Transcript
Speaker: Can VCs be founders too?
Speaker: Today, we're talking with Kickstart's founding partners to understand how Kickstart was kickstarted.
Speaker: Join us in today's conversation with investors, Gavin Christensen, Dalton Wright, and Alex Sof, as we bring you both sides of A Perfect Pitch.
Speaker: Perfect Pitch is a podcast from Kickstart that reveals the minds of both investors and entrepreneurs throughout a startup's journey.
Speaker: I'm your host, Karen Zunlick, and I'm really excited to introduce you to the team today.
Speaker: Gavin and Dalton, you're both familiar voices on the show, and we're excited to have you back.
Speaker: As always, we'll have a link to their bios in our show notes.
Speaker: And today we're joined by a longtime Kickstart partner, new guest to the show, Alex Soph.
Speaker: Alex, welcome.
Speaker: Great to be here.
Speaker: He's very excited to be here.
Speaker: We're going to learn a lot more about you in this episode.
Speaker: But to summarize, you graduated from the University of Utah with your master's degree in accounting.
Speaker: Your career started at EY, where you provided assurance and advisory services.
Speaker: And after that, you were the director of finance at Signal Peak Ventures.
Speaker: Today, you're a general partner and CFO at Kickstart.
Speaker: And obviously, we jumped over a lot between your days at Signal Peak and today.
Speaker: But before we jump into the good stuff about how Kickstart got started, what else should we know about you?
Speaker: Huge fan of Halloween.
Speaker: We do a fun spook alley every year with five fog machines, probably 12 to 13 animatronics, lasers, the whole deal.
Speaker: Will we be publicizing your address?
Speaker: Maybe we could post some photos though, because it really is amazing.
Speaker: We're excited to have you.
Speaker: Gavin, we'll start with you because you were the visionary for Kickstart.
Speaker: Tell us a bit about what you were doing before Kickstart.
Speaker: As an aside, Kez, I would say getting Al on the podcast, it's a new moment for the podcast.
Speaker: I know.
Speaker: He doesn't seek a lot of attention.
Speaker: And so getting him on for this episode is a special moment for all of us.
Speaker: There's no going back, Al.
Speaker: He may find he just likes it.
Speaker: My background prior to Kickstart was I was a BY undergrad, spent some time in consulting, came back and joined a venture firm called vSpring, which was a very entrepreneurial shop.
Speaker: It was really the first fund.
Speaker: There was others, but they really planted their flag in Utah.
Speaker: And it was founded by Greg Warnock and Paul Alstrom.
Speaker: And they attracted an amazing team of young people and they really were focused on, hey, we're going to get this ecosystem going.
Speaker: And so they raised a bunch of capital and hired a bunch of people and did a bunch of deals.
Speaker: Joining that team, I really fell in love with doing venture capital in Utah and just how interesting and stimulating it was.
Speaker: When I was at BYU, prior to my LDS mission, I was going to be a literature professor because I loved writing and reading and I loved discussion, but I loved just like the intellectual kind of
Speaker: I don't know, back and forth of that process.
Speaker: And I got back from a mission out of Norway.
Speaker: Now we say that it was amazing, but it made me pretty pragmatic.
Speaker: I came back with an appreciation with how hard life can be.
Speaker: And it was like, you know what?
Speaker: I almost felt this is tongue in cheek, but I feel like maybe I don't need to take a kind of vow of poverty and go be a liberal arts professor.
Speaker: I can...
Speaker: Maybe read and write and teach and do something else.
Speaker: And what I found in venture capital was just incredible variety.
Speaker: I fell in love with the psychological challenge of helping entrepreneurs navigate all the challenges of building something special.
Speaker: That was my process during business school was really coming to terms with that and saying, wow, I can't let go of this industry.
Speaker: And I was so lucky to be part of vSpring that really let young people do irresponsible things like myself, sit on boards, help with fundraising.
Speaker: It was amazing.
Speaker: And ironically, this is how vSpring was.
Speaker: I tried to leave, but they kept me on boards.
Speaker: Like it was funny.
Speaker: I was at Kellogg in Chicago and I spent the summer with Google.
Speaker: This was an...
Speaker: And so it was a really exciting time to be part of Google.
Speaker: But I just realized that I just had fallen too much in love with venture capital.
Speaker: I spent a lot of my time at Kellogg working on what we call the Kellogg Venture Fund Project, which really was a seed fund.
Speaker: And spending a lot of time thinking about what a seed fund model would look like, what would make it work, what were the levers and kind of as an academic exercise that eventually grew into a passion for me.
Speaker: And I started to have conversations with Paul Ostrom and Dinesh at vSpring of coming back to vSpring.
Speaker: and taken over their New Mexico office.
Speaker: They needed someone to take that over.
Speaker: And I had framed it as, hey, if I come back, I'd love to move out of the garage, so to speak.
Speaker: I'd love to have a little more autonomy and maybe be able to do this seed fund idea.
Speaker: And Paul had been working on a seed fund for Utah along with University of Utah and other stakeholders.
Speaker: Fast forward to when I rejoined vSpring, those two kind of efforts came together.
Speaker: There was some energy to do a seed fund.
Speaker: Some of that was frustrated energy because it was hard to get everybody to cooperate.
Speaker: And I stepped into that with the vSpring gang.
Speaker: And that was the early kind of energy that eventually became Kickstart Fund One, which we had a first close of vSpring and University of Utah and some angel groups and a local bank, allied bank in April of 08.
Speaker: Everything felt really exciting.
Speaker: and really hopeful.
Speaker: And I think this is about when you enter Dalton, just to introduce where Al and Dalton were on this.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So my earliest recollections of kickstart come from the advertisement.
Speaker: Was it like an adventurer's wanted ad in the newspaper, like Shackleton?
Speaker: That would have been amazing.
Speaker: That was, you know, the Shackleton imagery in the Polar Explorers was always at the very beginning.
Speaker: That was on the website.
Speaker: I remember that.
Speaker: We put it on the website.
Speaker: It was just like a passion I had and it just worked its way over to... The call to adventure.
Speaker: Yeah, call to adventure.
Speaker: Call to do something that probably will fail.
Speaker: But if successful, you know, glory will be ours.
Speaker: Yeah, that's right.
Speaker: That's right.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: What's interesting about my journey to Kickstart was that I was able to work with some of the original founders of vSpring, even before I had joined Kickstart.
Speaker: So Kickstart was being launched under the vSpring umbrella.
Speaker: And at the time, I had been working for Greg Warnock, who split off, went and did something else outside of vSpring.
Speaker: Now he's, of course, the managing director of Mercado.
Speaker: At the time, I was helping him with a little fund called Gazelle.
Speaker: And that's when...
Speaker: Gavin was launching Kickstart.
Speaker: There wasn't a seed fund in Utah at the time, just to be clear.
Speaker: There were other investors who would write Series A checks, but seed really in Utah wasn't a thing yet.
Speaker: And I would just interject and say seed was almost nowhere in the world.
Speaker: There was a few seed funds in California, maybe a few in the East Coast, and that was it.
Speaker: And it wasn't obvious that Utah as an ecosystem could even support a dedicated seed strategy.
Speaker: In fact, very few people believed that back then.
Speaker: But I was so excited to get the experience working at the earliest stage of venture capital.
Speaker: I had already had a little bit of experience as an entrepreneur, had a little bit of experience.
Speaker: doing investments, but really was still very much a student and was interested in putting myself in a position to be close to the great entrepreneurs of this ecosystem.
Speaker: And when Kickstarter was launching, I thought more than anything, that's the place where I want to be to interface, interact with amazing entrepreneurs are going to do big things.
Speaker: And so I threw my hat in the ring.
Speaker: There's only one seed fund launching in Utah and there's one position available at that fund and I'm going to be that person.
Speaker: But, you know, yeah, my early memories I have from the interview process was engaging through the HireVue.
Speaker: So HireVue was one of the portfolio companies that we wish we had added back then.
Speaker: There's probably more to...
Speaker: unpack there, but we were very evaluation sensitive back then.
Speaker: And so the technology that we use to do the interview process, the hiring process where they sent me a webcam, I was visiting my brother in Michigan.
Speaker: And it's interesting that we were testing that technology so early just in terms of our ability to interview remotely.
Speaker: And yet we still got it wrong in terms of not making the investment decision.
Speaker: So I did the hire view interview, went well, and was invited back for an in-person interview.
Speaker: And I remember I met with Gavin, I met with Paul Allstrom, I met with Dennis Wood, and these are all familiar names at vSpring.
Speaker: And at the time they told me this is going to be a $20 million fund.
Speaker: And the role that we're hiring for is $75,000 a year or something like that.
Speaker: For me at the time, just to be clear, $75,000 a year was much more than I had ever made at that point in my life.
Speaker: So it was pretty fresh out of undergrad.
Speaker: Everything was just perfect.
Speaker: It's the industry I wanted to be in.
Speaker: It was the group I wanted to work with, the people I wanted to be around.
Speaker: The compensation was phenomenal.
Speaker: And I wanted this.
Speaker: And so I lobbied anybody I knew.
Speaker: that could possibly give me any sort of an advantage.
Speaker: I had people who worked at vSpring that I was calling up saying, hey, I don't know if you remember, but we interacted during this interview years ago when I was doing this.
Speaker: And would you mind saying something to Gavin?
Speaker: I probably contacted 10 different people because I wanted it so bad.
Speaker: And I was lucky enough to get hired.
Speaker: And so it was the end of the summer.
Speaker: I remember I was wrapping up the summer.
Speaker: I hadn't yet accepted a job position that I was looking for.
Speaker: I was golfing with my dad and I got the call from Gavin saying, Hey Dalton, actually, I don't know if it's worth saying back then I went by Justin, but it's worth it.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So a lot of people in the early days of Kickstarter remember me as Justin.
Speaker: That's my middle name.
Speaker: So Gavin said, Hey, good news, bad news.
Speaker: Good news is
Speaker: we've conducted the process and you're the person that we want to hire.
Speaker: Bad news is fundraising is going much slower than we expected.
Speaker: We're not going to have a $20 million fund like we expected.
Speaker: Right now we're at four.
Speaker: We don't know when we're going to raise any more money.
Speaker: And so if you're still in, we can pay you $2,000 a month.
Speaker: And the joke that we've had over all these years is that Gavin was too respectful to call that a salary.
Speaker: He just said, well, it'll be a stipend.
Speaker: And that was an easy decision.
Speaker: I didn't even have to think twice about it.
Speaker: I just said, absolutely.
Speaker: I'm in.
Speaker: I would have done it for a thousand.
Speaker: I probably would have paid a thousand dollars to have that job, to be honest.
Speaker: But for me, it was an opportunity to learn venture capital, learn seed stage venture capital, actually do live deals and learn from some of the best in the business who were
Speaker: At the time, it wasn't proven that they were some of the best in the business, but it was early in developing a reputation, a brand.
Speaker: And I got to throw in before it was obvious that it was going to work.
Speaker: Because I might interject here.
Speaker: And just for our listeners, for those that are younger and thinking about their careers, I think there's a lot to learn from the Dalton joining Kickstart story.
Speaker: Because when you think about early in your career, the thing you don't have is network.
Speaker: You don't have experience.
Speaker: you don't have the momentum that allows you to go on to do other things and to make money and to have an impact.
Speaker: And so Dalton popped in the interview process because of his ambition, because of his passion for what we were doing and his hustle, in addition to intellect and the things he'd done.
Speaker: So I think...
Speaker: Him really being willing, and we'll talk more about his career arc, but him being willing to be very flexible on pay meant that he really made a big kind of deposit in the relationship with myself and others at vSpring and Kickstart to where his role went from being an analyst to being like part of the founding team here that really helped shape the fund and then set him up
Speaker: He really played the long game.
Speaker: And I think so many young people, that's such a great lesson to learn if you want to accelerate your career is to just recognize that you're not optimizing for title or money early.
Speaker: If you optimize for those, you're not going to have the opportunities to do when you are willing to put some, you know, quote unquote, skin in the game.
Speaker: Yeah, he was really optimizing for learning and growth and like establishing that foundation.
Speaker: Yeah, and also I think my personal situation, it wasn't like...
Speaker: I had already had any type of an exit or a windfall that allowed me to be super flexible.
Speaker: It was just that I kept my burn rate low.
Speaker: And that's the other advice that I give to young people is keep your options open by not painting yourselves into a corner with how much money you're consuming or the lifestyle that you have to support.
Speaker: keep your options open.
Speaker: So when you think about how Kickstart pays its people, it charges a 2% management fee on the money under management and $4 million at 2% per year isn't enough.
Speaker: It covers the audit.
Speaker: But as far as actually paying the salaries, it was not yet a viable fund, but Gavin was able to make sacrifices.
Speaker: I was able to make some sacrifices until it became viable.
Speaker: The ability to maintain flexibility and prioritize learning and choosing who you get to work with and the type of work that you get to do.
Speaker: To me, that was worth a lot more than a higher salary.
Speaker: And I think the other thing I would say for those who are interested in getting into this business or I think this applies to other industries as well, not just venture capital.
Speaker: Are you benchmarking against your peers in terms of how much money they're making right out of undergraduate?
Speaker: What are the things that you're trying to compare yourself on?
Speaker: And I know there's a lot of pitfalls about comparing yourself, period, to other people.
Speaker: but you really know what matters to you.
Speaker: And I think so often people fall into the traps of, okay, it's like, you want to go get the more prestigious job that pays well, the recognized brand name right out of college.
Speaker: You want what you're doing to be seen as credible,
Speaker: prestigious, valuable.
Speaker: And a lot of times in the startup world, when I joined Kickstart, it wasn't prestigious, right?
Speaker: There was something that's prestigious about venture.
Speaker: I don't want to say that there's nothing prestigious.
Speaker: I clearly wanted something to do in this industry, but it was just a really half-baked strategy with a lot of lack of structure and a lot of risk.
Speaker: And when I told people,
Speaker: What I did, the only time I ever got any type of social proof or validation in the early days for what we were doing was when people confused us with Kickstarter.
Speaker: It's like, oh yeah, you guys, congratulations on all your success.
Speaker: I've heard about you.
Speaker: Actually, you haven't heard about us yet, probably because nobody has really.
Speaker: We barely matter in anybody's minds yet.
Speaker: And so I think investing and creating value for people who are doing interesting things early is, at least in my path, I found a lot of happiness by...
Speaker: Throwing in early with ambitious entrepreneurs who were trying to do something important and hard and challenging and doing everything I can to help those people be successful before it was obvious.
Speaker: And in that process, I became part of these stories.
Speaker: And I think too, what you're also speaking to is this like intentionality around it.
Speaker: It can be very easy when you're early on your career, I think.
Speaker: And I don't know, I'd be interested in thoughts on this too, to just be like, oh, it's going to stardust and luck.
Speaker: And I'm going to stumble into these really amazing opportunities because I've got this experience or this education, but you have to be very intentional and you have to hustle a lot to get this job that ended up only having a stipend.
Speaker: And it's just a lot of grit and grind in the beginning.
Speaker: Maybe the biggest theme that...
Speaker: is not obvious, it's just patience and belief in yourself and being patient with the process.
Speaker: Just backing up a little bit, thinking about my motivation, I'm not someone who grew up always wanting to start something.
Speaker: What happened is being at vSpring, I fell in love with being a venture capitalist.
Speaker: And I fell in love with the process and the actual work of that.
Speaker: And then they were good enough to me to say, hey, you take over this New Mexico office.
Speaker: We'll let you run with this seed fund thing.
Speaker: Now, the seed fund thing was an ash pile of dreams because there were several people that wanted to do it and there was a falling out and it wasn't perfect.
Speaker: It was a mess.
Speaker: But as I got into it, I realized that
Speaker: Whoa, okay.
Speaker: There's no way that this fails, which makes no sense actually, but I had so much belief in that.
Speaker: I credit the vSpring partners partly for this because they had so much conviction about where Utah was going.
Speaker: That became like just an axiom for Kickstarter.
Speaker: Yeah, Utah is going to happen.
Speaker: We're going to plant our flag.
Speaker: We're going to go early.
Speaker: And so many things happened to make Kickstart possible that needed to happen.
Speaker: For example, when I was at business school, I wrote this white paper about the rise of the Business Web 2.0, which at that time, there was like one SaaS company in the world.
Speaker: And the movement of business software to the cloud enabled really the most important category for seed funds to be part of.
Speaker: Because prior to that, like the nature of technology was such that like you really couldn't get it done with small money.
Speaker: Now,
Speaker: Plot twist, K1, our first fund, is not very successful.
Speaker: So we were still on the product market fit journey with K1, actually.
Speaker: And part of it was saying, you know what?
Speaker: We need to invest in way more software as a service than we did.
Speaker: And we did in our second fund is amazing.
Speaker: That was one of the big things we learned.
Speaker: But there's other so many important technology trends, societal trends, demographic things that happened in Utah that made Kickstart possible.
Speaker: There's always so many layers of
Speaker: and I guess it's one of the themes I want to make sure that comes through in this, it's like, it takes a team.
Speaker: I was the guy staying in the arena.
Speaker: Dalton was critical.
Speaker: Al, and we're going to talk to Al, get his take.
Speaker: He was critical in terms of allowing us to not run off the rails early, just from a,
Speaker: being organized standpoint and actually reporting out on what we were doing standpoint.
Speaker: And then we had multiple existential moments at Kickstart probably every few years for a while.
Speaker: It's only been four or five years that I don't lose literal sleep over existential risk for Kickstart.
Speaker: And so founding stories, they're not an event, they're a process.
Speaker: And especially in a venture fund, as we talked about this, that's one thing I would just underscore is a venture fund, it takes a while.
Speaker: And as the journey has gone, I found that I have as much satisfaction from the building of the firm and the culture of the firm and the building of the people in the firm as I do in the companies.
Speaker: That's given me equal amounts of satisfaction.
Speaker: I'm excited to like double click on some of those, but let's hear from Al.
Speaker: What were you thinking when Kickstart first started?
Speaker: So I think it was 02 or 03.
Speaker: I can't even remember.
Speaker: I was undergrad at the University of Utah, wrapping up an accounting degree, had a chance to do a busy season internship with Ernst & Young.
Speaker: It just felt like at the U, it was hard to join a big forward firm.
Speaker: It just was hard.
Speaker: They'd take one or two of us.
Speaker: Got super lucky that was able to join.
Speaker: And then it was really interesting.
Speaker: My first client was a small fund up in Park City called, I think it was Prospector Equity.
Speaker: Yeah, that's right.
Speaker: My second client was vSpring.
Speaker: And then my third client was DW Healthcare Partners, another sort of private equity fund up in Park City.
Speaker: And really what it was is I just got lucky.
Speaker: There was these two folks at Ernst & Young, Peter Wall and Kelly Robbins, that were both U of U grads, and they were just looking out for me.
Speaker: So they gave me this experience.
Speaker: I just remember sitting in that middle conference room at vSpring on that first time I was at the audit.
Speaker: I was like, man, there's an energy here.
Speaker: So I joined EY a couple of years later after I finished a master's degree and come back and got really lucky that the same two folks pulled me in on the funds again.
Speaker: I wanted that.
Speaker: I was asking for that.
Speaker: It was the best experience I had during the internship.
Speaker: And that sort of set off an annual three to four weeks at vSpring for five years.
Speaker: I'd go to vSpring, go do the audit for three to four weeks, got to know mostly the finance team and mostly just observed the other partners.
Speaker: I think I met Gavin once.
Speaker: This would have been 04 to 09 timeframe.
Speaker: But mostly just observed the partners, got really close with Travis, who's now the CFO at Signal Peak, and then Dave Anderson, who's the then CFO at vSpring.
Speaker: Unlike Dalton, that it was hard work, I got really lucky.
Speaker: I actually did.
Speaker: So this is some stardust.
Speaker: This is the stardust moment.
Speaker: My boss at the time, David Jolly, who was the managing partner at UI at the time, just great boss, great person to work with, got really close with him.
Speaker: It just so happened every year he would go skiing with Dave Anderson for about three or four days.
Speaker: I feel like they went up to the Stein Erikson.
Speaker: I might be misremembering that, but they would go up.
Speaker: see the downhill mogul competition, spend a couple of days skiing.
Speaker: They were counterparts at EY for a little bit.
Speaker: So David was just really close to the vSpring CFO.
Speaker: And I had expressed to David in the past that like, hey, I think venture capital is really interesting.
Speaker: I knew after four or five years at EY that I didn't want to be in public accounting forever, but enjoyed my time there.
Speaker: I also knew I didn't want to really be like a
Speaker: director of SEC reporting for some public company.
Speaker: It sounded as miserable as it sounds, but it just wasn't for me.
Speaker: I just knew the 500 page checklists were just not my thing.
Speaker: I think I was a decent auditor, but I just think it wasn't my thing.
Speaker: And so I got really lucky that one day David wanted to go to lunch with me.
Speaker: I think we had just wrapped up the vSpring audit about a month prior.
Speaker: And he's like, hey, I know you want to be at vSpring.
Speaker: Dave Anderson wants to hire you.
Speaker: They need some more help.
Speaker: And so that is just not how it usually goes at public accounting.
Speaker: Usually you go in and you tell them you're going to move on to something else and they try to keep you or they're mad at you or it's just...
Speaker: You leave them in a bad situation because you're leaving at a bad time.
Speaker: And I just got super lucky that I had a boss in David that was like, hey, go for it.
Speaker: No, just go for it.
Speaker: I know you want to be there.
Speaker: So let me help you be there.
Speaker: That is how I feel like everyone should be.
Speaker: I'm going to cut you off, but that would be an amazing experience for people if everyone had that support.
Speaker: It was really special.
Speaker: David just was a great person to work for.
Speaker: Maybe it says more about my abilities as an auditor.
Speaker: He's like, hey, maybe you should leave.
Speaker: So that was May of 2009.
Speaker: And what I would say is I joined...
Speaker: Knowing that I was going to be doing vSpring stuff, but also knowing like I was going to pick up this little thing, Kickstart, that I didn't really know much about because we did not at Kickstart at the time.
Speaker: And then I was going to pick up this other little sort of side thing called Alta Growth, which was a fund based in Mexico that we were also kind of doing some of the back office stuff for.
Speaker: I realized pretty quickly when I joined vSpring that I joined towards the tail end of a deployment cycle on a fund.
Speaker: So I joined Fund 3.
Speaker: After I joined, I feel like vSpring did...
Speaker: two more deals.
Speaker: I think they did Matchbin and Vutara.
Speaker: I think those were the final two V Spring deals.
Speaker: And I quickly realized all the energy was actually on with Kickstart because they were the one doing deals.
Speaker: And we were doing... Tiny deals.
Speaker: 100K, 200K deals.
Speaker: But all of the energy was there.
Speaker: And I wanted to sort of put more of my time at Tickstart, even though at the time, I think when I joined, it was 4 million.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: By, I want to say 2010, it was 8 million.
Speaker: So we had some sort of a fund to do.
Speaker: We were crushing it.
Speaker: Something.
Speaker: We had doubled.
Speaker: Doubled inside 2X to fund.
Speaker: But the energy was really fun and the need was there from the ecosystem standpoint.
Speaker: That's sort of my recollection of now we're going 14, 15 years ago.
Speaker: Help me be a fly on the wall back then.
Speaker: What was the day-to-day like for all of you?
Speaker: It's probably important to set the stage.
Speaker: So Dalton was on stipend.
Speaker: I was living in New Mexico when my family was there and I was spending a lot of time commuting back and forth.
Speaker: I think we just knew that we had this small little fund, say $4 million, maybe in 2010 became $8 million.
Speaker: We were trying to lead deals with 250K checks.
Speaker: We would be on the phone kind of dialing in syndicate dollars, 25K at a time.
Speaker: Like a really red hot seed deal that we would do back then would be like a million bucks, 750.
Speaker: And so it was logistically super challenging.
Speaker: We were making it work by being part of this larger fund.
Speaker: But that larger fund wasn't actively doing new deals after a while.
Speaker: And Paul had gone down to start a fund in Mexico.
Speaker: And eventually Dalton and I had a tough chat where I'm like, man, I feel so guilty that we're only paying you this amount of money.
Speaker: And this is an amazing opportunity for you to go join a fund that will likely have more money to put to work.
Speaker: Now, we just knew that we were in for a wilderness period, as one of my entrepreneurs says.
Speaker: We had a little bit of a grind to get to the next fund, to prove enough to get to the next fund.
Speaker: You also have to put yourself in the context of that time.
Speaker: Following the Great Recession, it just was not obvious that venture would ever recover.
Speaker: It was very existential for all of Utah Tech at the time.
Speaker: Our belief level, I think, was really high.
Speaker: Weirdly high.
Speaker: We just put our heads down and survived.
Speaker: It just wasn't obvious, as Gavin pointed out, that the market would recover, the venture capital would come back, or that seed stage would be on a path to become something in Utah.
Speaker: So not only were we trying to do something that hadn't been done before in the state, but it was also in the context of dramatically deteriorating market conditions.
Speaker: And I don't remember feeling pessimistic, but I remember feeling like the uncertainty, the deep uncertainty, maybe to answer the question about being a fly on the wall.
Speaker: So from my perspective,
Speaker: In those days, I was spending a lot of time in the vSpring office because this was being developed under the vSpring umbrella.
Speaker: Gavin was commuting in on Mondays, typically for partner meetings, flying in from New Mexico.
Speaker: I think I was the only full-time employee at Kickstart, maybe.
Speaker: I think you were still working more hours for Kickstart than I was at the time.
Speaker: But, you know, I was still... I was all in.
Speaker: I had still had roles at vSpring that I had to...
Speaker: Manage, yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: My recollection of that time was just deep gratitude to work with vSpring, gratitude to work with somebody like Gavin as a mentor, gratitude to be in the game, be in the industry.
Speaker: So I spent a lot of time in those early days trying to establish credibility for Kickstart's due diligence process.
Speaker: So it was hard to raise money.
Speaker: We would commit 250K or something like that to a round.
Speaker: And we were trying to get another 250K from a bunch of angels or we were dialing West Coast firms and they were saying, remove your companies to the Bay Area before we're even going to consider funding them.
Speaker: We don't invest in Utah.
Speaker: That was the attitude that we were getting, especially in that environment where people were, I think, retrenching in the venture industry.
Speaker: People weren't looking to expand their investment practice into Utah at the time.
Speaker: And I would say follow-on rounds were super rare.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And so we just never assumed there was follow-on capital after us.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: We were hoping and there were some exceptions.
Speaker: And so we really focused on, okay, what can we accomplish with this money, which is too little.
Speaker: We realized in fund one, we were funding companies to be about halfway to somewhere interesting.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And we were also funding companies in some cases weren't particularly capital efficient.
Speaker: We were investing in some hardware businesses.
Speaker: To Gavin's earlier point about this shift towards the cloud, we didn't really hit our B2B SaaS source.
Speaker: stride and actually pick winners until we were investing out of fund two.
Speaker: Fund one, you'll see a kind of a hodgepodge of medical devices.
Speaker: Super res, microscopy, cancer drug.
Speaker: The original thesis was we had some universities as LPs.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: We thought that the commercialization engine pointed out a seed fund would be this incredible spark for great companies.
Speaker: It can be, I would say probably one of our biggest lessons learned was like,
Speaker: Tech is awesome, but who cares without great entrepreneurs?
Speaker: And so we're backing people and they create great tech.
Speaker: And if you spend something out of university, that's exciting and awesome, but you're going to completely remake it from scratch.
Speaker: And so if you don't have the people who want to be entrepreneurs,
Speaker: then that's tough.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I mean, so much of Fund One was a tech commercialization story because when we were out telling the story of Kickstart and raising money for Kickstart, it was the story of bringing the community together, a vehicle that was going to unite the ecosystem, align the ecosystem to support the earliest founders and accelerate the pace of innovation in the ecosystem.
Speaker: And we had an investment committee, people from Brian Cummings and Ed Weinshanker.
Speaker: Mike Alder.
Speaker: Mike Alder.
Speaker: Mike Alder.
Speaker: Guy Latender.
Speaker: Guy Latender.
Speaker: Brian Ritchie.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And I'm sure we're missing some names.
Speaker: Doug Wells.
Speaker: We'll have to add in the notes because there were a lot of people early on that really took the time to attend those investment committee meetings and give us their perspective on the decisions that we were making.
Speaker: This idea, though, of what does it mean to have found product market fit as a venture fund, I think, is an interesting question.
Speaker: What does it mean to go zero to one as a venture fund?
Speaker: It's very different than a startup.
Speaker: But I think of Fund One as a little bit of a proof of concept where what ultimately worked for Kickstart was not the original story that we were pitching.
Speaker: We actually had to continue to refine our investment strategy and move with the market.
Speaker: And in hindsight, when you look back at the deals that we missed in fund one, it was a narrow path to having a great fund.
Speaker: Now, these subsequent funds that we've raised, we've made a lot of great investments, but we've missed a lot of great investments.
Speaker: And we still are able to put together good funds, even though we missed some great investments.
Speaker: In fund one days, if you miss the one or two fund makers in your region, you don't have another shot at getting a decent fund.
Speaker: And so most of our investments, you see a lot in there that were kind of IP dependent and you're based off of university research.
Speaker: And the companies that we actually missed were, think of them as the college dropout SaaS founders.
Speaker: They weren't trying to negotiate a licensing agreement with the university to commercialize IP.
Speaker: They had spotted a market problem and they were going at it and they were going to build the product to meet that problem or solve that problem.
Speaker: They weren't starting with the product and looking for the problem.
Speaker: You could say some of those founders that we backed in Fund One, they had these...
Speaker: impressive resumes.
Speaker: They had a lot of academic training, let's say, but they didn't have the instincts for commercialization.
Speaker: They didn't have the same grit level in terms of really going to market with whatever they had with very little resource that we found with the folks that we missed.
Speaker: We backed some great founders, but this is an interesting kind of moment at Kickstart, right?
Speaker: 08 was an earlier time for this ecosystem.
Speaker: There wasn't as many founders and leaders that really knew the process.
Speaker: And the process matters is something we have learned at Kickstart.
Speaker: I remember you tell the story of, we won't say the company, but a fund one company that between the closing of the fundraise and the first board meeting, they come to the first board meeting and say, we're out of money.
Speaker: Well, it was actually better than that.
Speaker: And by the way, this was somebody who was an experienced founder, but it was like, we're out of money.
Speaker: I fired my co-founder.
Speaker: We were in default of our lease and they're one of our biggest investors and we're in a lawsuit with them.
Speaker: That was like the update.
Speaker: Terrific.
Speaker: First board meeting.
Speaker: We always joke about first board meetings, but I tell you, K1 first board meetings are a class of their own because it was kind of like, okay, do we still have a company?
Speaker: It was a bumpy time.
Speaker: I'll tell one more story, which kind of illustrates a little bit of
Speaker: what K1 was like.
Speaker: So when I'd come from New Mexico, you know, Kickstarter didn't really have much of an expense account.
Speaker: We had none, right?
Speaker: And so I would stay with my folks.
Speaker: And I was working a lot of hours, as Dalton was saying.
Speaker: I was like all in.
Speaker: for a long time with this.
Speaker: And I would come back late at night to my family's house.
Speaker: My parents are like super like safe, conservative people.
Speaker: And so it's always locked and they sleep very soundly.
Speaker: I would be like knocking on the door.
Speaker: And this is like one in the morning.
Speaker: And it was weird.
Speaker: I was like, oh, here I am in like high school again, locked out like late one or two in the morning coming back from the office.
Speaker: I would end up ringing the doorbell, which is I felt really bad about.
Speaker: And they'd come in like, oh, honey.
Speaker: But they didn't, they wouldn't give you a key.
Speaker: That's the punchline is I was like, hey, mom, maybe I could get a key, you know, that way I wouldn't have to wake you guys up.
Speaker: And she's like, oh, honey, what if you lost it?
Speaker: And for me, it was one of those illustrations of like, hey, you can never really leave.
Speaker: Like, here I am, not a huge fund, but like $8 million, you know, and like all these investors are believing in us.
Speaker: And my parents still don't trust me with a house.
Speaker: I have my own house in New Mexico and a family, you know, it's like, no.
Speaker: Oh, honey, what if you lost it?
Speaker: What if you lost it?
Speaker: So anyway, that was a humbling time.
Speaker: So that was like four years of that.
Speaker: And I think that's one of the themes that we all experience is like, hey, there's a volume of effort and work that goes into this process.
Speaker: But I'm not sure if we could have gotten over the hump if the volume of work had not been there.
Speaker: My quick fly on the wall would be, there's just a lot of change with what we'll call the mothership with vSpring too.
Speaker: navigating that as Paul embarked to go down to Mexico to do Alta Ventures.
Speaker: And eventually by 2012, he had Ron Hines and Brandon Tidwell come in.
Speaker: I just remember being...
Speaker: know, just a little unsettled just as far as what my role was.
Speaker: I just tried to use it as the opportunity to just observe and learn.
Speaker: And I'm a quiet person and I would say just that's the way I learn is observing.
Speaker: So, you know, do want to echo what Dalton said is, you know, a lot of gratitude for those Beespring founders that certainly treated me amazing.
Speaker: It's funny, Thanksgiving week, I always think of how nice Dinesh was.
Speaker: He'd come around and
Speaker: Usually the Wednesday before and give everyone a $25 gift card to Smith's or something.
Speaker: He just felt like a million bucks.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: But just classy people letting me work 75% of my time with their stuff, but 25% of my stuff with Kickstart.
Speaker: But like I said, all the energy was with Gavin.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: It was hard to have him down in New Mexico.
Speaker: Yeah, it was tough.
Speaker: That was the challenge.
Speaker: It was exhausting for him trying to learn about Kickstarter.
Speaker: It was hard because most of this was going to be over the phone.
Speaker: You were up here a lot, but there's a limit on how much you can be up here with having a young family and stuff.
Speaker: So I just remember...
Speaker: Just very different when Fund 2 came along and you're here full-time, fully present.
Speaker: And I just think that lifted a burden off of you and off of the fund in general.
Speaker: There is something to be said, and we've talked about it with our founding teams.
Speaker: In some ways, it's actually just a miracle that Kickstart worked at all.
Speaker: It is.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: You being there, Dalton being here, I'm spending a little bit of time on it.
Speaker: Frankly, all of your LPs are here.
Speaker: It's a miracle that it... No, absolutely.
Speaker: And one theme I'd love to summarize that with is what are the uncomfortable things that you're willing to do that other people are not willing to do so you can do your special thing?
Speaker: There's a lot of smart people in the world.
Speaker: There's a lot of hustle.
Speaker: But what are you willing to do
Speaker: And I think with Kickstart, one of the things I learned is that, let's say you have some brands on your resume, you've been to a hot business school, and there was definitely that period where I had a lot of peers who were like, Kickstart?
Speaker: That's not even cool.
Speaker: It was kind of like, ooh, wow, that sounds lame.
Speaker: It never bugged me because I was always like, hey, whatever.
Speaker: I know how fun this is, and I believe, and I find this very meaningful.
Speaker: You just have to...
Speaker: let go that social proof way of defining your life, I think is certainly one aspect.
Speaker: And I think another aspect is sometimes you have to just survive first before you can thrive.
Speaker: And so for Dalton, that meant taking another job.
Speaker: His total early time at Kickstart wasn't that long, but he made a big impact and we stayed close and we'll go to the next chapter of the story soon.
Speaker: And he was like my obvious first call and saying, we need a principal, actually a partner.
Speaker: And more than a stipend this time.
Speaker: So, you know, we'll tell that part of the story.
Speaker: And for Al, it was hanging around the hoop and saying, oh boy, the mothership is changing and where do I need to go?
Speaker: And for me, without getting too detailed, one of the most painful aspects of my life and my career was some challenges in my family that meant that I moved from New Mexico back to Utah to be around family for some hard things that happened to our family.
Speaker: And then the vSpring situation being tricky enough in terms of management fee where essentially they gave me an ultimatum saying, look, we can pay part of your salary, but we can't do it if you're not in New Mexico.
Speaker: And so me saying, kickstart's not ready for me to be full time.
Speaker: And so I have to turn my sad little family that's pretty shattered around and go back to New Mexico.
Speaker: That was a really shattering day for me.
Speaker: But it was like, I'm not ready to let go of this dream of Kickstart.
Speaker: And I've seen many of our entrepreneurs do something like this, which is like, hey, I'm going to go without salary.
Speaker: I'm going to get a part-time job, which is sort of what I was doing, so that I could stay with the dream.
Speaker: I'm so glad that I did it, but it was very far from obvious.
Speaker: And of course, your family pays a price for that kind of whiplash.
Speaker: So those are the kind of moments that led up to fun too.
Speaker: And this was not like up into the right.
Speaker: This was grind and believe and survive.
Speaker: But we did prove enough, I think, with those early days to earn the right to start talking about a fun too.
Speaker: And actually...
Speaker: When Brandon and Ron came and took over with Scott vSpring, it actually really created a unique window for Kickstart to spin out and be independent.
Speaker: One of the great things about the early vSpring crew is we had all these talented people, Jaron Paul, Jeff Curl, Clark Miyazaki, Ildar, Fazljanov.
Speaker: I'm thinking who else was part of that crew?
Speaker: Matt Hoffman.
Speaker: Yeah, JD Gardner.
Speaker: Anyways, a great crew.
Speaker: Clark and I had been in touch and he had an entrepreneurial background, really complimented my background, which had been largely in VC.
Speaker: Eventually, I asked him to team up with me to do fun too.
Speaker: And we went out and pulled in many of our existing LPs.
Speaker: We lost some as well.
Speaker: Actually, we lost most.
Speaker: Ah!
Speaker: If I'm honest.
Speaker: But not all.
Speaker: Yeah, not all.
Speaker: I was going to say like we lost 60, 70%.
Speaker: Yeah, at least.
Speaker: And so it's a really tough fundraise.
Speaker: And I think it was very eye-opening for Clark as we went through that fundraise.
Speaker: Just very different to fundraise for a company versus a fund.
Speaker: But we were able to secure in 2012 enough LP interest to have a $26 million fund.
Speaker: I remember one specific meeting with a lot of our existing LPs.
Speaker: I think we had a bunch of universities involved anyway, and somebody from the state was getting involved and saying, we figured out it's illegal for these endowments to invest in Kickstart.
Speaker: It was devastating to us, right?
Speaker: It was like, what?
Speaker: It was just so crazy.
Speaker: And there was these bureaucratic reasons and blah, blah.
Speaker: But I remember Clark getting really red-faced and being like, you have got to be kidding me.
Speaker: And it's just, it's a process of raising money for a fund.
Speaker: It's a different skill set.
Speaker: It takes a lot of patience.
Speaker: But anyway, we closed down on that fund and got a deal done to spin Kickstarter out of vSpring and
Speaker: is I think about a bunch of funds here locally.
Speaker: Essentially every seed fund locally in Utah and throughout the region started as part of another fund or part of a family office.
Speaker: Essentially had like an incubating entity.
Speaker: And our good fortune was our incubating entity was troubled and we were troubled.
Speaker: And so it was pretty easy to part ways because we were like, we don't need each other's troubles.
Speaker: And at the time, I think that incubating entity thought, wow, good luck with that Kickstarter thing.
Speaker: And we're probably thinking the same thing.
Speaker: Good luck with that, your thing.
Speaker: And we had a pretty clean launching from that perspective.
Speaker: Just inserting a personal moment.
Speaker: One of the options on the table was just pay an outsource group to do all this sort of back office CFO type stuff.
Speaker: And I was just like, you can pay me less.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And I'll do anything else you want me to do.
Speaker: And so that was my plea and sell, which is I'll do anything.
Speaker: I sort of happily took a role of, yeah, I'll schedule every deal screen.
Speaker: I'll follow up with the entrepreneurs.
Speaker: I'll go buy drinks.
Speaker: It was just three of us.
Speaker: And you guys were doing the same.
Speaker: We'll just divide.
Speaker: And my strategy has always been do a bunch of stuff that no one else in the room wants to do.
Speaker: It might lead to some job security.
Speaker: So you have, you know, I'm sure many listeners have had parents that have been out of a job at times and I certainly had.
Speaker: And so that sort of sticks with you.
Speaker: So my mind was like, do the stuff that no one else wants to do because it's so boring or so confusing or so stupid.
Speaker: And that's why even to this day, there's some stuff I'm not going to give up.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: As soon as someone else knows how to do it, I think I'm expendable and you can show me the door.
Speaker: So I just remember those early days when Clark joined and we sort of broke off on our own.
Speaker: Now, coincidentally, we sublet from V-Spring.
Speaker: They were super nice.
Speaker: We sort of built this awesome little space attached with a shared kitchen with the Signal Peak guys.
Speaker: And that was great.
Speaker: But it was a lot of fun because we had...
Speaker: A fund that we felt like, man, we could do some real damage.
Speaker: Like three X fund size.
Speaker: This is insane.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: A couple of moments for me that I remember.
Speaker: One is we did that first capital call.
Speaker: And I remember when it hit our bank account, which was finally our bank account.
Speaker: When we'd like, we could actually check our signing.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And I, whatever that first, it was, let's say it was a million five.
Speaker: I remember thinking there is a million five in our bank account.
Speaker: This is nuts.
Speaker: I can't believe they did.
Speaker: I can't believe they did.
Speaker: And then you get used to it after that.
Speaker: But it was like that moment of this is real.
Speaker: This is happening.
Speaker: Like we're out of the basement, even though we're moved into the guest house.
Speaker: But we kept the same structure.
Speaker: We kept the investment committee.
Speaker: Many of these same people continued with us.
Speaker: Some of the things I learned as I grew up in venture capital is I just felt so strongly about the Utah strategy.
Speaker: This is going to work as long as we don't blow ourselves up.
Speaker: Product market fit in a venture fund is creating a culture and a strategy that's repeatable, that makes good decisions, that you get people together.
Speaker: And because of your culture, because of your process, you make better decisions than you would individually.
Speaker: And I had seen how other funds, if you got that wrong, like you could actually make worse decisions as a group than you would make individually.
Speaker: But we had that confidence and we had a ton of fun doing fun too.
Speaker: I think it was just amazing.
Speaker: Incredible deal flow.
Speaker: SaaS came on the scene.
Speaker: Many people know some of the companies that we funded in that fund.
Speaker: At Kickstarter, we call something that returns a fund a dragon instead of unicorn because dragons eat unicorns.
Speaker: And we have a dragon wall at Kickstarter because of that.
Speaker: And we have already multiple dragons out of two and we'll have many more actually.
Speaker: So it's just a great fund.
Speaker: I do remember early though, Clark questioning whether we did have good deal flows.
Speaker: It took a little bit of time to build, but my recollection of the story is, you know, one of the early sort of deal days.
Speaker: We used to do deal screen days.
Speaker: We would do nine to five to come out of eight, 10 companies.
Speaker: Anyone could come pitch is really the idea, but...
Speaker: I feel like one of those early ones, wasn't there like a clay cat litter deal?
Speaker: And then Clark turns to you after he's like, how's our deal flow?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Probably there's a lot of moments I'm sure Clark had early during the fundraiser.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I think there was a lot of that where he's like, huh?
Speaker: I think there was some gut check moments and Clark was awesome.
Speaker: He was such a great compliment to us.
Speaker: If we go back and see our pitch deck for K3 and the companies we highlighted, I think Lucid probably was on there.
Speaker: But other than that, it was very different.
Speaker: It's a lesson we've tried to really understand at Kickstarter is you just don't know.
Speaker: What you think are your best companies can become some of your worst and vice versa.
Speaker: And you just stay patient.
Speaker: Don't lock companies and don't get too rigid in how you see companies.
Speaker: You just don't get too high or low.
Speaker: And that was probably the next crisis for Kickstart was Clark.
Speaker: We had a common friend, Jeff Curl, who's now at Paleon.
Speaker: He's an amazing entrepreneur.
Speaker: And he kept coming after Clark and saying, Hey, I've got this really hot company stance.
Speaker: And I think Clark was like, hey, I haven't made this little money in a long time.
Speaker: Because we were not paying big salaries.
Speaker: These were not high salaries.
Speaker: We were doing a lot of work.
Speaker: And I always joke that Clark was like, yeah, I'm used to...
Speaker: maybe spend a little more time with rappers and supermodels and having a team.
Speaker: And this is great, guys.
Speaker: But what if I were to go join Stance?
Speaker: To Clark's credit, he was super transparent with us.
Speaker: We worked it out.
Speaker: We tested it with LPs.
Speaker: And amazingly, our LPs were like, you know what?
Speaker: We believe in Kickstart.
Speaker: We do want to know...
Speaker: Who the next partner is.
Speaker: Okay, we know you.
Speaker: We see Al.
Speaker: Who else is there?
Speaker: And Dalton was at Wharton at the time and I gave him a call and was like, hey Dalton.
Speaker: Actually, the reality is I had given you an offer prior to that.
Speaker: That was principle.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I didn't know that Clark was leaving when I had agreed to come back to Kickstart.
Speaker: That was one of the big surprises.
Speaker: Gavin and I had worked on our agreement and we documented it, put it in writing.
Speaker: Gavin was ready to put a signature on the top.
Speaker: It had everything that we had agreed to.
Speaker: Title was principle.
Speaker: And he said, are you ready for the big surprise?
Speaker: And I said, I think so.
Speaker: So he crossed that off, that principle title and said, partner.
Speaker: You know, I said, Clark's leaving, we need you to step up and be a partner, which for me was great, obviously.
Speaker: This is great news.
Speaker: Not that Clark was leaving, but the opportunity for me was great.
Speaker: It was clear that Kickstart was in a much more stable position than I certainly remembered.
Speaker: I had been gone for five years.
Speaker: As Gavin mentioned, I moved down to Mexico with Paul in 2009.
Speaker: We spent three years, I spent three years in northern Mexico helping Paul and Rogelio, another partner to raise Alta Ventures, which was one of the first early stage tech funds in the country.
Speaker: And I came back and did grad school.
Speaker: So I had been gone for a while when Gavin was, you know, I left when we still had $4 million under management.
Speaker: Gavin went through this desert, got it up to $8 million.
Speaker: Al got involved.
Speaker: Clark got involved.
Speaker: And she got that $26 million fundraise.
Speaker: But now when you mentioned that $25 gift card that Dinesh gave you, to give a sense of where we were at, the Christmas or the holiday party of 2008, this is Kickstart's
Speaker: first year in business.
Speaker: Kickstarter couldn't have its own holiday party.
Speaker: We were, you know, doing the holiday party as part of V Spring's holiday party.
Speaker: And, you know, we did like a breakfast or a lunch at Grand America.
Speaker: And V Spring included me in the gifts, which the gift that I got was an iPod Touch, which at the time I'm like, I can't believe how much these people value me.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I felt the same way, right?
Speaker: I mean, that was like material.
Speaker: It was like sweet.
Speaker: Yeah, yeah.
Speaker: And so it was just to go from that to tail end of fund two, raising fund three, it was like, this fund is actually a viable fund.
Speaker: It's becoming a viable fund.
Speaker: We weren't out of the woods and Clark's departure posed some risk to the fund, but there was already enough trust built and enough momentum in the portfolio and enough belief in what Kickstart was doing that we were able to keep the momentum going and not really miss a beat.
Speaker: But sometimes I ask myself this question, what does it mean to be a founder?
Speaker: I don't consider myself a founder of Kickstarter, even though I consider myself a member of the founding team.
Speaker: And I don't consider myself a founder of Alta Ventures in Mexico, even though I consider myself a member of the founding team.
Speaker: And I think the word founder, almost like entrepreneur, how do you define some of these words and they can be misused.
Speaker: But I think of a founder as somebody who, for an important span, if they weren't part of that business, the business fails.
Speaker: As I think about who deserves to be thought of as a founder of the fund or who deserves to be thought of as the founder of Kickstart, I think of those years from 2008, 2009, 2010, 11.
Speaker: Those were the years where if Gavin had said, this is too hard...
Speaker: Kickstart ceases to exist.
Speaker: Maybe I'm wrong.
Speaker: Maybe somebody else steps up, raises their hand, has the same level of drive, passion, dedication, radical belief in this.
Speaker: Maybe somebody steps up and fills that role.
Speaker: But I think any day in that three to four year stretch that Gavin decided that it was over, I think it ends.
Speaker: And so I just want to acknowledge that I'm not the founder and I was able to rejoin kickstart at a time where it was so much safer for me to come back.
Speaker: And I didn't realize, you know, I wasn't taking that much of a risk and met my wife down when I was raising the fund in Mexico.
Speaker: And it was like, okay, I can't take the gamble route so much anymore.
Speaker: I have to have a little more confidence that this is going to turn into something.
Speaker: And everything was pointing to Utah heating up.
Speaker: Everything was pointing to Kickstart having a very strong position in this ecosystem.
Speaker: And since then, I think we've gone on to raise another 450 some odd million dollars since that point.
Speaker: But I just think that the inflection point had already been achieved.
Speaker: That's how I feel about it.
Speaker: I don't know what the exact inflection point is to a venture fund or product market fit.
Speaker: But at that point in time, you look at it and you say, people really wanted Kickstart's involvement in their companies.
Speaker: The best companies wanted to talk to us.
Speaker: We had solid LPs that wanted to be the patient capital that believed in this ecosystem for a long arc.
Speaker: And we had the fund returners in there.
Speaker: So we were actually going to return capital to our investors.
Speaker: And I think that's the point in hindsight, you look back and say, Kickstart had product market fit.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And that's around the time that I came back and was able to help accelerate it a little bit in my own way.
Speaker: But we went from fund two, which was a $26 million fund to a $39 million fund three.
Speaker: And I have to thank Clark, he's always too, because I think he helped put this into place.
Speaker: He chose a different path.
Speaker: We would be missing out on important opportunities to thank people who have contributed if we didn't see that.
Speaker: Because a lot of people along the way added something that made this possible.
Speaker: I appreciate that, Dolan.
Speaker: I think it's how I see it.
Speaker: I see myself as the common thread.
Speaker: An entrepreneur organizes the factors of production behind a vision.
Speaker: And I'm the common thread, but you made important sacrifices.
Speaker: Al has talked about how he put skin in the game with Kickstart.
Speaker: And we all grew up together.
Speaker: It's not like I knew what I was doing.
Speaker: I will say, though, I thought you did because I...
Speaker: This is the first I've heard of this.
Speaker: I mean, I used to, I probably never said this.
Speaker: I was nervous.
Speaker: I still get nervous sometimes in deal screens where I'm like, I don't know what they're talking about.
Speaker: And Gavin's so articulate and smart.
Speaker: Clark's the same.
Speaker: And I'm just like, oh my gosh, I'm so...
Speaker: so stupid.
Speaker: I can't even comprehend what you do.
Speaker: I think what I realized is like, you just have to see a lot of deals.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And I had not yet seen a lot of deals.
Speaker: Now I still am the quietest person in the room regardless, but I felt like at that time, I'm like, was just blown away that the questions that you would ask and that Clark would ask.
Speaker: And I'm just like, how do these guys know this much stuff?
Speaker: Like,
Speaker: I don't know a lot of stuff in general.
Speaker: Science fiction books.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Sci-fi.
Speaker: It must have been now.
Speaker: You just realize the old 10,000 hour rules.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: You see a lot of deals and you just get more comfortable and see patterns.
Speaker: But yeah, I always felt you didn't know what you were doing from day one.
Speaker: So I've waited until now.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: That's part of the thing where you just learn to act the part because you're like, I sort of have to.
Speaker: To your point, Dalton, I think if we hadn't worked, someone else would have risen up to do this because it was such a needed thing.
Speaker: And I will say one of those cool things that we've learned about all the years is that he came from a very different background than the general partners at Kickstart.
Speaker: But that approach, that humility, that just really different take of like being the different kind of voice in the room has been super stabilizing for Kickstart.
Speaker: Because we were so scarce in resources, we just forced Al to do deals.
Speaker: It was great.
Speaker: It just so happened, right?
Speaker: The first fund two deal where you guys were like, yeah, you can do it.
Speaker: It was an accounting deal.
Speaker: It was pretty comfortable.
Speaker: It was bookly, but it got me some reps of sitting in a boardroom as a board member because I've had counterparts of mine ask before of like,
Speaker: how does your fund let you do deals?
Speaker: And it's, we had to do everything.
Speaker: We didn't have enough bandwidth to not have all of us do some version of something.
Speaker: And so just once again, dumb luck, right?
Speaker: Like just very lucky to be in a spot where
Speaker: Gavin has a full plate.
Speaker: Clark has a full plate.
Speaker: Very soon, Dalton has a full plate.
Speaker: And so it's like, sweet.
Speaker: I can actually fill my plate a little bit with some non-accounting, non-finance stuff.
Speaker: That's how I got those opportunities at vSpring.
Speaker: It was, look, everybody's got too much.
Speaker: So you get to do stuff you shouldn't be doing, but whatever.
Speaker: That's what we do.
Speaker: One other theme I want to put out there, because I talked to a lot of early fund managers.
Speaker: They're like, hey, how'd you do it?
Speaker: How'd you raise that first fund?
Speaker: And you realize that fund one allowed us to do fund two, which is awesome.
Speaker: Even there's a lot we hadn't figured out with fund one and ultimately was not that successful of a fund.
Speaker: But I think one insight that we had that I think is helpful is that
Speaker: When you're a seed fund manager, it takes a long time to know whether you're even good at all.
Speaker: And it takes a long time to know whether there's going to be return or not.
Speaker: And so one of the ways that you can have a second fund and a third fund is by embracing every other aspect of the experience for LPs, recognizing that just as a seed fund investor in a startup company,
Speaker: You're looking for a financial return, but there's also a bunch of other aspects of the experience that are important.
Speaker: And so we kind of embraced that.
Speaker: We had this outside investment committee that made LPs feel like they're part of the process, even though they don't have to do a lot of the work.
Speaker: I probably stopped doing this in like fund three, but I would call every LP every quarter.
Speaker: We have a lot of LPs.
Speaker: So unfortunately, I don't do that anymore.
Speaker: And answer questions and making an experience because a lot of our LPs were angel investors that just wanted to be part of a venture fund and see what it was like and co-invest in deals.
Speaker: So I think that's one thing that a lot of GPs don't really understand that process as well as they should.
Speaker: And just recognize, hey, that's part of what you're providing is certainly the ability to have great returns, but also this experience.
Speaker: And that's part of what LPs early on are looking for.
Speaker: And we felt so lucky to have this room of these crazy qualified people that we could bounce things off of, do sanity checks, co-invest with, and still feel lucky, right?
Speaker: So it's been just an amazing resource over the years to be able to tap into that network.
Speaker: Yeah, you had the conviction, but it was such a wilderness for so long.
Speaker: How do you keep going?
Speaker: Why the Seed Fund in Utah?
Speaker: What was magical about Utah?
Speaker: I had developed that conviction while at vSpring and I went away to business school and thought more about it.
Speaker: Ultimately, the thing that was so special about Utah was the culture.
Speaker: It was the demographics.
Speaker: It was this incredibly myth of the West community.
Speaker: pioneer culture that just wanted to shock the world with what we did.
Speaker: And you had all these individuals doing entrepreneurial things.
Speaker: Now, they weren't always like gold standard businesses, but they were out hustling and wanted to create great businesses.
Speaker: And that was what made Utah different from the other states in the West.
Speaker: It wasn't like...
Speaker: It wasn't income levels.
Speaker: It wasn't housing.
Speaker: It was a beautiful place to be and great quality of life.
Speaker: But ultimately, it was the culture of entrepreneurship.
Speaker: I think about a story, which is funny.
Speaker: I think this is like peak early kickstart when things were looking really good and vSpring was feeling good.
Speaker: This was the only time I think I've ever been on a private plane.
Speaker: The vSpring partners rented a private plane to do fundraising for their latest fund.
Speaker: And I got to piggyback on that to pitch kickstart.
Speaker: And it wasn't like a cool plane, but it was like a novel experience for me.
Speaker: But we went to Wyoming and Montana in this plane.
Speaker: And we're pitching like, hey, you got research universities.
Speaker: Maybe we should do Kickstart here kind of thing.
Speaker: And I realized that Utah was really different.
Speaker: And it was that culture of entrepreneurship.
Speaker: And really, we've talked about how Fund One was to focus on research universities and labs and not focus enough on people and entrepreneurs.
Speaker: And how sometimes those are the same thing and sometimes they're not.
Speaker: And so by the time we got to fund two, we really doubled down on, okay, let's make sure we invest in the right entrepreneurs.
Speaker: And if there's commercialization involved, great, but that's not the mandate.
Speaker: The thing that I would also add, to really understand why there initially was a real lack of belief in seed stage capital in Utah, part of it is a question of seed stage.
Speaker: And what was happening at the time was that we had this shift from on-prem software to cloud software.
Speaker: So this was the cloud revolution, the rise of enterprise software, B2B SaaS,
Speaker: And prior to the seed stage becoming a category, if you were an entrepreneur, and especially if you were an entrepreneur in Utah that wanted to raise money, you had to have enough credibility, network, validation, access, all of the things to put together a $5 million round right out of the gate.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: To buy servers and database and space.
Speaker: Pre-revenue.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Before you had your first customer, before you had any traction, you had to convince somebody to give you $5 million to set up the environment for you to start developing your product.
Speaker: So there were very few people that would write those checks or could raise that type of money unless you had a reputation you could go to the Bay Area and go command that type of a fundraise.
Speaker: And so there was this trend that was underway where all of a sudden the cost of starting a company, particularly a software business, was falling through the floor.
Speaker: I don't want to paint with too broad of a stroke here, but you could actually get to product market fit on a half a million dollar investment for the first time.
Speaker: It's a software business, maybe for the first time ever.
Speaker: In the past, you had to raise 10x that amount.
Speaker: And so there was this new category that was forming to serve those entrepreneurs with smaller capital raises and just taking more shots on goal with smaller checks.
Speaker: And so in the early days, while this was unfolding, people would look at these unproven seed stage companies coming out of Utah and they'd think,
Speaker: If you want to build a multi-billion dollar company, you're not going to build it in Utah.
Speaker: You're going to build it in the Bay Area, obviously, because that's what we can point to in the past.
Speaker: So those early calls, trying to raise money, get the follow-on around, a lot of smug, condescending attitudes, frankly, towards us.
Speaker: Like we're, you know, hicks out in Utah, you know, like,
Speaker: I don't know.
Speaker: Maybe I'm exaggerating it a little bit, but you didn't get a sense of like, what are you guys doing?
Speaker: I had your capital in Utah.
Speaker: No, absolutely.
Speaker: I think it's no exaggeration to say it was smug and condescending just as a rule, honestly.
Speaker: And even as early as, or as late as Fund 2, right?
Speaker: We have a deal where Series A lead comes in and they're like, you need to move the team to the Bay Area.
Speaker: I would say even after Fund 2 that happened.
Speaker: Now, of course, it's a very different story where we...
Speaker: do a lot of deals.
Speaker: And they love the fact that, you know, hey, it's based in Utah.
Speaker: Hey, can I base part of my other companies here, et cetera, et cetera.
Speaker: It's changed so dramatically.
Speaker: Again, and most of the, some of those structural changes were just happening as Kickstart got underway.
Speaker: It took until K2 2012 to really become mature enough to really allow us
Speaker: to low-end disrupt what's going on in venture capital at a subtle level, and then what's the company creation in the SaaS world.
Speaker: One great metaphor, since we like to talk about Kickstarter and the myth of the West, railroads created shared infrastructure.
Speaker: And now the early railroad story is very messy.
Speaker: However, the shared infrastructure that's created by railroads allows incredible innovation.
Speaker: And that's what happened with shared infrastructure.
Speaker: on the internet and eventually cloud infrastructure that was both shared and proprietary, where you can create the opportunity for low-end disruption for startups, where you didn't have to have this full-stack technical expertise and hardware in order to compete.
Speaker: And then Utah entrepreneurs who maybe had a little more go-to-market orientation versus tech orientation could come in and create value for customers.
Speaker: That explains some of the reasons why the environment shifted so much for those years.
Speaker: You know, we don't get those questions anymore about whether or not you can build a billion dollar company in Utah, whether or not companies should stay and grow in Utah.
Speaker: It's just nice that those aren't the questions that we get anymore.
Speaker: So what questions do you get?
Speaker: Let's talk about funds four, five and six.
Speaker: As we think about our region, there's questions on, hey, how big can our companies get?
Speaker: Is there a lid?
Speaker: We don't think there is at all.
Speaker: You can always have more and more successful exits and large public companies that are sustaining and go on to buy other startups.
Speaker: I think that's maybe the next chapter for Utah and Colorado is maybe heading into that chapter as well.
Speaker: But I think our goal is to be the most active pre-seed and seed player in the regions that we really care about.
Speaker: And so we worry about the infrastructure of those regions, education, air, water, like the basics, because we think the demographics and the drive and culture is like rock solid and going to continue.
Speaker: And we just want to make sure that entrepreneurs have the raw materials in terms of infrastructure, such that they can attract talent, so they can scale companies, they can not have a lid on what they can achieve.
Speaker: So in some ways, our eyes have lifted a little bit higher level across our region just to make sure that we're looking ahead for them and they're not getting blocked by stuff like that.
Speaker: That's what I would say.
Speaker: Yeah, I also feel like every single fund that we've raised, we've had to make some slight adjustments.
Speaker: The good news in fund one, fund two days, you didn't really have a lot of competition for seed deals.
Speaker: And so you could be a gatekeeper, kingmaker, choose your deals, take your time.
Speaker: But on the other hand, you didn't have a vibrant co-investment ecosystem and follow-on network.
Speaker: Now we do.
Speaker: And so even though it's a more competitive industry that we're in, it's such a better time to be invested.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: It's more competitive and that's better.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Sometimes it sounds surprising to some people.
Speaker: You want to be a monopolist if you can.
Speaker: But I think about the early kickstart days when nobody actually was doing that with maybe the exception of Gavin, believing that this was actually going to be
Speaker: an interesting economic proposition, financial proposition.
Speaker: It was a feeder for bigger rounds down the road.
Speaker: It was an opportunity to get university, you know, IP off the shelves and commercialize.
Speaker: There were a lot of reasons why the fund won early investors were intrigued by what we were doing.
Speaker: And a lot of people saw us as Switzerland in some ways that we play nice with everybody.
Speaker: We're a community building organization.
Speaker: We're not here to take anybody's business away from them.
Speaker: We're here to accelerate what's going on.
Speaker: Everything was about the community, about the ecosystem.
Speaker: And people treated us like we were working on a charity or that we were do-gooders and they just were not threatened.
Speaker: And so they were kind and accommodating to us, but they didn't really care.
Speaker: Nobody really cared that much.
Speaker: And so I look at where we're going now and all of the environment is so different than what it was.
Speaker: I don't want to like say it too much, but the environment is so different than what it was in 2008 as an entrepreneur to raise money.
Speaker: And we've played a role in that.
Speaker: The terms are very different, the type of support that you can get, the partnership access that you have, the access to additional markets.
Speaker: Everything is so much better than it was back then.
Speaker: And so our challenge is, as we've raised these bigger funds, how do we learn the right lessons from the past and also not become complacent in how we do our business?
Speaker: Because this is a very competitive industry and we have to change with each fund that we raise.
Speaker: We raise bigger funds.
Speaker: We write bigger checks each time around.
Speaker: We want to stay true to our seed roots, but at the same time, we still have to put big multiples on these funds that we're raising.
Speaker: So as I think about the future, we've always had this side on being a world-class seed fund in Utah.
Speaker: And now we've expanded to Colorado too.
Speaker: So we're saying we want to be world-class seed investors in the mountain states.
Speaker: It's going to partially come from doing what we already know.
Speaker: It's also partially going to come from doing things that we haven't ever done before.
Speaker: I love that about Kickstart because this is an environment where we can do new things.
Speaker: Even though we're on fund six, fund seven, that's part of our culture.
Speaker: Every single fund, we've innovated something new as we've gone in order to make us a little more competitive, add a little more value to the entrepreneurs that we're serving, be better at what we do.
Speaker: And I think our biggest threat
Speaker: There are macro challenges in this industry right now, but our biggest threat is not staying and not maintaining our innovative DNA.
Speaker: And I'm not overly concerned about that because I know what the culture is here.
Speaker: But to me, we don't get to fund eight, nine, 10 by running the same playbook that we were running into.
Speaker: We just have to get better every step of the way.
Speaker: We have to get better and not get complacent.
Speaker: Some of that's geographic expansion in our region.
Speaker: Some of it's writing stronger lead checks.
Speaker: Fund one was a 250K average check size.
Speaker: Now we're 2 million average check size.
Speaker: So I don't know.
Speaker: What else would you add?
Speaker: No, I think that's right.
Speaker: I think some of the guiding principles I'd say that throughout have been when we were a monopolist, let's say, or when we're the only game in town, we needed to play a long game and really...
Speaker: behave with entrepreneurs and behave with the community in a way that we would have the kind of community we wanted 10 years down the road.
Speaker: But I think as competition has entered and mostly ends up being collaborators, it's made us better.
Speaker: It's sharpened us.
Speaker: It's been good for entrepreneurs.
Speaker: Most of the deals we do, there's a lot of challenging times and we're really happy if there's other people involved with us.
Speaker: That's the norm.
Speaker: These are long journeys, 10 years plus, and it's a lot of struggle and a lot of problem solving.
Speaker: And so we love to have more minds and checks around the table to do that.
Speaker: So I think playing along games have been a big part of what we've done historically.
Speaker: As Dalton has said, innovation.
Speaker: Dalton's been a big part of that for us coming up with, okay, here's how we can get more value to our entrepreneurs and scale up our team and take it to the next level.
Speaker: Certainly it's been also entrepreneurial leadership means always adjusting what you do as the company scales.
Speaker: And Kickstarter as a team and a platform isn't going to scale to a ton of people.
Speaker: It's scaled in terms of capital, in terms of number of companies, but we need to keep adjusting the roles that we play as partners.
Speaker: And part of that is bringing out amazing partners that we have over the years.
Speaker: Kurt was an important contributor at Kickstarter, did some great things for us.
Speaker: We brought in Kat recently.
Speaker: She's doing an incredible job bringing her startup operating background and really blazing a path there.
Speaker: And
Speaker: Tanner now is a big part of our next-gen story as a partner at Kickstart.
Speaker: So part of it is scaling up people and making room for them, giving away our Legos, as one of my entrepreneurs loves to say.
Speaker: And that's satisfying for me, right?
Speaker: Like I said, we grew up together here.
Speaker: And to see what Al has scaled up to be and what Dalton has is super rewarding.
Speaker: I want to do a little rapid fire and I would love to know from each of you, what was the high point in Kickstart's history?
Speaker: What was the low point?
Speaker: And then what are you looking forward to with Kickstart?
Speaker: You can work at this business for so long and wonder, are we any good at this?
Speaker: Are we just good salespeople who managed to convince investors to go on this crazy journey with us?
Speaker: And it's honestly a space where you can get people pretty excited because what's not exciting about seed stage venture capital is
Speaker: The prospect of identifying a company that's going to solve a huge problem in the world and deliver a solution at scale, create a bunch of wealth and abundance in the process is really exciting.
Speaker: I think that it lends itself to storytelling because that's what you have in the early days.
Speaker: And you're looking at a very far distant future, you know, companies that are going to hit their maturity 10 years down the road, potentially.
Speaker: And so I think that for me, getting to that point where you round trip the money from the investor into our hands as the managers into the hands of the entrepreneur and then back to the investors, that feels like, OK, this is working.
Speaker: We can keep doing this.
Speaker: We deserve to be in business.
Speaker: We aren't charlatans.
Speaker: We aren't scamsters.
Speaker: You know, we actually are making good on what we said we were going to do.
Speaker: And of course, we never believed that we were just salespeople.
Speaker: We believe in this business.
Speaker: But 10 years into that, to be working at something for 10 years and still not have returned capital, that moment when you return capital feels like the finest moments you have as an investor feeling, okay, our model is working.
Speaker: That came when we did a partial realization of Lucid software, Lucid's the dragon fund too.
Speaker: It also came when we realized our investment in Podium.
Speaker: We've had a couple of these moments where we've returned capital back to our investors and returned funds.
Speaker: And it gives us confidence that we can do this at an even bigger level.
Speaker: So I think of that as a high point.
Speaker: I think of a low point.
Speaker: For me personally, the low points aren't
Speaker: At Kickstart per se, it's more within my head.
Speaker: But those low points where I feel like I'm mediocre at times, you know, like doing half work, I would say.
Speaker: I think in this business, it can be a little bit easy to feel disempowered at times.
Speaker: We've all had this experience of making an investment and then at the first board meeting and thinking, oh, what have I gotten myself into?
Speaker: Those first board meetings.
Speaker: Yeah, it's very rare for you to go to a first board meeting and come away thinking like,
Speaker: can I get more money to work on this business?
Speaker: You know, more often than not, you're thinking, I've made a terrible, I may have made a serious mistake here because you can see the warts of all these companies and all of these startups have warts, every single one of them, even the best ones.
Speaker: Sometimes the best investments that I've made are the ones where
Speaker: They were the easiest, maybe even low conviction investments.
Speaker: And at times the ones where it was the hardest one to get my head around, but I finally got there and big, bold, daring investment that never took a product to market.
Speaker: And so I've had the experience of having high conviction, having those investments go to zero.
Speaker: And also I've had the experience of having, call it mediocre conviction, go to the moon.
Speaker: And so that puts me in a pretty humble state of being able to even predict winners, predict the future.
Speaker: You know, so when I find myself at low points, it's because I'm questioning my ability to actually bend the arc of any of these companies.
Speaker: There's only so much you can do as an investor.
Speaker: And so when I'm at my best, I'm thinking, I am getting better at this.
Speaker: I'm learning.
Speaker: I'm helping entrepreneurs.
Speaker: These companies matter.
Speaker: For me, the highs and lows have more to do with how I'm managing my own psychology.
Speaker: It's a business with long feedback loops.
Speaker: And so there are these moments where you question, am I good at this?
Speaker: And so particularly the seed stage, you know, where you're taking people who haven't even yet defined their product in some ways.
Speaker: So what am I most excited about at Kickstart right now?
Speaker: I'm most excited about what I'm working on in Colorado.
Speaker: So move the family to Colorado.
Speaker: This is the chance for me to take a lot of lessons learned at Kickstart and also down in Mexico and apply them into a new ecosystem where I think Kickstart has an important role to play.
Speaker: We're not doing the first seed fund in the ecosystem like we were in Utah.
Speaker: There are other great investors in Colorado.
Speaker: It's a different motion that we're making in that state.
Speaker: But I am just so excited about some of the initiatives that we're launching.
Speaker: We're doing a program called 14 Founders.
Speaker: This is based off of these 14,000 foot peaks, 14ers in Colorado.
Speaker: We're going to recognize Colorado, recognize the pioneers of Colorado's ecosystem and invest in the next wave of entrepreneurs.
Speaker: And we're going to be announcing for this program, the recipients of these new investments from the peaks of these 14ers.
Speaker: So for me, I'm in love with the mountain states.
Speaker: I'm in love with Utah.
Speaker: I'm in love with Colorado.
Speaker: And what I'm most excited about right now is my mission to go launch Kickstart in Colorado and have it count for the ecosystem in Colorado and count for us as a firm here.
Speaker: And we're really pumped that Dalton raised his hand to do this.
Speaker: We actually didn't anticipate that we would have one of our general partners raise their hand and Dalton did.
Speaker: And this is very in line with
Speaker: His early work with us at Kickstart, really getting the ecosystem of Utah behind Kickstart, what he did in Mexico and with the Alta team.
Speaker: He's got a playbook and he's got a passion for really mixing it up every few years and taking on a new challenge.
Speaker: And we're really pumped about what Dalton's doing in Colorado.
Speaker: And we couldn't be more excited about Colorado and what we see there.
Speaker: It's hard not to echo almost exactly what Dalton said in terms of returning capital, but maybe I would just say at a personal level, high point is advocate for a deal.
Speaker: And at the end of the deal, you actually made money for the fund.
Speaker: And I thought of times to put more money in and that actually worked too.
Speaker: So that's certainly a personal high point.
Speaker: Low point is
Speaker: Same could be said when you advocate for a deal and it doesn't work, but maybe just, I would say every fundraise we've had, there's been a low point where we've lost an LP, had a, what we thought was a firm yes that turned into a firm no, what we thought was a $10 million commitment that turned into a $1 million commitment.
Speaker: Those are low points when every fund, and we've been really fortunate to raise good funds.
Speaker: We have amazing LPs, but
Speaker: Multiple funds, it feels like we raised the fund two or three times over on what we thought it was on paper to what it became.
Speaker: So those are always low points because I don't think any of us around the table here take any of this for granted.
Speaker: It's not a no-brainer that...
Speaker: An LP is going to say yes next time, right?
Speaker: And so we have to keep proving it.
Speaker: And there's times when it's not us, it's them, right?
Speaker: Like it's timing on their standpoint or allocations or whatever it is, but those are always low moments because...
Speaker: We're relevant when we can actually provide something to entrepreneurs in the form of capital and hopefully expertise and help all this, but ultimately they need capital.
Speaker: And so if we can't do that, we become less relevant.
Speaker: So fundraisers are always lots of high points and low points.
Speaker: And then in terms of what I'm excited for, I just enjoy coming to work every day.
Speaker: I'm as excited as I've always been.
Speaker: And I feel just beyond fortunate.
Speaker: There's a lot of people that have a daily grind of a job that's hard.
Speaker: And we certainly have a lot of low moments.
Speaker: We have so many companies to worry about.
Speaker: And inevitably, there's going to be more companies that are struggling than not.
Speaker: And so that weighs on you.
Speaker: But to work with a great team...
Speaker: I work with people and entrepreneurs that we're inspired by.
Speaker: You can just make every day a good day, regardless of what's going on.
Speaker: And I'm just excited that we're investing out of a big fund and have a lot of amazing deals that we're going to choose over the next couple of years.
Speaker: In thinking about the high and low of my journey, Kickstarter, there's lots.
Speaker: I love the answer that Dalton and Al have given.
Speaker: These are two proven investors who have delivered great results for LPs, cash on cash.
Speaker: That's ultimately what matters.
Speaker: But also delivered great results for entrepreneurs in terms of advice they're giving and support.
Speaker: And you see how even people who are proven, it takes a lot of humility to do this business well.
Speaker: a lot of character, a lot of grit.
Speaker: And I would echo what they're saying, which is like, I remember writing the quarterly report when we finally had returned a fund.
Speaker: And just saying, you know what?
Speaker: I've given a lot of promises.
Speaker: I've made a lot of predictions.
Speaker: I've told a lot of stories over the years.
Speaker: I had a lot of belief, but it's awesome.
Speaker: We're sending you a wire and we've given you a multiple on your money.
Speaker: We've turned a few funds and we've got great visibility to doing really well across many funds.
Speaker: We've got seven active funds now.
Speaker: So what I tell people is that's just more relief than anything.
Speaker: It's hard to be like cocky at all.
Speaker: It's more just relief.
Speaker: Like, oh, thank you that it's working.
Speaker: That's how I feel about it, honestly.
Speaker: The low point is trickier.
Speaker: And what I would say, without getting too specific, is I would characterize low points in this journey being typical of the human experience, which is their human tragedies.
Speaker: So that might be an entrepreneur we backed.
Speaker: There was a failure of integrity.
Speaker: Maybe it was fraud.
Speaker: That's super rare, but it happens.
Speaker: Maybe it's a tragedy in the entrepreneur's life.
Speaker: Maybe something happened to someone on our team.
Speaker: It's these human tragedies that are the low points.
Speaker: And I would say, even for me specifically, I think there was a period where I was worried that because of my fanatical effort to get Kickstarter off the ground, that I was going to lose other things that mattered a lot to me.
Speaker: Thankfully, I didn't.
Speaker: But it's one reason I'm passionate about having entrepreneurs win, but win across the board.
Speaker: And not always paying such a high price for what's so important.
Speaker: That's what I think is the low point.
Speaker: It's also what makes us beautiful is when you can get it right.
Speaker: So in some ways, that's kind of what makes...
Speaker: this ecosystem different is because we care about the balance sheet across the board and we believe that it's possible.
Speaker: So that's what I'd say.
Speaker: And then finally, what am I excited about with Kickstart?
Speaker: For me, what gets me motivated, especially at this stage in the game, 20 years of venture capital, 16 plus at Kickstart, is just continuing to see our team level up, to see our companies and our ecosystem level up.
Speaker: And we want to stay nimble and flexible by keeping our culture what it is.
Speaker: and just be responsive to what our entrepreneurs need.
Speaker: And I'm excited just for the work of what we do.
Speaker: It's endlessly interesting and endlessly challenging.
Speaker: I feel like at this point, I know what I'm doing.
Speaker: I do learn every day and that keeps me interested and humble.
Speaker: Well, Gavin, Al, Dalton, thank you so much for this episode and for sharing all that insight into Kickstart.
Speaker: Great to have you.
Speaker: Thank you.
Speaker: Thank you.
Speaker: Good to be here.
Speaker: Thank you, Alex, Dalton, and Gavin.
Speaker: And of course, thank you for listening as we dive deep into what it takes to create the perfect pitch.
Speaker: If you want to learn more about our Kickstart investors, we'll have links to their profiles in our show notes at kickstartfund.com.
Speaker: You can listen to more episodes of Perfect Pitch wherever you listen to your podcasts.
Speaker: And if you like what you're learning, leave us a review or rating.
Speaker: We'll be back next time with more insights from entrepreneurs and the investors who fund them.
Speaker: So be sure to subscribe so you don't miss a thing.
