True Ventures

And so a lot of people will say, hey, you know, framing, frame control, idea, idea control, narrative, storytelling.

story composition, structure of a story, you know, works for like at the lower level, like at the Y Combinator level, because it's all about story, maybe at the venture level, you know, Sequoia, True Ventures, I kind of think it's all story.

But if you look, you know, Theranos, and you talk about using your powers for good or evil, you know, they raise money from the most state institutions, from the most the people most capable of underwriting, the people who are most incentivized to protect their reputation, and because they really took the limits of integrity, values, community, family, church, completely off what they were willing to do in business, and that's what I was talking about.

When you strip away what you're willing to do, and you do stand-in proxies for family, but you have no family, You use words and fake deeds and fake information around church and around community, around friendship, around, you know, education, around connections.

There was a gentleman named Phil Black who was on our board and he was with the venture fund.

He still is, I believe, with True Ventures.

And they've done some really cool companies like Peloton.

Their stock boomed early in the day.

and then eventually was acquired.

But all of those companies not only provided kind of that inspiration for locally grown startups or examples of what companies here could grow into being, those founders also took the opportunity to introduce local founders to their investors, like True Ventures is a good example that went through that, or First Ground Capital, you know, folks who Because these companies moved here and because those investors were associated with those companies, even Sequoia was eventually an investor in Jive.

But those companies helped kind of create that network of activity with local founders.

And so I'm super interested in that concept of like...

Graber, who has helped grow the X and Threads competitor to 43 million users and furthered the development of its underlying AT protocol, will be replaced by Tony Schneider as interim CEO.

Schneider is the former CEO of Automatic and a partner at True Ventures.

Under Graber, Blue Sky has seen remarkable growth at times, especially after Elon Musk's acquisition of Twitter.

In the Berlin-based startup, Periwinkle is offering a new avenue for those wanting to leave centralized social media operated by big tech companies.

I think a lot of other people were involved in that company and put a lot of effort in.

You know, one of the guys, Tony, who was at True Ventures, did a lot in it early on.

It's kind of a blah situation.

Yeah, it's been pending for a long time, and you kind of just go, "Gosh, I wish...

He's since co-founded two companies sold to AOL, one of which he later bought back and rebuilt and established.

He co-founded True Ventures, where for two decades, he's had an uncanny habit of writing the first check into companies nobody else believed in yet.

Automatic, Blue Bottle Coffee, Sweetgreen, Fitbit, Slack, Peloton, years before any of them were sure things.

He's also, not incidentally, a board member of my company, Flower and Water Hospitality Group, the restaurant company I co-founded with Thomas McNaughton.

But in that four-month timeframe, I was also helping a young founder, Matt Mullenweg, kind of structure and set up his company for WordPress.

And...

John and Phil had this idea of starting True Ventures and approached Tony and me about joining them and being part of that.

And I was like, well, you know, I've got this job called Sphere, so I don't know how I'm going to do all that.

And so happy that Clare Health is part of that movement, and hopefully more funding goes into other, uh, great solutions for women's health in the next few years as well.

So at Stanford, you actually also had the opportunity to work in Venture with True Ventures and Anthos, and then you also worked with a fashion tech startup called Daydream.

So what did you take away from those experiences, and why did you forgo those opportunities to build your own business?

Venture capital and startups was always something that I'd heard about and was really curious about, and so I wanted to explore as much as I could, you know, being an early stage operator doing marketing at Daydream, which is an incredible company, and I think they have some of the best founders out there, um, and also being able to scout early stage companies at Anthos.

Lo and behold, it is now coming here.

And I'm I am super excited because it's Clarence Bathia, who was at True Ventures.

He's a founder.

He's tried to raise money, gotten a bunch of no's, and then finally figured out how to raise money.

So that's where I was first exposed to Clarence and his insights and his knowledge.

And then he kindly took the opportunity to come in.

hang out with a small, intimate group of us here in Portland to just gain a better understanding of what was happening here and how True Ventures might be able to positively impact what was happening here.

So I guess contextually, Clarence understands Portland.