of that story.
00:13:01
Speaker
And that's really what product is all about.
00:13:03
Speaker
We are thinking about the human stories.
00:13:05
Speaker
We are thinking about the human experience.
00:13:07
Speaker
There's something that's going to be different about your story if you put this product into play.
00:13:13
Speaker
And that is true for companies.
00:13:15
Speaker
That is true for consumer products.
00:13:17
Speaker
That's true in any conversation that you are having with other people.
00:13:21
Speaker
You need to understand what the story is.
00:13:24
Speaker
You need to see how your story would change if those two things came together.
00:13:29
Speaker
And that is just a lot of fun.
00:13:32
Speaker
I think it's a fun challenge for all of us to consistently be telling more compelling, simpler stories.
00:13:39
Speaker
Taking complexity and turning it into simplicity is super, super hard.
00:13:44
Speaker
Apple does a great job of this.
00:13:46
Speaker
Their brand is so straightforward.
00:13:48
Speaker
It is so, so, so hard to make things simple because there's always endless complexity behind it.
00:13:54
Speaker
So yeah, basically, just a very long winded way of me saying ditto to what Tanner said.
00:14:04
Speaker
And by saying, you know, you found the simplicity on the other side of complexity.
00:14:08
Speaker
So that was great.
Product Development Stories
00:14:09
Speaker
You can watch the hero's journey.
00:14:11
Speaker
Yeah.
00:14:13
Speaker
We used to joke how once you do a presentation, you say, yeah, here are the pain points or the jobs to be done.
00:14:18
Speaker
People would be like, Oh yeah.
00:14:19
Speaker
They hadn't realized that all the complexity that took to get to that simple thing.
00:14:22
Speaker
But when it's simple and they get it, they're like, yeah, no doubt.
00:14:24
Speaker
That's obvious.
00:14:25
Speaker
But you're like, it wasn't obvious.
00:14:27
Speaker
Let me tell you why it wasn't obvious before.
00:14:29
Speaker
Let me tell you.
00:14:29
Speaker
Yeah, that's so cool.
00:14:31
Speaker
So with your passion for product and how much you clearly enjoyed it, what interested you in switching to VC, Tanner?
00:14:38
Speaker
Yeah, like... And to do more spreadsheets, apparently.
00:14:40
Speaker
Yeah.
00:14:42
Speaker
I like the data.
00:14:44
Speaker
I like making money.
00:14:45
Speaker
No, I didn't know what product management was before I started interviewing for it.
00:14:49
Speaker
And the same thing with VC.
00:14:50
Speaker
I didn't really know what VC was until a friend of mine who worked at Kickstarter at the time introduced me to it.
00:14:55
Speaker
And I think what really interested me about VC was, I felt like I could work in a
00:15:00
Speaker
product, business type role, not with just one or two products like I was doing at Vivint, but I could do that across the portfolio.
00:15:07
Speaker
And I could see B2C and B2B.
00:15:09
Speaker
And I could see something in enterprise and something in SMB and something that was networking based and something that was in fintech.
00:15:15
Speaker
So to me, that variety really interested me.
00:15:18
Speaker
And then I think the second was...
00:15:20
Speaker
At the time, I had had multiple roommates.
00:15:23
Speaker
My roommate that was next room to me was working on a startup.
00:15:26
Speaker
The one across the hall is working on a startup.
00:15:28
Speaker
And the one downstairs was getting ready to leave a bigger company and go do a roll-up.
00:15:32
Speaker
And so seeing that happen, I wanted to work with those people that were taking risks and going out there and trying to create something in the world.
00:15:39
Speaker
To me, that's what's the most exciting part about this job is working with people who want to make a difference.
00:15:45
Speaker
They don't want to just do the trod path.
00:15:47
Speaker
And so that got me interested.
00:15:50
Speaker
And Tanner, I know that there's a fun story about how you came to be at Kickstart.
00:15:53
Speaker
Tell us about that.
00:15:56
Speaker
So actually, Kickstart approached me via Jason at the time.
00:15:59
Speaker
He was an associate, I believe, at the time at Kickstart.
00:16:01
Speaker
He introduced me.
00:16:02
Speaker
He was a friend that I had worked with in undergrad.
00:16:05
Speaker
And it was one of those stories where like... I don't know if this is the right analogy, but it's like getting set up on a blind date where you're like, I don't want to go.
00:16:12
Speaker
And then you go and you're like, Oh, crap.
00:16:15
Speaker
I really like this person or I really like this opportunity.
00:16:18
Speaker
And it was a little bit like that for me.
00:16:20
Speaker
I realized as I was interviewing and talking with Gavin and Al, Dalton and the team, wow, this is something that I really want to do.
00:16:27
Speaker
I feel like it fits my personality well, my interests.
00:16:30
Speaker
And so I applied, I interviewed.
00:16:33
Speaker
And the long sad story is I really, really wanted the job and I didn't get it.
00:16:38
Speaker
And I remember I got a call and Gavin said, Hey, we really liked you.
00:16:43
Speaker
You were such a good fit.
00:16:45
Speaker
We think there's another role in the future that you might work out for, but not now.
00:16:50
Speaker
And nobody wants to hear that.
00:16:52
Speaker
And so I was pretty bummed.
00:16:53
Speaker
I remember talking to my girlfriend at the time, my now wife, Sarah, and we were both pretty sad.
00:16:59
Speaker
And that prompted me to actually go apply to business school, do the work of writing the essays, go through that process.
00:17:06
Speaker
I applied and got into HBS.
00:17:09
Speaker
But I had on the back of my mind that whole time, I really like VC.
00:17:12
Speaker
I really like early stage VC, like pre-seed and seed, where it's just an idea.
00:17:16
Speaker
And I really loved the people at Kickstart.
00:17:18
Speaker
And so I reapplied.
00:17:21
Speaker
Gavin had come out to Fenway Park for a visit.
00:17:23
Speaker
I remember chatting with him there.
00:17:25
Speaker
And then I stayed in touch with the partners.
00:17:27
Speaker
And ultimately, with Fun5, an opportunity came up and I jumped at it.
00:17:32
Speaker
And you both touched a little bit on how a product background applies to VC, but could you each speak to how your product experience has translated into VC?
00:17:42
Speaker
And Kat, I'll have you go first.
00:17:44
Speaker
I want a Tanner to go first.
00:17:45
Speaker
Okay, Tanner, you can go.
00:17:46
Speaker
Yeah.
00:17:48
Speaker
There's a few ways.
00:17:48
Speaker
I think one of the most interesting is that as a product manager, you're mostly working laterally with individuals.
00:17:54
Speaker
I wasn't managing a bunch of people.
00:17:56
Speaker
I was managing a product.
00:17:58
Speaker
And then there was literally hundreds of people that were working on that product together in concert, but none of them reported to me.
00:18:05
Speaker
And so I had to learn how to work to influence, to try to guide, shape, finesse a product into being...
00:18:12
Speaker
And I think one of the things I've realized about VC is that we don't have big teams.
00:18:16
Speaker
You're not managing a lot of people, but you're working on boards, you're supporting companies in advisory roles, you're introducing new people who want to get connected to the portfolio.
00:18:24
Speaker
So you're almost always working laterally with people where there's not a formal hierarchical relationship.
00:18:29
Speaker
And so for me, that was one thing that was very similar.
00:18:32
Speaker
And I think the second that's a corollary to that is
00:18:36
Speaker
As a product manager, I worked with a lot of diverse teams.
00:18:39
Speaker
I was working with designers and electrical engineers and mechanical engineers and Taiwanese ODMs and New Zealand-based engineering teams who all have different outlooks, different approaches.
00:18:50
Speaker
Designers think very differently often than the way an engineer thinks about a problem versus the way that the business operations person thinks about a problem.
00:18:57
Speaker
So as we are talking with entrepreneurs every day...
00:19:02
Speaker
You're working with a lot of different types of entrepreneurs.
00:19:04
Speaker
Some come from very different backgrounds.
00:19:07
Speaker
And so I think that's helped me a lot.
00:19:09
Speaker
And then I would say maybe the third thing would be thinking through the customer problem, building something people want, and making sure that there's a business there.
00:19:18
Speaker
That's just fundamental to creation of any business, the creation of any product.
00:19:21
Speaker
And so I find myself using frameworks that I used as a product manager, thinking about those things almost on a daily basis as a VC.
00:19:31
Speaker
I love that word of influence.
00:19:34
Speaker
As a product manager, the joke that people make about product managers is like, what do they even do?
00:19:40
Speaker
Are they even necessary?
00:19:41
Speaker
And sometimes I'm like, are they joking?
00:19:44
Speaker
They really don't think I did anything.
00:19:46
Speaker
But it is something that engineers will say, hopefully in jest the majority of the time.
00:19:52
Speaker
And the core of that is because the actual building belongs to the engineers.
00:19:58
Speaker
As a product manager, you're influencing, you are data gathering, you're giving advice, you're helping them to anticipate what roadblocks they're going to run into as they're building.
00:20:09
Speaker
So you get to work cross-functionally, you get to provide a lot of data, you get to anticipate and have hunches and make guesses and then validate those.
00:20:19
Speaker
It's a lot of scientific method at work.
00:20:22
Speaker
And as I got into conversations with Gavin and Dalton and Al, and they were telling me about the work and what it could be like, and I talked to other investors as well.
00:20:35
Speaker
It was a lot of the same muscles that I developed inside of product and as an executive that I loved putting to work.
00:20:45
Speaker
They were using something I helped to build.
00:20:48
Speaker
That's so freaking awesome.
00:20:49
Speaker
And that little nugget getting to be like, Hey, we had a little piece in helping them build that thing.
00:20:58
Speaker
And they are making the world different in some way or another.
00:21:01
Speaker
Now that that is becoming a reality that feeds me, that energizes me.
00:21:06
Speaker
I love it.
00:21:07
Speaker
What gets me up and excited to come to work every day is like, we get to make cool stuff.
00:21:12
Speaker
We get to help people make cool stuff and help them anticipate what's going to hit them in the face as they're doing it.
00:21:20
Speaker
It's very exciting and energizing work.
00:21:25
Speaker
Yeah, I would add to that too.
00:21:26
Speaker
That building, oftentimes in organizations, whether you're an organization or you're founding a startup, a lot of people don't agree or don't agree with whatever you're trying to build.
00:21:37
Speaker
I remember when I was at Vivint, we were seeing all these trends.
00:21:40
Speaker
This was like 2017, 2016, that packages and package delivery were going through the roof.
00:21:46
Speaker
And so we wanted to build this doorbell camera that would be the first of its kind to have a 180 degree field of vision vertically so it could see straight down the floor as well as a 180 degree width.
00:21:55
Speaker
And I remember talking and actually an engineer on our team, part of the idea and people in management, I remember there were a few of them that were like, what is that really that important?
00:22:05
Speaker
And so it required this belief and conviction that like, hey, this matters.
00:22:07
Speaker
This is going to be there, even though there's no data or there's not a lot of data yet that suggests it.
00:22:12
Speaker
And so to Kat's point on it, exciting.
00:22:14
Speaker
Having founders that are building non-consensus stuff that like oftentimes other people are like, oh, that's not really needed.
00:22:21
Speaker
And then to watch it come forth and be needed is so fun.
00:22:24
Speaker
And thank goodness he built the camera that way because my 18 month old child snuck out the door and it caught her because it saw the ground.
00:22:35
Speaker
So seconds after she escaped my home, the camera caught it.
00:22:41
Speaker
So I sent it to Tanner like one, I'm not a bad mom.
00:22:44
Speaker
We got her seconds after, but like, check out this camera tracking my child and alerting me.
Reflecting on Venture Capital Growth
00:22:49
Speaker
I need that camera.
00:22:51
Speaker
Now the door locks immediately after it's closed.
00:22:54
Speaker
Thank you to Vivint.
00:22:55
Speaker
Yeah.
00:22:55
Speaker
This isn't a Vivint ad.
00:22:56
Speaker
But we're sharing cool products on this.
00:22:58
Speaker
Yeah.
00:22:59
Speaker
Let's get into the ecosystem and a little bit of the things that we are building and that you're helping build as VCs.
00:23:05
Speaker
And let's talk about sort of the last 5 to 10 years and the way that the industry has shifted in VC and the entrepreneurship ecosystem.
00:23:14
Speaker
When I first learned of venture, it's when I joined Degree and was told, you'll get your paycheck when we get this money closed.
00:23:21
Speaker
And I was like, wait a second.
00:23:24
Speaker
You can call yourself a business and not have revenue.
00:23:27
Speaker
That's how I got to know venture.
00:23:30
Speaker
And that was back in 2012.
00:23:33
Speaker
It's been so cool to see the ecosystem evolve.
00:23:36
Speaker
There's been some really incredible funds here for a long time, long before 2012.
00:23:43
Speaker
But the amount of capital that is now flowing into this ecosystem is vastly different today than it was back then.
00:23:51
Speaker
and feel lucky to be a part of a firm that had a key part in that evolution.
00:23:57
Speaker
But it's also been cool to see the amount of companies that are now being started.
00:24:05
Speaker
So it's this virtuous cycle of companies exit, more founders understand the journey, and then they go and ask for money.
00:24:12
Speaker
And then more money flows into the ecosystem because there's more startups.
00:24:17
Speaker
So it's a very rich, thriving ecosystem at this point.
00:24:22
Speaker
And we are seeing companies across a lot of industries being started.
00:24:27
Speaker
The U having a massive impact in the biotech and health sciences side, down at Silicon Slopes, all of the exits that are now breeding more SaaS companies and FinTech really coming online over the past five to six years because of some of the
00:24:44
Speaker
behemoths coming here.
00:24:46
Speaker
We got the Divi exit.
00:24:47
Speaker
We got MX doing great things.
00:24:50
Speaker
I could go on and on and on about the amount of companies.
00:24:54
Speaker
But success breeds success.
00:24:56
Speaker
And more money coming in breeds more success.
Personal Success Practices
00:25:01
Speaker
Yeah, I totally agree.
00:25:02
Speaker
I remember when I was graduating, I was deciding whether to go to Vivint, which was, I guess, more startup-y or Amazon.
00:25:07
Speaker
And I asked probably 20 different people.
00:25:10
Speaker
And I think one person told me to go to Vivint because at the time, it just was not socially acceptable.
00:25:16
Speaker
It wasn't cool to do.
00:25:17
Speaker
Undergrads, different systems pushed you to go to consulting or banking or other big firms.
00:25:22
Speaker
And now you're seeing kids graduate from whether it's undergrad or MBA and join a startup directly.
00:25:28
Speaker
And so it's been fun to watch that transition.
00:25:31
Speaker
Then I realized like, okay, we're starting to make some movement.
00:25:33
Speaker
And to Kat's point, we're diversifying our industries.
00:25:36
Speaker
We have great SaaS companies that's been leveraged in fintech companies.
00:25:40
Speaker
Now we have a lot more consumer companies.
00:25:42
Speaker
And so I'm excited to see that both in Utah and in Colorado.
00:25:46
Speaker
Colorado has probably even a broader breadth of companies to see that happen as the ecosystems mature.
00:25:54
Speaker
Tanner, we like to ask everyone on this podcast the same question as we wrap up.
00:25:58
Speaker
And so I would love to know from you, what is an effective practice that you've implemented in your work or personal life that you think has had a great impact on your success?
00:26:08
Speaker
For me, it's been just reading a lot of reading.
00:26:13
Speaker
Books have actually helped me, I think, get two jobs.
00:26:17
Speaker
I remember when I was interviewing to become a product manager with a great guy named Brian Brower, I had just read Creativity Inc, which is by Ed Catmull, a U of U grad who founded Pixar.
00:26:27
Speaker
And we were able to connect over that at our lunch at Lehigh Inn and In-N-Out because we had read the same book and we were able to talk and geek out on that and what that meant and what that meant for product experiences.
00:26:38
Speaker
And then the second time I can think of that happening is with Dalton actually at Kickstart.
00:26:41
Speaker
Dalton likes a lot of esoteric sort of material.
00:26:44
Speaker
And we had both read this book called Homo Deus and Sapiens.
00:26:47
Speaker
Sapiens is a much more popular one than Homo Deus is a follow on to that.
00:26:50
Speaker
And we ended up chatting a bunch about that and developed a strong relationship because of that book.
00:26:55
Speaker
So for me, reading and being really just curious has helped me to try to at least be smart or sound smart.
00:27:03
Speaker
I feel like you are smart.
00:27:04
Speaker
I was calling out for some validation there.
00:27:05
Speaker
So I appreciate that, Karen.
00:27:06
Speaker
Yeah, I'm here for you.
00:27:08
Speaker
Books are great.
00:27:09
Speaker
Books are great.
00:27:11
Speaker
I don't even have as good a story.
00:27:12
Speaker
One thing that helped me get my first job was having the same coat as the person I was interviewing with.
00:27:17
Speaker
And so mine's a lot more shallow.
00:27:19
Speaker
So let's just like...
00:27:21
Speaker
Have a blue coat.
00:27:22
Speaker
Anyway, Tanner and Kat, thank you so much for joining the episode today.
00:27:27
Speaker
Thank you.
00:27:27
Speaker
Fun to be on.
00:27:28
Speaker
Thanks everybody.
00:27:30
Speaker
And of course, thank you for listening as we dive deep into what it takes to create the perfect pitch.
00:27:34
Speaker
If you want to learn more about our investors, Tanner Potter and Kat Kennedy from kickstart, we'll have a link to their profiles and longer bios in our show notes at kickstartfund.com.
Conclusion and Additional Resources
00:27:43
Speaker
And hopefully that tree ballet photo as well.
00:27:47
Speaker
You can listen to more episodes of Perfect Pitch wherever you listen to your podcast.
00:27:50
Speaker
And if you like what you're learning, leave us a reviewer rating.
00:27:53
Speaker
We'll be back next time with more insights from entrepreneurs and the investors who fund them.
00:27:57
Speaker
So be sure to subscribe so you don't miss a thing.